5 ms·
I'd recommend learning the math/physics from a textbook. At some point, the pop-sci explanations get so garbled that they make the actual idea sound harder and
by bollu 6y ago
I'd recommend learning the math/physics from a textbook. At some point, the pop-sci explanations get so garbled that they make the actual idea sound harder and more mysterious than it actually is.
When I first understood what entanglement was, mathematically, I was profoundly disappointed. Years of pop-sci had made it seem like a crazy thing, but mathematically, it's quite.. tame. (Some tensor products don't factorize).
For quantum mechanics, I strongly suggest going the quantum computing route if you have a background in computing. Pick up Quantum Computing since democritus (https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/), Nielsen and Chuang(http://mmrc.amss.cas.cn/tlb/201702/W020170224608149940643.pdf http://mmrc.amss.cas.cn/tlb/201702/W020170224608149940643.pd...), and learn how to program in Q# (Microsoft's quantum programming language) and solve their quantum katas: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/tutorials/intro-to-katas https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/tutorials/intro-to-....
I've done the same thing as part of a course at university: https://github.com/bollu/quantum-course-exercises https://github.com/bollu/quantum-course-exercises
and it made a lot of things click for me.
- monktastic1 6y ago> Some tensor products don't factorize I'm sure you know this, but it's that some elements of the tensor product space don't factorize (i.e., are not tensor products).
- bollu 6y agoThank you for the correction, this was indeed what I meant to write :)
- ubercore 6y ago> When I first understood what entanglement was, mathematically, I was profoundly disappointed. Years of pop-sci had made it seem like a crazy thing, but mathematically, it's quite.. tame. (Some tensor products don't factorize). Is the _math_ quite tame, or is the phenomenon itself?
- antognini 6y agoThe math of entanglement is not particularly complicated. The philosophy on the other hand....
- ubercore 6y agoThat's the part I understood that GP was asking about. I know the math is way over my head, but I'm interested in the concepts, to the extent that I can be. I love popular science that tries to explain that (really been into PBS Spacetime recently)
- bollu 6y agoThis is what I'm trying to combat, though! The math is not over your head. maximum, If you know high school math, then literally all one needs to start studying quantum computation is linear algebra --- you can study in a semester, as it is one of the first courses all engineering graduates learn, and is luckily quite intuitive. MIT OCW has Gilbert Strang's video lectures freely available (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...), along with exercises and transcripts. That's the beauty of quantum computation; it harnesses all the intuitions we already have about computation, skips the messy parts of solving stuff in quantum mechanics while still keeping all the fiddly interesting bits that makes quantum quantum. I really do believe that learning quantum computation is the "correct way" (for some folks) to gain an intuition for quantum mechanics
- whatshisface 6y agoThe hard parts of entanglement aren't the Bell pairs, they're all of the things you can do with Bell pairs.