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vzn
vzn
5:57 PM
in The h Bar, 4 hours ago, by Abhas Kumar Sinha
@JMac That's true, but modern physics have a lot of scope for improvements, teaching QM now doesn't gurantees that the QM would be same as today after 60 years. Personally, I align myself to the group saying God does not play dice Even though there might not be any hidden variable, but another equation apart from Sch eqns, to describe the system correctly...
 
Thomas Klimpel
Thomas Klimpel
6:26 PM
Reading Mike and Ike, I get the impression that the problem of the old ways of teaching QM has nothing to do with whether God does not place dice. The extremely low temperature quantum side and its strangeness is over-emphasized, and the phase transitions between quantum and classical are all too often only looked at coming from the quantum side. How about also discussing gases and their quantum effects?
 
vzn
vzn
@ThomasKlimpel mike and ike? anyway agreed there seem to be many different ways of looking at QM and teaching it. this again relates to the profusion of interpretations. and the boundary between QM vs classical has been a subject of perplexity and confusion for an entire century, and (arguably) continues to this day.
Blind men and an elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused. However the meaning of the popular proverb differs in other countries. It is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each...
 
Thomas Klimpel
Thomas Klimpel
7:14 PM
'Mike and Ike' -> 'Quantum Computation and Quantum Information' by Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang.
 
vzn
vzn
@ThomasKlimpel (oh ofc!) have been thinking about that book, need to get a copy myself sometime. halfway following your brief sketch. are you saying "low temperature QM side and its strangeness is overemphasized, + phase transitions" is part of the "old ways of teaching QM"? am not sure the ways of teaching QM have changed that much in a century, maybe there is some new trend? yes decoherence is a modern idea but not really sure how much it is a break from anything before it...
 
Thomas Klimpel
Thomas Klimpel
But maybe my impression just arises from the fact that I am not a physicist, and my knowledge of statistical physics is not particularly deep. The Gibbs paradox (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_paradox) is actually discussed in my book on statistical physics. But my thought process was less on the remaining quantum effects is gases, but more on that gases are probably fully computable and understandable without access to quantum computers, and probably most fluids too.
 
vzn
vzn
7:30 PM
@ThomasKlimpel again not totally following, probably have to read N&C to get a better idea what you are referring to. have looked into the gas + fluid analogy at substantial depth as you are probably aware of. bose einstein condensate has many parallels to gases. it appears that there is some disconnection/ fragmentation/ compartmentalization in the way physics is currently conceptualized/ understood/ taught. these discontinuities are not isolated one might say. personally think they all add up...
 
Thomas Klimpel
Thomas Klimpel
7:45 PM
With respect to N&C, section '2.2.3 Quantum measurement', section '2.4 The Density operator', or section '8.2.3 Operator-sum representation' are good example how one could teach QM without artificial restrictions. And then comes section '8.5 Limitations of the quantum operations formalism', which transcends it.
So in a way I understand better now why the quantum mechanics books were so much better in 2013 (when I had my second shoot at QM) compared to 1998 (when I had QM in university, and completely failed to get anything out of it).
 
vzn
vzn
N&C have been highly influential, liked another book a few yrs ago by Nielsen.
Feb 28 '14 at 17:43, by vzn
http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Discovery-New-Networked-Science/dp/0691148902
 

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