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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.

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