Malus’s Law

Quantum Information Supremacy

Scott Aaronson is a Computer Science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. See his Wikipedia entry, which says he’s the founding director of UT Austin's new Quantum Information Center. Aaronson is into quantum computing in a big way, and is a famous blogger on the subject. His blog is called Shtetl-Optimized, and one of his recent posts was called Quantum Information Supremacy. I take an interest in this sort of thing because I have a Computer Science degree, and I know a thing or…

Continue ReadingQuantum Information Supremacy

There is no quantum entanglement

In physics, there is something called Malus’s law. It’s named after Étienne-Louis Malus, whose name is one of 72 names on the Eiffel Tower. It dates from way back, to 1809, and it gives the intensity of polarized light passing through an ideal polarizer: Malus’s law image from Rod Nave’s most excellent hyperphysics website This intensity is given as I = I₀ cos² θ, where I₀ is the intensity of the light that has passed through an initial polarizer, and θ is the angle between the…

Continue ReadingThere is no quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement is scientific fraud

The quantum entanglement story began in 1935 with the EPR paper. That’s where Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen said quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because it predicts a system in two different states at the same time. Later that year Bohr replied saying spooky action at a distance could occur. Then Schrödinger came up with a paper where he talked of entanglement, a paper where he used his cat to show how ridiculous the two-state situation was, and a paper saying he found spooky action at a…

Continue ReadingQuantum entanglement is scientific fraud