This has absolutely nothing specific to do with Trump except that he’s spooky, what’s happening to American is spooky, and it’s spooky to see how many people buy into his propaganda and follow his lies like sheep following the Judas goat to their slaughter.
I can barely understand quantum physics though it fascinates me.
Unlike Trump, I do know enough to know what I don’t know, and enough to know that this kind of cutting-edge physics research is important.
There is an appalling dearth of intellectual curiosity, let alone critical thinking in a large minority in our country. It is fostered in the Trumpian era by Fox News and the far right propaganda machine. It is promulgated by school boards that mandate that creationism is taught in science courses. Climate change denial is the most blatant timely example but there are many others.
I found this article on Salon. How many Trumpers even read Salon, let alone click on a link about quantum physics?
I’m not saying everyone should be interested in all the advances in science, however, too many people simply don’ t give a damn.
I am sure that if you’re reading this you probably know a lot more about the subject than I do. This is the excerpt that intrigued me the most.
The classic example of a superposition involves firing photons at two parallel slits in a barrier. One fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is that tiny particles can behave like waves, so that those passing through one slit “interfere” with those going through the other, their wavy ripples either boosting or canceling one another to create a characteristic pattern on a detector screen. The odd thing, though, is this interference occurs even if only one particle is fired at a time. The particle seems somehow to pass through both slits at once, interfering with itself. That’s a superposition.
And it gets weirder: Measuring which slit such a particle goes through will invariably indicate it only goes through one—but then the wavelike interference (the “quantumness,” if you will) vanishes. The very act of measurement seems to “collapse” the superposition. “We know something fishy is going on in a superposition,” says physicist Avshalom Elitzur of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Research. “But you’re not allowed to measure it. This is what makes quantum mechanics so diabolical.”
For decades researchers have stalled at this apparent impasse. They cannot say exactly what a superposition is without looking at it; but if they try to look at it, it disappears.
One potential solution—developed by Elitzur’s former mentor, Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov, now at Chapman University, and his collaborators—suggests a way to deduce something about quantum particles before measuring them.
Aharonov’s approach is called the two-state-vector formalism (TSVF) of quantum mechanics, and postulates quantum events are in some sense determined by quantum states not just in the past—but also in the future. That is, the TSVF assumes quantum mechanics works the same way both forward and backward in time. From this perspective, causes can seem to propagate backward in time, occurring after their effects. (Emphasis added)
Time for our Kossack physicists to jump in and explain this so the rest of us can understand it.