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September 16, 2012

Uncertainty

Update (10/18/2012) — Mea Culpa:

Sonia pointed out to me that my (mis)interpretation of Ozawa was too charitable. We ended up (largely due to Steve Weinberg’s encouragement) writing a paper. So… where does one publish simple-minded (but, apparently, hitherto unappreciated) remarks about elementary Quantum Mechanics?

Sonia was chatting with me about this PRL (arXiv version), which seems to have made a splash in the news media and in the blogosphere. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it and (as you will see), I didn’t do much better. But I thought that I would take the opportunity to lay out a few relevant remarks.

Since we’re going to be talking about the Uncertainty Principle, and measurements, it behoves us to formulate our discussion in terms of density matrices.

Posted by distler at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Followups (29)