as days pass by

The Crooked Timber crew point us at Chad Orzel’s physics posts as part of his weblog, Uncertain Principles. I’d forgotten how fascinating I find this stuff; Orzel is a physics professor in the field of quantum optics, and he’s written some lucid explanations of some hot physics topics like quantum computing. We had a big discussion at the last LUG meeting about this; well, it started with a little remark about how quantum computers could revolutionise cryptography if they can ever get them to work, and then expanded (based on an ever-increasingly basic set of “what does that term mean?” questions from Jono) to cover all of quantum mechanics and relativity in about two hours. Chad’s explanations would have been an invaluable help when bambam and I were trying to remember exactly what the deal was with quantum entanglement.