Have you read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, Vol 3? First few chapters, describing the double slit experiment, at least through to the part about turning the light on and off. Best intro to the mysteries of quantum mechanics in the world.
Discussion
Read that and ask yourself HOW THE FUCK CAN THAT BE TRUE.
Feynman, like Einstein, was great at math, but they were physicists first and foremost.
Much cooler when you explore this phenomenon in the context of quantum information theory. When you take out many degrees of freedom in the physics and just focus on the transformations on quantum amplitudes things get less spooky. Ok it’s still a bit spooky.
Susskind has a mind blowing theory called ER = EPR where he makes the case that entanglement has similar properties to worm holes 🤯 there may even be quantum wormholes connecting entangled particles. QM is a lot of fun 😁
pretty sure this is what led wolfram to his hypergraph theory of everything 😂 have you seen his latest blogpost on it?
i really like his discussion of the branchial space (what he calls the quantum mechanics part of reality); branches world vs matter world is such a nice analogy imo
oh might def not be latest at this point lol 😂
Im too dumb to understand this stuff
No ur not
it sounds more complex than it is. general idea is that everything is a state machine, and the quantum realm is where the set of “allowed” state transitions are explored (hence the name branch-ial, they branch furiously)
where the branches actually move is what “matters” (get it? matter/material world)
time is the weird moment of collapse of the branchial to the material (i think, kinda guesstimating)
quantum computers are clever because in the material world you have to physically explore every path of a problem; the quantum realm of branches moves at a tremendously faster rate comparatively (in path exploration) than materially needing to calculate every state
being able to frame questions such that you can access the branching process of particles is an enormous speed up for searching a problem space
"So how is the effort to try to find a fundamental theory of physics going to work in practice? We plan to have a *centralized* effort that will push forward with the project using essentially the same R&D methods that we’ve developed at Wolfram Research over the past three decades,"
They are going to fail.
Ok frens, once we all get the decentralized web figured out, I say our next big project should be to unify QM and general relativity into a single theory.
We should probably try to figure it out before the technological singularity hits, bc who knows what the hell’s gonna happen sixty seconds after that …
Who’s with me? 🤓
I hadn’t heard of ER = EPR, but I like it.
Have you heard of the 4-geon model of elementary particles by Mark Hadley?
“It has been shown by Hadley that the logic of quantum mechanics is consistent with general relativity when closed time-like curves are permitted.”
Closed timelike curves in general relativity are pretty interesting. They give rise to the “grandfather paradox” which Kip Thorne explores in his 1994 book Black Holes and Time Warps.
Seth Lloyd's "Programming the Universe" and Wojciech Zurek's work on Quantum Darwinism are required reading for anyone on the intersection of computer science and physics.