Qulog

As promised, although a bit late, the second part of my comparison between Intelligent Design and Quantum Mechanics. I’m afraid there’s no real compelling conclusion, so that’s left as an exercise to the reader.

Einstein famously said he didn’t like QM because “der liebe Gott würfelt nicht”: God doesn’t play dice. And I think many ID-proponents would agree.

While I was thinking about the analogy between ID and QM (see part one), I figured something else was important, something to do with chance, or probability, and with - let’s say world views.

Last week I was talking about Intelligent Design (with, by the way, the founding father of the now sadly closed down UVvN) when an analogy with quantum mechanics occurred to me. Or maybe even two analogies. Today, I bring you the first one.

One of my friends in high school told me you should never tell people what you did not want as a birthday present. She had told several people, when they asked her what’s on your wish list: uhm, I don’t know, just don’t buy me empty tape cassettes, I have plenty of those. So she […]

A very special edition this week, because of the almost-white Christmas we had here (it started snowing yesterday): two Dutch poems by Drs. P about two big names in the construction of the modern atomic model: Rutherford and Bohr.
Rutherford
Groot natuurkundige:
Lord Ernest Rutherford
Kreeg de Nobelprijs
In negentien acht
Daar hij ten aanzien van
Submicroscopische
Deeltjes
Veel interessants had bedacht
Bohr
Niels Bohr
Kwam […]

Maybe it’s not as great as Cosmic Gall, but still, here it is: the next physics poem. This one is by Erich Hückel, and speaks about Erwin Schrödinger and his wavefunction (called psi).
The original is in German:
Erwin kann mit seinem Psi
kalkulieren wie noch nie.
Doch wird jeder gleich einsehn:
Psi lässt sich nicht recht verstehn
There is an […]

There are two important rules when making jokes: never explain a joke, and never make a physics joke. At least not in public.
Anyway, if you don’t care about these rules and / or if you want to learn about the Planck scale, do head to Cosmic Variance for a Bad Physics Joke Explained.
And while […]

The introductory quantum class has started again. As the book we use (Introduction to QM by Griffiths) actually doesn’t do much effort to give an introduction, literally stating the Schrödinger equation on page one, we decided to begin the tutorials with some questions on ‘why do we need quantum mechanics’ and ‘what are the ingredients […]

Some more positions on what is the quantumness of quantum.
The Schrödinger equation as the basic equation of the theory. The ideal is the following: once you know the statevector or wavefunction - preferably of the whole universe - just apply the Schrödinger equation and find the state at any other instance of time. The SE […]

Thoughts about quantumness

More or less everything I write or say about my reserach would have to start with an answer to this question. I tend to start with some minor point and then end up repeating myself, which isn’t good, obviously. So here is an attempt to order my thoughts.

The (quantum) physics blog Uncertain Principles points to a lengthy discussion at Crooked Timber on playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma game using entangled photons.
The game is as follows: two people are seperated from each other, they cannot communicate. Both have to answer a question, and depending on the combination of their answers, they are rewarded or […]

Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, by L.E. Ballentine, in Review of Modern Physics, October 1970.
The basic idea: use the Statistical Interpretation, that is, assume that a quantum state describes an ensemble of similarly prepared systems, and all interpretational difficulties of quantum mechanics disappear. I haven’t finished yet, but it’s certainly promising.
(Later) Okay, this was a […]