Sorry I don't hang around here much. I keep meaning to. You're still the ones I come to when I have no clue at all what a quantum-physics article I come across means though.

http://io9.com/heres-a-photo-of-something-that-cant-be-photographed-1678918200

So. Um. What?

They have some kind of double-slit experiment that gets double-slitted again then passed through a stencil before being recombined and recombined again to give a stencil-shaped interference pattern?

Is that even right?

Can someone many-worlds-interpretation describe that at me, even if it turns out its just a thought-experiment with a graphics mock-up?

I made a video last month, which when I mentioned in another thread someone said I should post as a top level discussion.

It's just a ten minute zero-budget thing I wrote in which a girl has a video conference with her dead and backed-up-then-uploaded grandfather. Intended as the first in a series, but later episodes will only get produced if donations come. Later episodes talk more about AI's failures and the political situation with unrest from the living demanding the dead shouldn't have their jobs etc.

Anyway, watch it here if you like, I'd be happy to hear what y'all think :)

Through a path more tortuous than is worth describing, I ended up talking to friends about the quantum effects which are exploited by photosynthesis. There's an article describing the topic we were talking about here.

The article describes how quantum effects allow the molecular machinary of the chloroplasts to "simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one."

Which is essentially how Quantum Computing is usually described in the press too, only we get to set what we mean by "most efficient" to be "best solution to this problem".

Since I usually find myself arguing that "there is no wave collapse," the conversation has lead me to trying to picture how this "exploring" can happen unless there is also some "pruning" at the end of it.

Of course even in the Copenhagen Interpretation "wave collapse" always happens in accordance with the probabilities described by the wave function, so presumably the system is engineered in such a way as to make that "most efficient" result the most probable according to those equations.

It's not somehow consistently picking results from the far end of the bell-curve of probable outcomes. It's just engineered so that bell-curve is centred on the most efficient outcomes.

There's no 'collapse', it's just that the system has been set up in such a way that the most likely and therefore common universes have the property that the energy is transferred.

Or something. Dunno.

Can someone write an article describing how quantum computing works from a many-words perspective rather than the explore-and-then-prune perspective that it seems every press article I've ever read on the topic uses?

Pretty please?

I'd like to read that.

If we had topic-headings here, I'd be suggesting a new one: I changed my mind today.

Being rational is all about chainging your mind, right? It's about re-assessing in the face of some new evidence. About examining the difference between your assumptions and the world itself. Narrowing down the difference between the model and the reality, the map and the territory.

Maybe your 'karma' should reflect how much you've told us when you changed your mind? Certainly I'd like to know when people change their minds about things more than when they just agree with me.

In fact, I think that is probably the thing I most want to know about from any of the people whom I know primarily because of their professed rationality.

Especially if they explain why they changed their minds, and do it well.

With that in mind, and introducing the new acronym: ICMMT

I Changed My Mind Today!

Or at least I revised my opinion.