Clif's Book World

Learning about the quantum world while living in the macro world is sort of like reading Alice in Wonderland. Things just don't behave in logical ways. One needs to accept new rules for reality.

Professor Benjamin Schumacher explains the subject as simply as possible. But it's still a real mind stretcher in a knock-your-socks-off sort of way.

My main motivation for listening to these lectures is to have quantum entanglement explained again. It's the spookiness of entanglement that made me consider as possibly true the suggestion that the Higgs boson went back in time from the future in order to cause the CERN Large Hadron Collider to malfunction. I know the people who originated that story were joking, but the idea is no more strange than the evidence for entanglement.

Entanglement is the phenomenon of two particles acting on each other even though they are separated in space. But come to think about it, that's no stranger than the phenomenon of gravity. The only reason we don't think gravity is strange is because we live with it in our macro world.

If you would like to have a better understanding of fermions and bosons, I highly recommend these lectures. If you don't know what fermions and bosons are, well then you really do need these lectures.

In the later part of the lectures he talks about quantum computers and quantum communication. All I can say about that is, "huh?"