Physics

The Many Worlds Wiener Sausage is the first step in understanding the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox. However, there are still three steps missing until we can resolve the EPR paradox correctly. One important step: Although it is a many-worlds model, with parallel universes and all that, and although it can reproduce certain quantum factors, it is not yet a quantum world! UPDATE: What is written in this post is now mostly much better accessed in this, extremely pedagogically written article:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5419 The Sausage is Real Why is the sausage not a quantum…

While other sources (voluntarily not linked here, to avoid pissing off my collaborators) choose to be "on the news" these days, with a brand new exclusion plot of the Higgs boson obtained using almost one full inverse femtobarn of collisions which is not yet public but was made accessible by mistake on a Fermilab site, I will meekly point you out today to another result, which is by all means public and freely reproducible here (no reproach to Phil intended here -he acted in good faith and the fault is not his). The fact that the result I pick comes out in print quite some time after its…

This instance of my "guess the plot" contest will be hopefully raising fewer controversies than the former one. You are asked to explain what the figure represents, possibly guessing the units on the x and y axes. More advanced readers may know at a glance what this plot is and where it comes from. To them, I ask the favour to wait one day (to not spoil the game to the less knowledgeable users) before trying a harder challenge: by heart, explain the meaning of every single distribution shown -e.g. provide the correct key of the masked legend on the right. Please do not be shy and shoot your…

This just to report progress on the Quantum Randi Challenge. It has changed a lot, so please have a look to see whether you think it is now attractive enough for you to help “internetizing” it, which is still highly desired. The novelties: 1) The name changed to “Quantum Randi Challenge” because there is a surprising number of scientists out there who have their heads shoved deeply up … ok, forget it, whatever, pffft. (It is exactly this kind of PC “professionalism” that lets crackpots undermine science and academia in the first place, but whatever.) 2) A test of whether the anti-…

The game of quantum mechanics is rigged, but I will let you in on the rules. The wave function has all the information usually written as complex values. Operators are used to grab out different values from the wave function. Once you agree to those ground rules, the uncertainty principle and its Silent Bob twin the certainty principle are set in stone. It is the product rule of calculus that does it all. It is not the Wizard of Schrödinger behind the curtain, it is Isaac Newton or his not so silent contemporary Gottfried Leibniz. The Uncertainty Principle gets all the press. Philosophers can…

Many Worlds by Splitting a Wiener Sausage is extremely simple as far as models go. Before we can resolve the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox with it however, we need to understand what is still wrong with it. It is “wrong” for a simple reason that I wrote about in several other posts, and anybody who understands the EPR problem to some degree should know the correct answer, regardless of whether they trust Bohm, or “believe Copenhagen”, or subscribe to locality, non-locality, many-worlds, objective state collapse into one world, whatever! The correct reason can be put into a short sentence.…

The DZERO collaboration has just produced an update of their analysis of the dimuon charge asymmetry using 9.0 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions. The new result confirms the previously reported effect, raising the discrepancy with the Standard Model prediction to over four standard deviations. I feel this result is important to comment here, so I will do it regardless of the fact that another authoritative source has already discussed it in detail for the blogosphere (and this time, much more timely than I did). I however suggest that if you are interested in this topic you…

In their seminal paper of 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) put forward the following criterion, which they considered reasonable: If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity. In his 1951 textbook, David Bohm reformulated EPR's thought experiment in terms of a dissociating diatomic spinless molecule. The dissociated atoms are in the singlet state and can be separated by an arbitrary distance. In…

A few years back I heard Joy Christian give a talk on his disproof of Bell's theorem, where he explained his idea for an experiment involving two hemispheres with a mass stuck on each. To me it seemed obvious that the first thing to do with such an idea was to write a computer simulation of it. It took me some time to get round to it, and I was rather distracted on the way looking into computer game engines, but it is finally finished, and can be seen at http://tachyos.org/bell/bell1.html.   The result is unsurprising:The green areas are those results allowed by Bell's theorem,…

I am quite happy today to announce here that there is a new blog to visit, and to bookmark!, for those among you who are interested to know what does a PhD in physics do after he or she graduates. In particular, as is explained in the subtitle, the question that the blog addresses are: What are the sectors of employment for a physics graduate? How do you get a job in keeping with your studies/interests? This blog tries to answer these main questions, by sharing the life experiences of physicists that already entered the work market, in a private company, in the public sector or in an academic…