Plus Advent Calendar Door #11: Quantum mysteries
It may be Sunday but that's no excuse for resting your brain. Plus has been grappling hard with the strange weirdnesses of quantum mechanics lately, and we think that you should too. So get ready to be mind-boggled.
The podcast: Does quantum physics really describe reality?
With counterintuitive ideas such as superposition and entanglement, quantum mechanics doesn't seem to resemble reality as we know it, yet quantum physics is an incredibly successful theory of how the physical world operates. Plus spoke to Andrew Briggs, John Polkinghorne, Nicolas Gisin, David Wallace, Roger Penrose and Andrea Morello about how we can resolve the mysteries of quantum physics with our experience of reality. And we found out why quantum physics is just like riding a bike...
Flying home with quantum physics
Quantum mechanics is usually associated with weird and counterintuitve phenomena we can't observe in real life. But it turns out that quantum processes can occur in living organisms, too, and with very concrete consequences. Some species of birds use quantum mechanics to navigate. Studying these little creatures' quantum compass may help us achieve the holy grail of computer science: building a quantum computer. You can also listen to the accompanying podcast.
When it comes to the science of the very small, strange things start happening, and our intuition ceases to be a useful guide. Plus finds out about the crazy quantum world, and spin that a politician would die for.
String theory: From Newton to Einstein and beyond
Over the last few years the words string theory have nudged their way into public consciousness. It's a theory of everything in which everything's made of strings. Find out how these tiny strings offer hope for reconciling quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity.
One of the many strange ideas from quantum mechanics is that space isn't continuous but consists of tiny chunks. Ordinary geometry is useless when it comes to dealing with such a space, but algebra makes it possible to come up with a model of spacetime that might do the trick.
Quantum mechanics say that some physical processes are fundamentally random. The perfect set-up for a lottery!