The Quantum Gang

Sometime ago I was an active user on this site and particularly on this forum.

On this time of activity a group of people were very active in discussing quantum mechanics. Sometimes more formally and other times less formally.

To do away with some imperfect notions on quantum mechanics I decided to create a blog that would explain quantum mechanics from the bottom up in order to help people learn and understand quantum mechanics on an interactive way.

we started the blog, gained some traction but then life happened and the whole thing had to be put on hold and I kind of forgot about it.

But the other day some guy asked me some questions on relativity and the Quantum Gang sprang back into my mind. Now that I have a lot more free time on my hands I guess it's time to give back, relaunch the Quantum Gang and pick up from where we stopped.

Hence if you feel like that you're in for the ride of your life just join the gang:
https://thequantumgang.wordpress.com
https://thequantumgang.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/the-beginning/

Comment a lot, make questions, give recommendations and even join the wordpress.com team if you feel like it

See you soon

@adam-warlock
Did you see my post about quantum teleportation of RF beams?

@sonhouse I didn't. Can you please link it for me?

Edit: no need to link it I just found it

I was a (rather unproductive) member of that gang.

Curiously, you sired this thread almost exactly around the time I ordered a book called "Quantum Theory for Mathematicians" by Brian Hall.

I have become acutely fascinated over the past several months with certain quantum theoretical hypotheses being bandied about in the physics literature. But I am not trained as a physicist, and thus find the way physicists do mathematics to be nearly impenetrable. It's a different dialect. Nonetheless, over the next couple of years I intend to pivot from studying mathematics for its own sake toward studying mathematics as it relates to certain areas of physics. I do not find pop science books on the subject to be particularly edifying, and there is apparently no market for "intermediate level" accounts.

There seem to be enough well-written books out there nowadays that explain quantum theory and general relativity in the language of mathematicians that I can break into these areas with a self-study program. I've become much more adept at working with differential equations in recent months, which also helps.

I'm particularly interested in the idea that "space," and the geometry of spacetime as modeled by general relativity, is an emergent property of quantum entanglement phenomena. More to the point: how "far apart" things are is a function of how entangled they are, and not how many centimeters or lightyears apart they are. It's an idea that completely rethinks the concept of distance, and could explain the origin of what we call gravity. Yes, masses produce gravity wells, but why?

So, rather than try to hitch general relativity to quantum mechanics in order to unify all the forces (including gravity), the idea is to try to get relativity to emerge from quantum mechanical phenomena. This has been tried many times in the past, I think, but I gather that lately (past decade or so) there have been some interesting developments owing to novel applications of quantum information theory -- a comparatively new field.

I feel there is something very deep here. Something to the tune of "everything is information" or "reality is mathematics." It could speak to the very nature of consciousness itself.

It's going to be a long road. Our understanding of the nature of reality cannot just stop at the Copenhagen Interpretation and "shut up and calculate." My goal is to develop a facility with the basics so that I can at least read some of the latest papers on the subject of quantum theory as it relates to the Big Questions.

It is something of a spiritual journey for me. A long road ahead, but should be fun if I can stick to it!

@Soothfast
My son in law is such a physicist. If you have direct questions, I could pose them to Gandhi, he would know.

@sonhouse said
@Soothfast
My son in law is such a physicist. If you have direct questions, I could pose them to Gandhi, he would know.

Cool! But I'm not quite even at the point yet where I can formulate an intelligent question!

@Soothfast
I might ask him this question:
So with superposition, say, an electron, can be in two places at once, so my question is, suppose you banged a positron into the electron, would both disappear or only one?

And another, if you start with say one electron and get it superpositioned, and one is here and the other there, is the total energy of the pair two times that of one lone electron or are they just sharing traits, like mirror images?