I shouldn't have denigrated my digital bathroom scale for being precise but inaccurate. Maybe I wasn't standing still, and my weight was slightly shifted during the consecutive measurements made by the scale earlier. If I stand still and look straight ahead, then look down after the scale has had a moment to do the measurement (and calculation--it's digital, it calculates after doing an analog-to-digital conversion from whatever transducer, probably a strain gauge, used to make the physical part of the measurement), then I can get consistent consecutive readings to the 0.1 precision of the digital display. Lately, they've been in the range of 144, 145, and 146 pounds on different days. So I did approximately lose those ten pounds I said I needed to lose. Summertime manual labor and walkin' with a little runnin' everyday is what did it presumably. And more beer consumption seems not to have prevented the loss. Smithwick's Irish Ale, to be specific.
Now for some more quantum superposition discussion. Gary Zukav actually wanted to include three polarizers in the back of his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters, so that readers could do for themselves the experiment he describes--that's how important he considered the 3-polarizer mystery. But the cost of the book would have been too much he thought so he didn't include the polarizers. You can buy two pairs of cheap polarized sunglasses, though, and demonstrate the effect to your own satisfaction (well, I don't know how cheap you can get 'em, actually, not being a sunglasses buyer currently myself).
Gordon Baym, author of Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, published in 1969, when he was a professor at the U of Illinois, Urbana, also thought the polarization experiment or demonstration (not much to get out of it except to observe it) was important. He starts his book off with a description of it, in well-written English as well as in mathematical detail. He emphasizes how probability comes into the process once we consider a beam of light to be quantized, saying the total energy of the beam cannot be arbitrary, but must instead be an integral multiple of Planck's constant times the light's frequency. Another way of saying that is there are a certain number of photons in the beam. (Is or are? Never mind!) Baym says, "Thus when the energy of the wave is halved by the polaroid what must happen is that half the photons pass through and half don't. This is very weird--"
Gotta stop there for now, but we can think in the meantime of why that's weird. If one of these identical photons gets throught, why should another not?
