Daily Archives: July 23, 2010

Really, Nature?

Posted on by

Quantum mechanics flummoxes physicists again

If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again.

Flummoxed? Unpalatable?

It looks like a neat experiment. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand how the experimenters were flummoxed (the results agree with QM), nor do I see what they were getting at with the mention of relativity. And I don’t think I’ve found which-path behavior to be unpalatable, but then, I always used chocolate-covered gratings.

Celebrating the Enabler of Cheap Laser Cooling and Trapping

Posted on by

Landmarks: Invention of the CD-Player Laser

The invention of the semiconductor laser took lasers from the scientist’s lab and action hero’s arsenal to every living room DVD player and grocery store scanner. It began with the serendipitous discovery in 1962 that gallium arsenide could be made to produce surprisingly intense light. Later that year, the first gallium arsenide laser was reported in Physical Review Letters. The modern descendants of that device are the tiny lasers that abound in countless modern appliances.

… and atomic physics labs throughout the world.