Related papers: The April First Phenomenon
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
We introduce a formalism that exploits the many-input many-output nature of nodes in quantum circuits. There is a diagrammatic and an algebraic version, the latter similar to the spinor formalism of general relativity. This allows us to…
In this Letter, we numerically present the possibility of the first-order phase transition occurring through the thermal fluctuation in the early universe. We find that when the temperature is slightly higher than the mass scale of the…
This brief article discusses some aspects of quantum theory and their impact on popular culture. The basic features of quantum entanglement between two or more parties are introduced in a language suitable for a general audience, and…
The principle of sufficient reason asserts that anything that happens does so for a reason: no definite state of affairs can come into being unless there is a sufficient reason why that particular thing should happen. This principle is…
This is a 1-page comment on a wrong paper that recently appeared in PRL (Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 (23), 5393 (2001), also quant-ph/0101004). The authors claim to have shown that using a quantum computer gives an "exponential advantage" for…
The universe appears to be accelerating, but the reason why is a complete mystery. The simplest explanation, a small vacuum energy (cosmological constant), raises three difficult issues: why the vacuum energy is so small, why it is not…
The quantum plasma theory has flourished in the past few years without much regard to the physical validity of the formulation or its connection to any real physical system. It is argued here that there is a very limited physical ground for…
We introduce CLIMATE-FEVER, a new publicly available dataset for verification of climate change-related claims. By providing a dataset for the research community, we aim to facilitate and encourage work on improving algorithms for…
Experimental evidence for and against the existence of pentaquarks has accumulated rapidly in the last three years. If they exist, they would be dramatic examples of hadronic states beyond our well-tested and successful particle models. The…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
In a brief article [1], Seife refers to works by Einstein and Schroedinger and concludes that there is a relentless murmur of confusion underneath the chorus of praise for quantum theory. It is noteworthy that a "murmur" is not necessarily…
Quantum mechanics (QM) has attracted a considerable amount of mysticism, in public opinion and even among academic researches, due to some of its conceptually puzzling features, such as the modification of reality by the observer and…
Since ancient times, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in its description of physical phenomena. As humankind enters a period of advancement where the completion of the much coveted theory of quantum gravity is at hand, there is…
We consider N bosons occupying a discrete set of single-particle quantum states in an isolated trap. Usually, for a given excitation energy, there are many combinations of exciting different number of particles from the ground state,…
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
While it is widely agreed that Bell's theorem is an important result in the foundations of quantum physics, there is much disagreement about what exactly Bell's theorem shows. It is agreed that Bell derived a contradiction with experimental…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
Many of the most familiar features of our everyday environment, and some of our basic notions about it, stem from Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (RQFT). We argue in particular that the origin of common names, verbs, adjectives such as…