Examples:
- flash memory uses quantum tunneling as the basis for setting and resetting bits
- alpha decay is understood as a quantum tunneling effect in the nucleus
True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Lillian Hoddeson talking about Bardeen
. Source. From Video "The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)". She's actually good looking!The model is extremely simple, but has been proven to be able to solve all the problems that any reasonable computer model can solve, thus its adoption as the "default model".
The smallest known Turing machine that cannot be proven to halt or not as of 2019 is 7,918-states: www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2725. Shtetl-Optimized by Scott Aaronson is just the best website.
A bunch of non-reasonable-looking computers have also been proven to be Turing complete for fun, e.g. Magic: The Gathering.
Turing machine that halts if and only if the Goldbach conjecture is false by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
The approach of this channel of exposing recent research papers is a "honking good idea" that should be taken to other areas beyond just machine learning. It takes a very direct stab at the missing link between basic and advanced!
Can be achieved in two ways it seems:
- macroscopic beam splitter and optical table
- photolithography
Animation of Hong-Ou-Mandel Effect on a silicon like structure by Quantum Light University of Sheffield (2014): www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2r2IMt4vg No maths, but gives the result clear: the photons are always on the same side.
- quantum dot source. TODO how do you produce identical photons from two separate quantum dots? See also: quantum dot single photon source.
- superconducting nanowire detector. So the device has to be cooled then? Video "Jeremy O'Brien: "Quantum Technologies" by GoogleTechTalks (2014)" youtube.com/watch?v=7wCBkAQYBZA&t=2497 however says that semiconducting devices can also be used
GDM crashes sometimes when switching windows right after opening a new window: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/1956299
Ubuntu 24.04 installer "Erase disk and install Ubuntu" doesn't work when BitLocker enabled by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli reproduced on Dell Inspiron 15 3520 with factory defaults. This bug prevents "wipe windows" installation without workarounds, one of which is to disable encryption in Windows.
Sponsored by National Academy of Sciences, located in Long Island.
Some photos at: www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/archives/milestones-in-NAS-history/shelter-island-conference-photos.html on the website of National Academy of Sciences, therefore canon.
This is where Isidor Rabi exposed experiments carried out on the anomalous magnetic dipole moment and Willis Lamb presented his work on the Lamb shift.
It was a very private and intimate conference, that gathered the best physicists of the area, one is reminded of the style of the Solvay Conference.
QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 4.1 this conference was soon compared to the First Solvay Conference (1911), which set in motion the development of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
Much before atoms were thought to be "experimentally real", chemists from the 19th century already used "conceptual atoms" as units for the proportions observed in macroscopic chemical reactions, e.g. . The thing is, there was still the possibility that those proportions were made up of something continuous that for some reason could only combine in the given proportions, so the atoms could only be strictly consider calculatory devices pending further evidence.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter 5 "The reality of molecules" has some good mentions. Notably, physicists generally came to believe in atoms earlier than chemists, because the phenomena they were most interested in, e.g. pressure in the ideal gas law, and then Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics just scream atoms more loudly than chemical reactions, as they saw that these phenomena could be explained to some degree by traditional mechanics of little balls.
Confusion around the probabilistic nature of the second law of thermodynamics was also used as a physical counterargument by some. Pais mentions that Wilhelm Ostwald notably argued that the time reversibility of classical mechanics + the second law being a fundamental law of physics (and not just probabilistic, which is the correct hypothesis as we now understand) must imply that atoms are not classic billiard balls, otherwise the second law could be broken.
Pais also mentions that a big "chemical" breakthrough was isomers suggest that atoms exist.
Very direct evidence evidence:
- Brownian motion mathematical analysis in 1908. Brownian motion just makes it too clear that liquids cannot be continuous... if they were, there would obviously be no Brownian motion, full stop.
- X-ray crystallography: it sees crystal latices
Figure 1. Still from A boy and his atom by IBM. Source.
Less direct evidence:
- 1874 Isomers suggest that atoms exist
- kinetic theory of gases seems to explain certain phenomena really well
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 40 mentions several methods that Einstein used to "prove" that atoms were real. Perhaps the greatest argument of all is that several unrelated methods give the same estimates of atom size/mass:
- from 1905:
- in light quantum paper
- enabled by experimental work of Wilhelm Pfeffer on producing rigid membranes
- 1911: blueness of the sky and critical opalescence
This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.
Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.
This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact