Further information: Rich Noer: Quantum Entanglement
Our text will be The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, by Louisa Gilder (Vintage, 2008, paperback; list price $17.95). This is an unusual book, a sort of “historical novel” constructed almost entirely using extensive quotations from the participants in the story. This seemed implausible when I first heard of it, but actually reading the book convinced me that Gilder does an excellent job, well documented and engagingly written in a non-mathematical style for a general audience. We’ll read the entire book, in chunks that average about 40 pages a week.
Classes will consist mainly of informal lectures, easily interrupted by student questions and comments. There will be occasional demonstrations. Most of the class time will be devoted to discussing the relevant ideas and results in ways intended to clarify and expand on the week’s readings. A provisional schedule is as follows:
Class Topics Reading (pages)
Jan. 3 The first quantum ideas 3-31
Max Planck quantizes energy
Albert Einstein quantizes light waves into photons
Jan. 10 Early quantum theories 32-73
Neils Bohr quantizes the atom; failure of causality
Matter waves, quantum spin
Wolfgang Pauli’s “exclusion principle”
Jan. 17 The “final” quantum theory; interpretations and objections 74-122
Werner Heisenberg’s matrix theory, Erwin Schrodinger’s wave equation
Max Born’s probability interpretation
Waves vs particles; Bohr’s “complementarity principle”
Indeterminacy vs causality; does God play dice?
Jan. 24 Hidden variables and EPR 123-177
Einstein’s “light box” argument and Bohr’s challenge
Schrodinger‘s “cat paradox”: the role of observation
Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR) “paradox”: quantum theory is “incomplete”
Bohr’s refutation
John von Neumann’s “no-hidden-variables proof”
Jan. 31 David Bohm’s alternative theory 181-230
His textbook on conventional quantum theory
His hidden variables theory (after exposing von Neumann’s error)
Rejection/ignoring by physics establishment
Feb. 7 Basic experimental tests of entanglement 233-289
John Bell’s inequality: quantum theory vs hidden variables
First tests, using photon polarizations
Feb. 14 Further quantum theory tests 293-315
Closing loopholes
Anton Zeilinger: 3-particle entanglement
Use of entanglement for secure (no eavesdropping) data transmission
Feb. 21 More experiments and questions 316-337
Alain Aspect demonstrates entanglement over 10 km
Photon “teleportation”
Reflections on current state of quantum theory
Note to graduates of the Quantum Reality course (Winters 2015 and 2016):
In this course (Quantum Entanglement) there will be a fair amount of overlap with that earlier course, as can be seen from the topics listed above. The point of view and the depth of treatment here, however, will be different (less detail on the history of quantum theory; more emphasis on entanglement, recent experiments, and applications).