The fourth video I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Einstein's Brilliant Mistake: Entangled States. The title is not just an Elvis Costello reference, but gets at the fact that while the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper was wrong in that the local hidden variable theories they favored are impossible, it turned out to be important and productive.
As with the others, I'm very happy with the way this came out. The images are great, and I'm glad to get in the point that Bell's key insight involves measuring different properties for the two particles, which is sometimes glossed over. It was really hard to get this down to five minutes, though...
Anyway, this is the last of the videos I wrote for them. It's been tons of fun seeing how these came together, and also extremely gratifying to see the huge numbers of views these have drawn. Just to have them all in one place, the lessons I wrote are:
Particles and Waves
The Uncertainty Principle
Schrödinger's Cat
Entangled States
I'm proud of these scripts (as you can probably guess), and very grateful to the animators who brought them to life. It's been a great experience, and I hope these do some good for people trying to teach or learn the tricky points of quantum physics.
Again with the electrons going round an atom in circles! Without thinking about it a whole lot, this is the most disappointing aspect of the animations. What's wrong with an electron density map of some sort in different states, which seems the most obvious alternative? Not that they're perfect, but Electron Density Models are far more empirically effective than any particle theory has ever managed. Furthermore an electron density map ties into interference fringes in a way that particle models cannot.