Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:

But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:and in the understanding of the 2020 Standard Model the photon is one of the elementary particles.

This duality is fully described mathematically by quantum electrodynamics, where the photon is modelled as a quantized excitation of the photon field.

Uses photons!

The key experiment/phenomena that sets the basis for photonic quantum computing is the two photon interference experiment.

The physical representation of the information encoding is very easy to understand:

The knowledge that light is polarized precedes the knowledge of the existence of the photon, see polarization of light for the classical point of view.

The polarization state and how it can be decomposed into different modes can be well visualized with the Poincaré sphere.

One key idea about photon polarization is that it carries angular momentum. Therefore, when an electron changes orbitals in the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom, the angular momentum (as well as energy) change is carried out by the polarization of the photon!

Inferior compared to self-directed learning, but better than the traditional "everyone gets the same" approach.

With all this ready, we opened the Nanopore flow cell, which is the 500 dollar consumable piece that goes in the sequencer.

We then had to pipette the final golden Eppendorf into the flow cell. My anxiety levels were going through the roof: Figure 4. "Oxford nanopore MinION flow cell pipette loading.".

At this point bio people start telling lab horror stories of expensive solutions being spilled and people having to recover them from fridge walls, or of how people threw away golden Eppendorfs and had to pick them out of trash bins with hundreds of others looking exactly the same etc. (but also how some discoveries were made like this). This reminded Ciro of: youtu.be/89UNPdNtOoE?t=919 Alfred Maddock's plutonium spill horror story.

Luckily this time, it worked out!

We then just had to connect the MinION to the computer, and wait for 2 days.

During this time, the DNA would be sucked through the pores.

As can be seen from Video 1. "Oxford Nanopore MinION software channels pannel on Mac." the software tells us which pores are still working.

Pores go bad sooner or later randomly, until there are none left, at which point we can stop the process and throw the flow cell away.

48 hours was expected to be a reasonable time until all pores went bad, and so we called it a day, and waited for an email from the PuntSeq team telling us how things went.

We reached a yield of 16 billion base pairs out of the 30Gbp nominal maximum, which the bio people said was not bad.

www.qiagen.com/us/products/discovery-translational-research/dna-rn-a-purification/dna-purification/dna-clean-up/qiaquick-pcr-purification-kit/#orderinginformation (archive)

Manual archive: web.archive.org/web/20190911100243/https://www.qiagen.com/us/resources/download.aspx?id=e0fab087-ea52-4c16-b79f-c224bf760c39&lang=en

Removes PCR byproducts from purified DNA.

This is the only way to truly understand and appreciate the subject.

Understanding the experiments gets intimately entangled with basically learning the history of physics, which is extremely beneficial as also highlighted by Ron Maimon, related: there is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field.

"How we know" is a basically more fundamental point than "what we know" in the natural sciences.

In the Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez! Richard Feynman describes his experience teaching in Brazil in the early 1950s, and how everything was memorized, without any explanation of the experiments or that the theory has some relationship to the real world!

Although things have improved considerably since in Brazil, Ciro still feels that some areas of physics are still taught without enough experiments described upfront. Notably, ironically, quantum field theory, which is where Feynman himself worked.

Feynman gave huge importance to understanding and explaining experiments, as can also be seen on Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979).

The strongest are:

DokuWiki about physics, mostly/fully written by Jakob Schwichtenberg and therefore focusing on particle physics, although registration might be open to all.

These videos can give some geometric insight and do have their value.

But they are sometimes too slow, there are never any mention of experiments, just "the truth".

And when things get "mathy", it sticks to a more qualitative view which may not be enough.

Very over the top with sexy demons and angels making appearances, and has some classic aesthetic artistic value :-)

Conceptually the simplest mesons. All of them have neutral color charge:

One of the first 1 million USD (zero artistic value) porn movie. And also a piece of shit! Hotter porn has been shot in kitchens around the world using iPhones.

IMDb entry: www.imdb.com/title/tt0477457/.

Proportionality factor in the Planck-Einstein relation between light energy and frequency.

And analogously for matter, appears in the de Broglie relations relating momentum and frequency. Also appears in the Schrödinger equation, basically as a consequence/cause of the de Broglie relations most likely.

Intuitively, the Planck constant determines at what length scale do quantum effects start to show up for a given energy scale. It is because the Plank constant is very small that we don't perceive quantum effects on everyday energy/length/time scales. On the ${\lim }_{h\to 0}$, quantum mechanics disappears entirely.

A very direct way of thinking about it is to think about what would happen in a double-slit experiment. TODO think more clearly what happens there.

Defined exactly in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units to:

Photon energy is proportional to its frequency:or with common weird variables:

This only makes sense if the photon exists, there is no classical analogue, because the energy of classical waves depends only on their amplitude, not frequency.

Experiments that suggest this:

Used to explain the black-body radiation experiment.

Published as: On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum by Max Planck (1900).

The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) page 9 mentions that Planck apparently immediately recognized that Planck constant was a new fundamental physical constant, and could have potential applications in the definition of the system of units (TODO where was that published):This was a visionary insight, and was finally realized in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.

TODO how can it be derived from theoretical principles alone? There is one derivation at; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law#Derivation but it does not seem to mention the Schrödinger equation at all.

In this solution of the Schrödinger equation, by the uncertainty principle, position is completely unknown (the particle could be anywhere in space), and momentum (and therefore, energy) is perfectly known.

The plane wave function appears for example in the solution of the Schrödinger equation for a free one dimensional particle. This makes sense, because when solving with the time-independent Schrödinger equation, we do separation of variable on fixed energy levels explicitly, and the plane wave solutions are exactly fixed energy level ones.