If I can’t find my keys, they could be on the counter, or in the kitchen table hiding under some junk mail. Or maybe I left them hanging on the door. Until I find them, I obviously can’t say which. It’s a bit like sealing a radioactive atom in a box and leaving it isolated: until I open the box I can’t say whether it decayed. Sounds familiar?
Many jokes, particularly puns and one-liners, rely on on setting up expectations, just to subvert them, on double meanings and ambiguity. Take this one:
I would tell you a chemistry joke, but I wouldn’t get any reaction.
Particles are strange. In more than one way: for example they behave as if they were spinning, like a top. But they aren’t moving at all. Even if they were, trying to imagine how some of them “spin” would probably melt your brain. The property that measures this “spinning” (though nothing is moving at all here!) is, creatively, called spin.
Telepathic particles, international collaborations, and games. What the heck was this Big Bell Test? Continue reading The Big Bell Test: do particles talk to each other behind our backs?
So it wasn’t gravitational waves after all: the Nobel prize for physics went to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz. That’s the easy part. The motivation needs a little unpacking: For theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. We all know and love a few phases of matter: solid, liquid and gas (maybe plasma if you want to get kinky). … Continue reading Theoretical donuts and quantum computers: the Nobel prize 2016
AnThere’s a sealed box, inside the box is a cute cat and a device that can kill it as soon as a radioactive atom decays. Were we to open the box, would the cat be alive? And how is it doing while the box is still closed? In extreme synthesis, this is the idea of the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” experiment (thought experiment! no actual … Continue reading Cats and not
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