It From Bit

R.I.P.

Physics Today News Picks: John Archibald Wheeler 1911-2008

It’s only getting more and more awesome:

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2611757.ece#2007-06-04T00:00:25-00:00

http://www.physorg.com/news98468776.html

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14

If true, this would be interesting, here is an article explaining it (from slashdot.org)

http://www.physorg.com/news96027669.html

But seriously, I just want to see the Large Hadron Collider fired up.  That thing is a monster, just check out these cool photos.

This is an interesting article which has a very plain easy-to-understand description of the double-slit quantum experiment.

Also this (part I) from ytmnd (mute audio plz) is pretty good, and part II, part III, part IV are similarly very well illustrated.

If you kept your audio on, well I don’t know what you got becuase I turned it off.  YMMV.

This page is an awesomely clear explaination of these ideas:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070608022917/http://blueox.uoregon.edu/~karen/astro123/lectures/lec18.html

I don’t know who Karen is but I hope the page stays up. Karen if you are out there, please leave that great page up!

Edit: Page got removed, new link is via waybackmachine.

The quote and it’s origin: Here This idea expressed by John Archibald Wheeler is succinct in contrast to its magnitude.

The thing is, this stuff is really weird, but reading through it I could see that there was this crazy gap in between quantum physics and our full-size world – and the notion of a  participatory universe pretty neatly fills the gap, as unfathomable as that seems.

When I first looked up the quote I found the above linked article, it led me on a 2 hour hyperlink safari which unearthed for me concepts such as the Copernican principle, the arrow of time, and the anthropic principle.  I find all this stuff truly fascinating – that physics, cosmology and philosophy are all informing some of the most fundamental questions of the nature of reality.

I was pretty psyched when I got the domain name, so I have set up a pretty standard Drupal installation with blog and forum, membership is open and so are the forums and comments.

J