{"id":9950,"date":"2015-03-09T09:10:10","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T13:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9950"},"modified":"2015-03-09T09:10:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T13:10:10","slug":"both-roads-taken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/03\/09\/both-roads-taken\/","title":{"rendered":"Both Roads Taken"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\nTwo roads diverged in a yellow wood,<br \/> And caused me no small amount of panic<br \/> For traveling both of them would be good<br \/> But there simply was no way I could<br \/> Until I remembered quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n<p>So half my wavefunction I sent left<br \/> And rightward steered the other half<br \/> Both pieces of me with equal heft<br \/> And thanks to calculations deft,<br \/> I knew the end would sum both paths<\/p>\n<p>Plenty of physicists claim to know<br \/> Or at least will confidently speculate<br \/>That collapse, or a pilot wave&#8217;s flow,<br \/> Or decoherence act to make it so.<br \/> Me, I just shut up and calculate.<\/p>\n<p>So in the woods I went two ways<br \/> To return together some distance hence<br \/> And through the passing of many days<br \/> My branches accumulated differential phase<br \/> Which in the end makes interference.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>With apologies to the estate of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poem\/173536\">Robert Frost<\/a>. Credit and\/or blame for inspiring this silliness goes to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Stephen_Curry\/status\/574357765101084672\">this Stephen Curry tweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And caused me no small amount of panic For traveling both of them would be good But there simply was no way I could Until I remembered quantum mechanics. So half my wavefunction I sent left And rightward steered the other half Both pieces of me with equal&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/03\/09\/both-roads-taken\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Both Roads Taken<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,104,7,37,23,11,24,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-humanities","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-quantum_optics","category-science","category-silliness","category-theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9950","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=9950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}