The Quantum world
Rédigé par Clément Stahl
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I recently stumble on a very nice video of one of my previous teacher Terry Rudolph. Terry is a character and I had the chance to spend a year working with him in his group on quantum dots and "the photon machine gun". In the aforementioned video, Terry is sharing his point of view on the quantum world for a non-specialist public. As usual, his speech is refreshing and fun so if you want to see a theoretician drinking beer during one of his talk and discussing monkey reality as opposed to reality, feel free to sleep on this amusing video.
Terry and his collaborators showed what is now referred to as the PBR theorem which merely states that under some fair assumptions, the wave function has actually a physical meaning. It is quite of an open question for the physicist to know whether the wave function is only a computation tool to calculate physical quantities in quantum mechanics or is indeed a "real thing". Some specialists believe that this result is one of the more important in quantum mechanics in the past 30 years.
Image Credit : Andy Hair/iStockphoto