wilderside

Cultural Creatives. Co-curated by Ian Wilder & Kimberly Wilder. The views here are my own and not those of any organization that I belong to

[BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking]

British artist David Hockney has died aged 88, his publicist has said https://t.co/nvCAwmcR9t

[wilderside @wilderside]

@Hertz Why do you waste people's time taking reservations when you don't have any cars? Why do you advertise other car companies at your location?

[NBC News @NBCNews]

No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public. https://t.co/N99uOgFTQ9

[wilderside @wilderside]

@Rubbermaid Do Better. Delivered without the 3 inch brace and 2 screws: "I regret to inform you that the parts for the Rollout Container 65 Gal are not available separately, so we can't place a replacement order. You may contact Amazon for a return or exchange of your trash can."

[wilderside @wilderside]

@rubbermaid Do Better!

I bought a $200 garbage can from you. You shipped it without the 3 inch clamp and 2 screws. Now you say it's up to me to return a 65 gallon garbage can rather than you shipping me 3 small pieces.

[Yoko Ono @yokoono]

PLAY CHESS WITH YOKO ONO
https://t.co/G72ZQOkMbM
Challenge the Yoko-bot and play with an exclusive all-white chess set based on Yoko Ono's 'Play It By Trust' artwork: "The white chess set is a sort-of life situation. Because the chess pieces on both sides are white, you always have to be aware of which are your pieces."

[Seb Johnson @SebJohnsonUK]

"AI is going to cure cancer and create abundance for everyone"

Meanwhile in Ireland:

[Steve Jurvetson @FutureJurvetson]

Things get strange when you shoot a single photon through the double slit. It deflects when passing through the slit, and when a string of distinct photons are sent, they accumulate in places where you’d expect in an interference pattern, but there is only one photon, and only one of two slits it could have passed through; yet it behaves as if it is interfering with itself.

Here's my summary of a recent history of quantum physics: Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once. It uses the classic two-slit interference experiment as the common thread across generations of theories that try to explain its peculiar properties.

Richard Feynman calls it the “one experiment which has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics.”

With more complicated setups involving beam splitters, the photon will behave as a wave, as expected with multi-photon interference patterns, but if observed in its trajectory, it will act as a particle as one would expect, with nothing to interfere with its path.

With more complex setups and long light paths, this bifurcation of behavior (wave or particle) can even be made to occur after the fact, warping our sense of time and causality.

And it not just photons. Similar results have been achieved with neon atoms, C60 Buckyballs, and even a custom molecule of 810 atoms.

The notion of superposition, required to explain this quantum interference, “is the most unsettling story perhaps to have emerged from any of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century.” Prof. David Albert, p.80.

And then it gets really strange, when you consider the entanglement of photons that can collapse simultaneously when one is observed, even at a great distance away. This nonlocal behavior is a subject of much debate, including Einstein’s objections to quantum physics. Einstein’s most cited paper is not on relativity, it is his 1935 paper identifying the property of entanglement, which he called “spooky action at a distance.”

The critical role that an observer plays in the experimental results (specifically, the collapse of the wavefunction in the Copenhagen interpretation) is a bit unsettling and anti-realist and reflective of the philosophical correctness of the day — with literary modernism questioning the ambiguities inherent to any one perspective of the world. In quantum physics and literary modernism, “there is no true world, since everything is but a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us.” Prof. Albert p.183.

The theory that I favor is the one that modifies neither philosophy nor physics and explains the two-slit experiment without resorting to an observer or the particle-wave duality; it solves determinism and non-locality, but… it is a psychological bender — the many interacting worlds interpretation. Each discrete photon is interfering with its sister particle in a parallel universe, and each quantum transition event spawns a copy of each universe, one for each path the particle could take. “The idea that 10^100 slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies is not easy to reconcile with common sense. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance.” Prof. DeWitt p.227.

Thanks @anilananth for the good read.

And this brings us to the Universe Splitter app on my iPhone. Each time I use it to make a decision, it directs a single photon through a beam splitter in Geneva, Switzerland, and there is subsequently one universe where the photon goes left and one where it goes straight. We happen to be in the one that observes one of those outcomes.

When I read Feynman’s QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), I was struck by the peculiar squiggles that helped him visualize the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. “The insight that Feynman had was to realize that what’s interfering are two different states of the universe. And those two states may only differ by where a single particle is.” Prof. Aephraim Steinberg, p.232.

It was David Deutsch’s exploration of the two-slit experiment with single photons that guided him to parallel universes and the intuition behind quantum computers and their capacity to out-compute anything we could build that leveraged just one universe!

And that brings us to the Entanglion game, published by IBM Research. I have yet to play that, in this universe at least, but hope to soon.

[Tim Spalding 🇺🇦 @librarythingtim]

Thought this was a parody, but, no, the US Mint really removed the olive branch—but not the arrows—held by the eagle on the dime. The design goes back to the super-woke days of 1782. Link in next tweet.

[wilderside @wilderside]

@mattyglesias Trump is solely interested in how he benefits personally. We are at war to distract from his Epstein complicity with a pedophile and his hopes of wagging the dog for the midterms

[wilderside @wilderside]

“Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.”
— Tara Mohr
via the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter (https://t.co/7hFFjkUUIg) from @tferriss

[Jacqueline Sweet @JSweetLI]

NEW: 70 organizations—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Unitarian, civil rights, academic, legal, peace, and human rights groups —submitted a formal request to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division seeking a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigation into Canary Mission, citing our Drop Site story from January that showed among other things that Canary is operated in Israel by a large Israeli team.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Stanley Kubrick gave an interview to Playboy Magazine after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. They asked him about chess, knowing that as a young man he spent countless hours in Washington Square Park playing compulsively - from noon to midnight. Here is what Kubrick said:

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

An artist creates stunning sculptures from scrap metal

📹Guillermo Galetti

[NewsNation @NewsNation]

"The truth needs to be known," Air Force veteran Dylan Borland told members of Congress on Tuesday at a hearing on UAP, as he testified for the first time publicly that he became a whistleblower after facing retaliation, medical malpractice and workplace harassment.

More: https://t.co/VIny1Sl8o4

[Rep. Anna Paulina Luna @RepLuna]

In today’s UAP hearing, we revealed new military surveillance video showing a UAP splitting a Hellfire missile in mid-air.

Not a single witness was aware of any U.S. military technology capable of such a feat.

Every witness described the footage as extremely “scary”.

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

A mom uses AI to make her kids' messes look like they're on the news.

It worked! 😂

[Rasheed J. Griffith @rasheedguo]

Those old service sector jobs.

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

Whoever designed this packaging deserves a raise.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

@EZebroni Sure, if you like oil, gas, and a U.S. energy industry falling behind China.