{"id":281,"date":"2011-06-03T16:03:37","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T21:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=281"},"modified":"2011-06-03T16:03:37","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T21:03:37","slug":"quantum-silliness-from-the-bbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2011\/06\/03\/quantum-silliness-from-the-bbc\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum silliness from the BBC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since I regularly express <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/02\/07\/britain-envy\/\">my<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2011\/04\/29\/science-is-all-about-replication-of-results-right\/\">envy<\/a> at the quality of science journalism in England, I thought I should mention that the BBC has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-13626587\">particularly silly piece<\/a> about quantum mechanics on its web site.<\/p>\n<p>The experiment described in the article looks perfectly nice, but the results definitely do not &#8220;bend&#8221; any rules of quantum physics, nor does they &#8220;pull back the veil&#8221; on quantum reality. The results found by the experiment are precisely what we &#8220;knew&#8221; they must be all along &#8212; that is, they&#8217;re exactly what is predicted by standard quantum mechanics. Of course, that doesn&#8217;t mean the experiment isn&#8217;t worth doing &#8212; it&#8217;s always nice to test our theories, and learning better techniques for manipulating quantum systems is a great thing to do. But there are precisely no philosophical implications about the nature of reality here. As John Baez <a href=\"http:\/\/world.std.com\/~mmcirvin\/interpretation.html\">said<\/a> a long time ago<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Newspapers tend to report the results of these fundamentals-of-QM experiments as if they were shocking and inexplicable threats to known physics. It&#39;s gotten to the point where whenever I read the introduction to one of these articles, I close my eyes and predict what the reported results will be, and I&#39;m always right. The results are always consistent with simply taking quantum mechanics at face value.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The new result fits perfectly into this category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I regularly express my envy at the quality of science journalism in England, I thought I should mention that the BBC has a particularly silly piece about quantum mechanics on its web site. The experiment described in the article looks perfectly nice, but the results definitely do not &#8220;bend&#8221; any rules of quantum physics, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2011\/06\/03\/quantum-silliness-from-the-bbc\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Quantum silliness from the BBC<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}