For convenience, I gathered a few comments of mine into a blog post.

  • @selfMA
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    131 year ago

    If you really want to cite someone he admires, you could note that Eliezer Yudkowsky uses 1 as a probability when trying (and failing) to explain quantum mechanics, because he writes probability amplitudes of absolute value 1.

    I’m glad I’ve never pissed off a career physicist, cause this is concise, targeted destruction

    • @titotal
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      131 year ago

      If you want more of this, I wrote a full critique of his mangled intro to quantum physics, where he forgets the whole “conservation of energy” thing.

      • @blakestaceyOPMA
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        51 year ago

        Thanks for taking on that task (I linked to your post to provide further details).

      • @selfMA
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        41 year ago

        fuck yes. I can tell already this’ll need more brain than I can give it during work, but from the first few paragraphs this seems like absolutely my kind of shit

      • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        despite phase shifts being the main cause of the described effects.

        what are the other ones?

        (when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/2 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?)

        • @titotal
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          1 year ago

          what are the other ones?

          I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn’t be full destructive interference.

          when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?

          I’m not sure how you’d actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you’d need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I’m fully theoretical physics so I’m not too familiar).