Something Great

Quantum Reality and Computing

Albert Einstein famously quipped that "God does not play dice with the universe". He was sceptical about the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. To illustrate and explain his ideas he wrote a paper in 1935 with his collaborators Podolsky and Rosen. But quantum mechanics proved enormously successful and Einstein's doubts were put aside. The 'Copenhagen' interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by Niels Bohr became widely accepted despite its strangeness. But in 1964 the Irish physicist John S Bell (no relation) published a paper 'On the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen Paradox'. Bell was working at CERN (European Nuclear Research Centre) at the time but worked alone on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and published his conclusions in an obscure journal that subsequently went bust. His radical result showed that it would be possible to perform experiments to distinguish between the 'hidden variable' interpretation of quantum mechanics favoured by Einstein and Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation. I've embedded his paper below. Those experiments have now been done and confirm the strange 'Copenhagen' interpretation of quantum mechanics.
To be continued.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to Quantifying

Image
Introduction This blog is going to be about everything quantitative, focusing on applications of mathematical and statistical modelling. Not cool eh? Well, hopefully you'll find otherwise. Mathematics has been around for millennia and was first used for essentials such as counting things. More exciting applications soon developed in geometry and astronomy. This happened because people observed the regularity of the movements of the moon and the stars. Useful things came out of that very early such as the ability to navigate. But the ability to develop statistical models was a long time coming and wasn't to do with the lack of data. Conceptually statistics seems difficult and many ideas, even as simple as the mean, took a long time to gain acceptance. A great article on this is "An average understanding" by Simon Raper in the Royal Statistical Society's Significance magazine which you can find online. We take this concept for granted but it was only i...
Read more

Book Review: "Material World" by Ed Conway, published WH Allen 2023

Material World is an outstanding book. It takes six materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium and explores their role in the world economy. What is especially fascinating about this book is that the author takes both an historical approach and a forward look into the coming transition to a low carbon economy. The author is no scientist or engineer so whilst this can be frustrating at times it allows him to take a wider perspective connecting the past, present and future and considering many aspects of how these materials came to be so important. It is refreshing to share with him as he discovers more about his subject. This is a deeply researched book with an extensive bibliography and many interviews as the author travels the world to visit mines and quarries. A major theme of the book is that this 'material world' of mines, oil refineries and chemical factories is mostly hidden from us and so we take it for granted. We don't need to think about it too much any ...
Read more

Index Linked Gilts

Image
Short Guide to Inflation-indexed Bonds Summary In this post I introduce you to inflation linked bonds and how they can be used by investors in an investment portfolio. Introduction Most private investors focus their attention on the equity market. It's exciting and offers the possibility of big gains, albeit at the risk of big losses or worse every now and then. Others are nervous of the equity market and prefer government or corporate bonds with their predictable (mostly) flow of coupons and pay-out (hopefully) on the maturity date. If your nervousness has developed into paranoia you may invest in gold as an insurance against war and pestilence. And if all of these options and choosing between them seems like too much then, of course, cash is a respectable investment although in some countries you may now be 'rewarded' with a negative interest rate. But there's a good alternative to all of these options and that's inflation-linked bonds. What are I...
Read more