The nature of Bell-type inequalities

I’ve written an awful lot on this topic in the past couple of years.  My latest publication condenses, consolidates, and improves on all of this and notes a distinct clash between the classical definition of entropy and the behavior of quantum systems.  In particular, I think I have finally succeeded at showing that Bell-type inequalities are simply another way of stating the second law of thermodynamics.  As such, I think one could derive a Bell-type inequality (of the Cerf-Adami type) for merging black holes based on all the work with black hole thermodynamics.  Of course, I have no idea what that would tell you, but hey, I’m a theorist…

Someone read my dissertation!

Someone actually cited (not sure if they read it or not) my dissertation!  And it was because someone actually reads my blog!  Amazing.  In any case, I received a nice e-mail from one of the authors of this paper that I referenced on this blog back in July. Sometimes it’s the little things in life…

Life and death of a photon

Physicists in France have recently ‘filmed,’ for the first time, the complete life of a single photon. But, while we observe it living and dying, how does Joe Photon see things? Technically, time has no meaning for Joe and he never ages so how could we see him die while he doesn’t? Oh, I just love these apparent paradoxes and I love even more confounding people with them…

March Meeting recap

Well, the March meeting was a veritable blur of activity. A full recap will be published in The Quantum Times. My talk went reasonably well though with only 12 minutes for both speaking and answering questions, I inevitably skimmed a thing or two (and mistakenly said “non-diagonalizable” when I meant “non-seperable” in reference to density matrices). I still have a person or two I need to convince of my argument but I have been introduced to a number of additional sources to help support my claim, including Frank Schroeck’s voluminous treatise on quantum mechanics in phase space. It was Frank himself who photocopied a section or two of interest. Now I’m bent on convincing a few others who were at the meeting.

At an informal dinner session on Monday evening seven of us discussed how to better incorporate foundational aspects of quantum mechanics in curriculum as a way of enhancing quantum mechanics education and bring more people into the fold (in general students tend to be more interested in the foundational stuff anyway). In a rather ironic bit of timing, Physics Today published a few letters on the benefits of learning foundational concepts in quantum mechanics in this month’s issue which was waiting for me in my mailbox upon my return.

The GQI business meeting was well attended and the discussion on the future name of the group was mostly free of bloodshed. I also attended the GQI Executive Committee dinner the following night at Rioja, supposedly the best restaurant in Denver, from which I managed to get a nasty bout of food poisoning (I’ll spare you the details). The meeting was fruitful though.

In short, it was a fairly productive meeting both from the standpoint of GQI and from the standpoint of my own research. I’m just hoping that in both cases I/we can build on the energy and not let the good ideas flutter off into obscurity.

Quantum biology

Well, as my friends all know, I’m very good a beating dead horses. So, continuing my on-again-off-again rant about why people entering medicine should know some physics, here is a recent article from BiologyNews.net about a recent discovery in the burgeoning field of quantum biology. Note that the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health was one of the partner institutions on this project. Thus physics has proven important enough to medicine to extend beyond pure academia and has received some attention from public health researchers.

Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe

Now this is cool. I’ll be testing the pedagogical usefulness this spring in my QM class and potentially my General Physics class as well (we do a brief overview of quantum physics). I’ve always wanted to create a game that taught quantum mechanics or some other aspect of physics. My mother used to use games as pedagogical tools to teach French (she’s retired).