Heisenberg
drorzel | October 11, 2010SteelyKid, like most toddlers, knows a few songs, and likes to sing them over and over. Her repertoire is limited to "ABCDEFG" (the alphabet song, but that's how she requests it), "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Some man" ("This Old Man," which I only figured out this weekend), and "Round and Round" ("The Wheels on the Bus"). I get a little bored with the repetition, and so tend to make up my own verses, which get sideways looks from her, followed by telling Kate "Daddy's silly!"
I've been posting a lot of these on Twitter over the past several days (@orzelc), but for posterity, a few physics-related…
drorzel | May 13, 2010I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I'm going to keep being asked about it. One of his links led to the Bohmian Mechanics collaboration, where they helpfully provide a page of pre-prints that you can download. Among these was a link to the Bohmian Mechanics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which seemed like a good place to start as it would be a) free, and b) aimed at a…
esiegel | May 13, 2008There is a very techincal paper this morning by Martin Bojowald that asks the question, How Quantum Is The Big Bang? Let me break it down for you.
If you took a look at empty space and zoomed in on it, looking at spaces so small that they made a proton look like a basketball, you'd find that space wasn't so empty after all, but was filled with stuff like this:
What are these? They're little pairs of matter particles and anti-matter particles. They spontaneously get created, live for a brief fraction of a second, and then run into each other and disappear. That's what happens on very small…