In previous posts Aron introduced us to the strange, yet compelling world of quantum mechanics and its radical departures from our everyday experience. We saw that the classical world we grew up with, where matter is composed of solid particles … Continue reading
In my recent talk about fine tuning, I mentioned that the numerical value of a physical quantities with units (such as meters, joules, etc.) is just an arbitrary human convention. So if you don't understand the grammar of units, you … Continue reading
A reader asks: This seems to be as good a place as any to ask a question about closed universes. See, in a lot of popular science books, they teach you that an "open" universe is one where space is … Continue reading
[Fixed typo in Schrodinger's equation below—AW] Previously I talked about interference, the chief weird thing about QM that makes it different from Classical Mechanics. You have to think about complex-valued "amplitudes", from which you derive (real-valued) probabilities. From this you … Continue reading
Strictly speaking, most of the other rules about QM are already implicit in what I've already said. But a few implications of this setup are worth pointing out. First note that, in QM, the "state" includes information about every single … Continue reading
