Slicing it Right Into the Entanglement Hazard

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ZapperZ has a takedown of an article that purports to apply QM to golf; the critique is Quantum Physics And ….. Golf?!

He addresses each point but I think he misses one important aspect of the first issue, on entanglement. Creating and maintaining entanglement isn’t easy, but more importantly, there’s the ol’ bugaboo

Entanglement might one day allow us to communicate instantaneously across the light-years of distance between stars. But for golfers, entanglement offers a more practical benefit.

I have watched golfers tee off and then twist and bend their bodies as they follow the flight of their ball, trying to influence the ball’s course through the air. It doesn’t work, of course.

But if the golfer and the ball could somehow be entangled, then every movement the golfer makes would instantly have an effect on the golf ball. The golfer could literally steer the ball in midair.

…

The body English would work!

No, no, no; a thousand times no. Entanglement does not allow for instantaneous communication and does not allow you to influence distant objects. Entanglement allows you to do one measurement and determine the states of two particles, with one particle possibly being far away — it does not enable you to change that state.

Nature, Dissin' the Maser

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Microwave laser fulfills 60 years of promise

Because of this [low power] impediment, most in the field gave up on masers and moved on to lasers, which use the same principles of physics, but work with optical light instead of microwaves. Lasers are now used in applications ranging from eye surgery to CD players.

The poor maser lived on in obscurity. It found only a few niche uses, such as boosting radio signals from distant spacecraft — including NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. Those masers work only when cooled to less than ten degrees above absolute zero, and even then they are not nearly as powerful as lasers.

To paraphrase Ray “Bones” Barboni, this is the exact frikkin’ thing I needed. A little pique after a blogcation to get the blood going again. And to quote Jules Winnfield, “Well, allow me to retort.”

First of all, “microwave laser” is just … wrong. The maser came first, so popularity aside, you don’t just ignore the history. That’s like touting a cover song while ignoring the songwriter who first recorded it. Blasphemy.

Second, and more importantly, the “first practical maser”? The mind boggles. Well, my mind does, anyway. Hydrogen masers have been the best atomic clocks at time scales out to a day or so for quite a while, and even with the advent of laser-cooled atomic clocks in the past decade, they only surpass masers after about a day of integration. (This is why the even more advanced optical clocks you read about every few months cannot be called better, in some sense — they don’t yet run long enough to make a significant contribution to timekeeping). You can make the argument that the world’s timekeeping, backbone for GPS and other timing-dependent technologies is living in obscurity, but I can’t see how that isn’t practical.

Don't Bother Me With the Details

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Such as the definition of theory in a scientific context.

KENTUCKY GOP OUTRAGED COLLEGES WANT STUDENTS TO KNOW THINGS

ACT, the state’s testing company, interviews professors to figure out the things most important to student readiness for college, which sounds like a smart thing to do. Unfortunately, those professors have bad news: If you want students to do well in biology classes, they have to know about evolution.

I’m not sure how the Kentucky politicians equated not teaching evolution with better critical thinking skills, but I’m not surprised they don’t see the problem.