Recent content by Nugatory

You are describing non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the only kind you’ll encounter unless and until you’re well on the way to an advanced degree in physics. The way NRQM works, we describe the initial state of the entire quantum system with the wave function, the wave function evolves over...

For the sake of the analogy, we're assuming that the couples have been preselected to meet the conditions that every couple consists of one man and one woman and every couple consists of one blue-eyed and one brown-eyed person. If you prefer, we could state it as Victor selects two individuals...

Native speaker here, agrees with your edit. A gauge produces measurements, a guide points out a path to a conclusion or destination.

Your intuition is mistaken here. Away from the edge effects and if the two slabs are identical the field is zero. That’s just another way of saying

Goethe (actually not Goethe, that’s a loose paraphrase from an English language translation) has a good point but you’ve misunderstood it. Skipping the textbooks leaves you without a solid foundation for communicating with specialists. You may be getting something out of your experience here...

There remains the (rather discouraging) possibility that there is no natural interpretation.

There is no such thing as "real acceleration", at least until you provide a definition of this non-standard term. There is proper acceleration, which is invariant, independent of coordinate choice, what an accelerometer (calibrated to read zero in free fall, as opposed to zero at rest on the...

It's four-dimensional spacetime that is curved, and it is far easier to measure the effects of curvature in the time direction than in the spatial directions: they show up as tidal effects.

It's not "light", it's single photons and .7 mm is four orders of magnitude more than the 350 nm wavelength of the photons. They can easily resolve a .7mm feature.

Nothing. When QM allows something that is classically forbidden, the explanation is that it isn't really forbidden and the classical picture is inaccurate.

Could be…. And if so would be aesthetically satisfying for many, it’s a major impetus behind consideration of hidden variable theories. But in the absence of a candididate theory there’s no way of knowing.

And it still is. That’s not a my take on the history, and I’m thinking that you are still overestimating the extent to which new discoveries overthrow the old model. Einstein’s relativity was a big breakthrough but it didn’t shock the world or even the much smaller world of physicists, it was...

We know that we’re getting single photons one by one when the dots indicating that a photon has landed on the screen appear one at a time, or our array of photomultiplier tubes triggers one at a time, or the equivalent for whatever other equipment we’re using. Or in most experiments we know up...

We don’t. All we observe is the dot on the photographic film screen where the photon landed and was absorbed. As an aside, any description of “the” double slit experiment that does not make this clear (which will be probably 90% of the online pop-sci video junk you’ve been wasting your time...

Many popsci presentations really grossly misrepresent “the” double slit experiment. There are at least three different types of “double slit experiment” spanning almost two centuries and showing different weirdnesses. First, there’s the original double slit done by Thomas Young, in which we...