LiveCatDeadCat

What’s it all about, Lair-REE? Is it about receiving with simplicity all that happens to us? Or are Joel and Ethan Coen just messing with our minds (again) when they use that quote from Rashi as an epigraph at the beginning of A Serious Man, a movie that focuses on the troubles of Professor Lawrence “Larry” Gopnik, physicist and Jew? Larry seems to "receive with simplicity" and gets emotionally backhanded in a slapstick fashion every time. Key word: slapstick. Key word for this blog: phyziks.

03 April 2013

Interference of probability amplitudes, not photons

"The things that interfere in quantum mechanics are not particles. They are probability amplitudes for certain events." So says Roy J. Glauber in a letter to the editor of the American Journal of Physics, printed in the January 1995 issue. Glauber was describing how Dirac's writing that each photon interferes only with itself, and thus interference between different photons can never occur, is not strictly correct. So there. The great ones can get it wrong too, and frequently do, so don't worry too much about your own little pultritudinal mistakes.

2-D complex vector space is still waiting in the wings to be written about...