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Damnit. I just wrote a huge post, but the keybindings in Firefox are different from Safari and I just erased the whole damn thing. If this post doesn't seem up to par, blame it on that.
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This weekend went quite far in bringing me back to my normal happy self. I should probably be less dramatic in the future.
Friday night a bunch of us were planning on going out to Santa Fe. Kyle and Katie were coming up from D.C., and I hardly get to see them so I was looking forward to that. Kevin and Laurel were also planning on coming, and so was Karen and some of her high school friends. Everybody but me takes longer than expected to get there, and Kevin called on the way to tell us that they were bringing Amy, Laurels sister, who is 19. That means, of course, that we cannot go to a bar since all the College Park bars are 21 and up. I start thinking that the night is going to suck, because things aren't going according to plan and I like plans. Plans make doing things easier. Breaking plans is worse than not having plans. I need to lighten up. We go to Town Hall to pick up some booze and come back to the old house. We stay in and drink there. After a few beers a bunch of us decide we're drunk enough to walk down to 7-11. I zip up a beer in one of those huggies and we start walking. At the store Laurel buys a couple cans of that aerosol whipped cream, so she and her sister can fight later. I don't know whose idea that was, but I want to shake their hand. When we start walking back Kyle tells me to run to the house, then back to them. I drunkenly oblige. It was about a half mile to the house, and I got there sweaty and hot, so I drop off my shirt figuring I don't want it any more and it will serve as proof that I got to the house. I then run back to everybody. Man am I suggestible while drunk. Later at the house, we're hanging out on the deck, and Laurel and Amy start fighting with the whipped cream. For some reason they decide to attack me, still shirtles. It wasn't a fair fight, but I wasn't so drunk that I would demand a friends girlfriend and her little sister to take their tops off. I am a gentleman. So this gentleman takes those whipped cream cans and start spraying back. It gets messy. At some point during the brawl a can gets launched off the deck. Amy goes for the stairs and Kevin, in his constant attempt to get my pants off, is pulling on them partially to keep me from going over the side of the deck. The only way for me to get that can is to take my pants off and jump off the edge, so I do it. I know it wasn't a good idea, but at the time the 5 beers in me were doing a good job convincing me. So I get the can, and the fight continues. At some point my pants get thrown in a tree, then lost. The party slows down after that, and around 5 in the morning I drive Kyle and Katie up to my place in Laurel (the town, not the whipped-cream-wrestler.) By the way, if you get covered in whipped cream and sweat, take a shower. It will dry and smell like vomit. I took a shower and went to sleep.
The next morning after we all get up I drive Kyle and Katie to Rockville so they can meet up with a friend, and I head home to switch cars with my dad so my brother has a non-manual car to drive over the weekend. I hang out at the pool some trying to get a tan, then head home and get ready for Paul's graduation party. His party was pretty good, lots of people and the conversations were engaging. The party starts to dwindle but stays interesting. We start a couple poker games. I came in third out of five the first game, and the second game I won. Winning at Texas holdem was a new experience for me. We decide we should make it a regular event, poker night, and I hope we manage to do it. Paul's friends seem like decent people.
Today was uneventful, relaxing, and I heard back from my uncle, the physics professor, and he says that he doesn't think the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment has been verified. He sent me to these two pages:
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/kim-scully/kim-scully-web.htm
and
http://www.tardyon.de/ko2.htm
That's all for now. I'll probably have more by the end of the week.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
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5 comments:
What I like about this is that it only defies our intuitive idea that time flows one way but not the other. Almost every model for physical processes we have treat the future the same way they treat the past (except wavefunction superpositions collapsing to single eigenstates, which is still a highly debated theory anyway) so this doesn't defy anything except our classical (dare I say Newtonian) concept of causality. This could potentially disprove the many-worlds hypothesis, which I am actually quite fond of, since it would imply that both possibilities aren't equally valid for the future. Something definately will happen. It may even shed some light onto the wavefunction collapse mentioned earlier, since that process treats the future differently from the past (and is kindof the whole basis of the experiment.) I just realized... the only theory that treats the future differently from the past is the theory that says the experiment should work. That's it, I'm convinced. I'm thinking about getting some lasers, half-mirrors, downconverters, etc, and seeing if I can setup the experiment. Anybody interested in building a delayed-choice quantum eraser? Let me know.
I was all excited by there being comments on Fuzzy's post, and then I started reading them and my brain glazed over. Stupid Fuzzy and his stupid physics musings! You took Ben away from me for the majority of Sunday as he read crap about stuff I don't care about.
Sorry Anna, maybe some gorillas doing it would entertain you?
The only real explanation I have for why it may not work is that since at the moment in time the signal photons are detected (yeah yeah, different reference frames alter what a moment in time means, I'll think about that later) the idler photons are still separate and distinguishable, and so there is at least the potential to gather which-path information. It may be that the which-path information must be destroyed before the signals are detected for an interference pattern to show up. I personally think that has ugly logical repercussions in a relativistic universe where "before" and "after" hold different meanings for reference frames undergoing relativistic movement. I'll have to think about this some more.
I also do not care about animals having sex.
Talk about something else.
As for the potential paradox, I don't think it's actually a problem. The probability waves even of idler-observed-photons spike at the point of observation and drop to almost zero everywhere else in space, but don't actually hit zero anywhere. So there's still a chance, albeit a small one, of observing an interference pattern when you detect the idlers. What would be created is a statistical anomolee. More of an "hmm, interesting" than an "uh oh, start praying to god/allah/spongebob". I think this would prevent the sci-fi people from fearing a rip in the fabric of spacetime or some other sensationalistic opinion. What would be creepy is if you send back not random and checkable signals (like the output from a quantum random number generator) but instead send back information with significant meaning to the beings performing the experiment. If you get back something intelligible (like "Hello World!") when the experiment begins, then decide to "fuck it" and ignore all the idlers, where did that message come from? Are we then communicating between different branches in the many-worlds hypothesis? I'm going to read up on QED this weekend and then see if any physics professors on campus can explain things next week.
That comment was longer than some of my posts.
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