Welcome to the Revolution

I have a big dog in this fight, so all standard disclaimers apply. 

This is exciting news. The paper was just now published by Physical Review Letters, which is, of course, a flagship among physics journals. Here's an excerpt from the article in Gizmodo.

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"Most physicists believe that there is a richer and deeper theory of nature beyond quantum theory."

Quantum mechanics is the theory explaining the behavior of the smallest units of nature, like photons and electrons. Particles behave like waves (and vice versa), and before observing them, scientists can only explain the particles’ properties using probabilities. Rather than saying “this ball is blue,” they can only say “here are the chances this ball is blue or green.” But when two of these balls interact, they can become entangled, meaning you must describe both the balls’ properties at the same time. Measuring one of the balls’ colors directly implies what the color of the other ball will be, no matter how far away the balls are.

Scientists can observe entanglement. Chinese scientists set up this special inter-particle connection between light particles on a ground station and a satellite 100 kilometers away, for example. They observed correlations between the light particles in space and on Earth that couldn’t exist based on the laws of classical physics alone. Einstein hated entanglement since it implies that somehow, photons are influencing each other instantly without actually being near each other.

Richens’ team’s new paper, published yesterday in Physical Review Letters, doesn’t observe entanglement. Instead, “the main contribution of this work is to provide a compelling argument that entanglement—one of the most interesting and counterintuitive aspects of quantum theory—is an inescapable feature of any physical theory more “fundamental” than classical physics,”

A New Era of Color Science

The secret behind feather iridescence lies in how tiny structures interfere with light. These structures are fine enough to produce color through the warping of light rather than pigmentation.

Understanding how color works at a structural level could be useful for the development of sensors in medical and security applications.

With all of this in mind, we can expect the world to become a lot more colorful in the next few years.

"We are on the threshold of a new era of color science, and the interdisciplinary nature of this collaborative enterprise holds enormous promise," the authors conclude.

The research is published in Science.

http://bit.ly/2wf3PJq

Physicists measure complementary properties using quantum clones

The old textbooks might make handy paperweights...

(Phys.org)—In quantum mechanics, it's impossible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties (such as the position and momentum) of a quantum state. Now in a new study, physicists have cloned quantum states and demonstrated that, because the clones are entangled, it's possible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties of the clones. These measurements, in turn, reveal the state of the input quantum system.

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More information: G. S. Thekkadath, R. Y. Saaltink, L. Giner, and J. S. Lundeen. "Determining Complementary Properties with Quantum Clones." Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.050405, Also at arXiv:1701.04095 [quant-ph]

http://bit.ly/2uR3wBc

Primal

Many of the foundations of wave mechanics are based on the analyses and equations that Rayleigh derived for the theory of acoustics in his book The Theory of Sound. Erwin Schrödinger, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, studied this book and was familiar with the perturbation methods it describes. 

~Masters

Excited again — found a number of articles by Atiyah, du Sautoy et al., which begin to tie together for me various threads regarding harmonics and sound.

For mathematical physicists, this material will be old news — but for the fact that they've missed the connection to what we actually hear, owing to sound's putative status as a "mental" thing. The scare quotes are there because "mental" is one of those words we all understand until we start to think about it.

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Riemann discovered that the physics of music was the key to unlocking the secrets of the primes. He discovered a mysterious harmonic structure that would explain how Gauss's prime number dice actually landed when Nature chose the primes.

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What Riemann discovered was that Gauss's graph is like the fundamental note played by an instrument, but that there are special harmonic waves that, when added to this graph, gradually change it into the true graph or "sound" of the primes, just as the harmonics of the clarinet change the sine wave into the square wave.

~du Sautoy

"Mathematics in the 20th Century," by Sir Michael Atiyah

Perfect Harmony

'Harmonics,' by Cory Ench

When starting down a new path, I like to find the simplest book I can find on the subject at hand.

The eminent mathematician Edward Frenkel has provided a great service here in regard to the 'Langlands program,' which has been aptly described as the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of mathematics.

I was quite excited to learn of a good number of intersections between that vast and lively body of work* and my own, including symmetry, projective geometry, spectral theory, Riemannian surfaces, quantum field theory (QFT), and harmonic analysis.

Although symmetry is arguably the most important theme here, gauge symmetries are fairly abstract, whereas harmonic analysis provides a trove of correlations between simple physical theory and what we directly experience in sight and sound.

Let's review.

The mathematician Fourier proved that any continuous function could be produced as an infinite sum of sine and cosine waves. His result has far-reaching implications for the reproduction and synthesis of sound. A pure sine wave can be converted into sound by a loudspeaker and will be perceived to be a steady, pure tone of a single pitch. The sounds from orchestral instruments usually consists of a fundamental and a complement of harmonics, which can be considered to be a superposition of sine waves of a fundamental frequency f and integer multiples of that frequency.

The process of decomposing a musical instrument sound or any other periodic function into its constituent sine or cosine waves is called Fourier analysis. You can characterize the sound wave in terms of the amplitudes of the constituent sine waves which make it up. This set of numbers tells you the harmonic content of the sound and is sometimes referred to as the harmonic spectrum of the sound. The harmonic content is the most important determiner of the quality or timbre of a sustained musical note.

Hyperphysics

OK, now here's Frenkel.

The roots of harmonic analysis are in the study of harmonics, which are the basic sound waves whose frequencies are multiples of each other. The idea is that a general sound wave is a superposition of harmonics, the way a symphony is a superposition of the harmonics corresponding to the notes played by various instruments. Mathematically, this means expressing a given function as a superposition of the functions describing harmonics, such as the familiar functions sine and cosine. Automorphic functions are more sophisticated versions of these familiar harmonics. There are powerful analytic methods for doing calculations with these automorphic functions. And Langlands' surprising insight was that we can use these functions to learn about much more difficult questions in number theory.

Frenkel

Well, this is just a taste, but that's enough for today.

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* The Langlands program has deep roots in number theory, but I've only scratched the surface of that sprawling topic. For the time being, here's a nice bridge in regard to theory vis-à-vis experience.

It was not until the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century that absorbtion spectra were given a satisfactory theoretical explanation. They were shown to correspond with eigenvalues of appropriate Schrödinger operators. A given atom could absorb or emit light only at certain frequencies, corresponding to the energy levels of bound states represented by different eigenvalues. The mathematical spectra of differential operators thus carried fundamental information about the physical world, which even now seems almost magical.

The analogy with number theory is through spectra of other differential operators. These are Laplace-Beltrami operators (and variants of higher degree) attached to certain Riemannian manifolds. The spectra of these and other operators are expected to carry fundamental information about the arithmetic world, a possibility that also seems quite magical.

~Arthur