Mastodawn

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𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 5, 2024

@mir @NumbersCanBeFun @ielenia awww I mean yeah that's the quote unquote "safe" way, let's do it that way

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𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 5, 2024

@mir lol regrets leaving your comfy server

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𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

I still like this pfp though, so I'm gonna pin it

𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

I've migrated my followers off of emacs.ch due to irreconcilable differences in opinion on human rights from one of the main admins and benefactors of the emacs.ch instance, @louis. His twitter account, stefflat41, contains a multitude of tweets and retweets that contain objectionable and conspiracy-theory-laden views. This is not simply a difference of political opinion, but rather a fundamentally different view of dignity and truth. I hope others follow my example.

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𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

@BlahajBlast omg yes photons are so cool! This gives me a chance to bring up one of my favorite quantum mechanics demonstrations, that's really only tangentially related, 'asking photons where they have been'. The experiment doesn't actually uncover anything new, observationally, but it makes the two state vector formalism of quantum mechanics seem really appealing as an intuitive explanation of why certain observations actually happen. Given two state vectors for a photon, one that describes forward progression through time and one backward, you can find that they only agree some of the time about where a photon can exist, and these agreement points comprise the photon's experiences, as observed when you collapse the wave function.

The experiment tries to give each photon a memory of which mirrors in the contraption it has bounced off of using vibration. When the photon hits the detector at the end, the frequency distribution can be observed and the peaks show where the photon has been. The experimenters then create a set up where the frequency distribution showed that, of the photons that hit the detector, most of them came from an arm of the set up that couldn't possibly reach the detector.

The reason this makes sense in the tsvf because a photon traveling backward in time from the detector can end up in the dead end arm of the experiment, even though forward traveling photons in the arm will never reach the detector, due to clever beam splitting placement.

Really interesting experiment: https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7469

Asking photons where have they been

Quantum mechanics does not provide a clear answer to the question: What was the past of a photon which went through an interferometer? Various welcher weg measurements, delayed-choice which-path experiments and weak-measurements of photons in interferometers presented the past of a photon as a trajectory or a set of trajectories. We have carried out experimental weak measurements of the paths of photons going through a nested Mach-Zehnder interferometer which show a different picture: the past of a photon is not a set of continuous trajectories. The photons tell us that they have been in the parts of the interferometer which they could not have possibly reached! Our results lead to rejection of a "common sense" approach to the past of a quantum particle. On the other hand, they have a simple explanation within the framework of the two-state vector formalism of quantum theory.

arXiv.org

𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

"Everything you said about my passwords is probably true, but I've decided to accept that risk."

How do I respond to that? "Ok, well you're not allowed on my wifi anymore."?

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𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

@kirancodes I will just go ahead and speak for all of us that we really appreciate your presence here! No doubt in my mind

𐌀𐌌𐌙 Sep 4, 2024

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