decoherence

4 posts

Dispelling Maxwell's demon

12 min read
Analysis Scicomm Science arrow of time Charles Bennett decoherence Dennis Gabor entropy information theory James Clerk Maxwell Léon Brillouin Leo Szilard Maxwell's demon no-cloning theorem quantum entanglement quantum information Quantum mechanics Rolf Landauer Schrödinger's cat second law of thermodynamics unitarity wavefunction collapse

Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to mak…

The Hyperion dispute and chaos in space

9 min read
Scicomm Science butterfly effect classical chaos decoherence ensemble interpretation Hyperion Leslie Ballentine Maximilian Schlosshauer measurement problem Nathan Wiebe quantum chaos Saturn Titan wavefunction Wojciech Zurek

When reading around for my piece yesterday on the wavefunctions of quantum mechanics, I stumbled across an old and fascinating debate about Saturn’s moon Hyperion. The question of how the smooth, cla…

What on earth is a wavefunction?

10 min read
Scicomm classical mechanics coherence decoherence delocalisation Newton's second law quantum information Quantum mechanics quantum superposition Schrödinger equation uncertainty principle wavefunction wavefunction collapse zero-point motion

If you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread outward in gentle circles. We all know this sight, and it feels natural to call them waves. Now imagine being told that everything — from an electron t…