How I Assume You're Reacting Right Now
After a hectic and unpleasant few weeks, this blog should be back in business! Previously, these kind of bland posts have been followed by bursts of genuine activity, so I'm hopeful to get back to almost daily writing.
Max Born and Wolfgang Pauli
The IITSTIAPW series is going pretty well! Someone asked me why I haven't discussed anything actually quantized (that is, discrete) yet, which is a very fair criticism. The reason is that I haven't yet introduced anything that makes the discrete nature of quantum physics seem natural. What I'm going to do next time is introduce a new concept, "the operator", through a specific example, "the particle number operator". This will make it obvious that one must be in a Hilbert Space at the expense of making it somewhat mysterious that most "real" systems (that is, systems that we have) do not have a definite number of particles but rather a distribution over them. In fact, systems with definite numbers of particles are called Fock States and have weird properties. For instance, thanks to no-cloning theorems, only one person can observe a system in a Fock state, which means that if you encode a signal into a system in a Fock state (in binary polarization angles) an eavesdropper can't quietly listen in. Two people cannot look at the same thing if the image of that thing is in Fock space. The idea of splitting light comes from intuition bread on non-Fock light. I hope I can give examples that make that concept clear if only to myself.
Never Ending Dandy, Baby
Well, the best TV show of the past two years, Space Dandy, has been over for some time now. Even though we all hope with bated breath for the announcement of a movie, a new season or at least a new batch of merch, perhaps we should take this time to reflect. I'd like to do a retrospective of Shinchiro Watanabe's work in general, starting with Macross Plus in 1994 (it seems like only yesterday, it was twenty years ago) and ending with Space Dandy in 2014 (well, I haven't seen Terror In Resonance yet). It would be a bit of fun, dipping into more artistic endeavors online. But I doubt there would be many interested.
Before I go, this one is just for me:
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