Physics Blogging Round-Up: March

Another month, another batch of blog posts at Forbes:

-- In Physics, Infinity Is Easy But Ten Is Hard: Some thoughts on the odd fact that powerful math tricks make it easy to deal uncountably many interacting particles, while a smaller number would be a Really Hard Problem.

-- New Experiment Explores The Origin Of Probabilities In Quantum Physics: A write-up of an experiment using a multi-path interferometer to look for departures from the Born rule for calculating probabilities from wavefunctions.

-- The Most Important Science To Fund Is The Hardest To Explain: In light of the awful budget proposal put forth by the Trump administration, some thoughts on the importance of government funding for the most basic kinds of research.

-- Popular Science Writing And Our Fascination With Speculation: Prompted by the new book from Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, a look at why so many pop-science books focus on what we don't know.

-- Can You Make A Quantum Superposition Of Cause And Effect?: A write-up of a new paper where they put a single photon into a superposition of A-then-B and B-then-A, which kind of makes my head hurt.

I'm pretty happy with these, though I would've expected more pageviews for the cause-and-effect thing. My teaching schedule is slightly lighter this Spring term, so I may be able to do a little more in-depth blogging than in recent months. Or maybe not. Come back in May to find out...

More like this

The ArXiV Blog and several other sources last week linked to a new paper titled Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms:
After blogging about my experiences earlier this week, I had crows on the brain. So, as I went drifting through fractal sets, trying to come up with something for this week’s Friday Fractal (now a Saturday Set), I kept running across crow-like shapes.
Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff...
When I wrote up the giant interferometer experiment at Stanford, I noted that they've managed to create a situation where the wavefuncti

@Chad: Annoyingly off-topic, but ...
Do you know anything about Forbes's Web situation today? I'd like to read at least three of your articles :-), but Safari is getting malformed HTML (or something), and Firefox just gets stuck in a "Welcome" loop. I have whitelisted Forbes in my AdBlock, but that doesn't seem to matter.

By Michael Kelsey (not verified) on 03 Apr 2017 #permalink