{"id":87,"date":"2006-02-27T07:07:04","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T07:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/counterfactual-physics-bloggin\/"},"modified":"2006-02-27T07:07:04","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T07:07:04","slug":"counterfactual-physics-bloggin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/counterfactual-physics-bloggin\/","title":{"rendered":"Counterfactual Physics Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, let&#8217;s say you want to explain something really difficult, like <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/you_cant_get_there_from_here_1.php\">counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation<\/a>, but you don&#8217;t want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let&#8217;s say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There&#8217;s a way to pull this off.<\/p>\n<p>What you do is, you put yourself in a superposition of states in which you explain and don&#8217;t explain this phenomenon, and then don&#8217;t touch your blogging software (that would constitute an observation, and collapse your wavefunction) for a day or two. When you come back, you&#8217;ll find that <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmicvariance.com\/2006\/02\/27\/quantum-interrogation\/\">an explanation has already been posted<\/a>. With puppies, even.<\/p>\n<p>The Internet is a weird and wonderful thing.<\/p>\n<p>(Update 2\/28\/06: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottaaronson.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/lord-send-no-sign.html\">Scott Aaronson weighs in as well<\/a>, with a good classical analogue.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, let&#8217;s say you want to explain something really difficult, like counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation, but you don&#8217;t want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let&#8217;s say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There&#8217;s a way to pull this off. What you do is, you&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/counterfactual-physics-bloggin\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Counterfactual Physics Blogging<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-quantum_optics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}