Quantum Superposition, Explained Without Woo Woo
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 12. 05. 2024
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A common phrase in quantum mechanics is: "The electron is in multiple states at the same time." But it's actually a lie. Quantum particles like electrons are never in multiple states at the same time. It's just that most quantum states donât make sense to us.
00:00 Cold Open
00:28 Quantum Spin
01:02 Ball Analogy
02:46 Vector Spaces
04:59 Quantum States
06:58 Quantum Measurement
09:24 Bra-Ket Notation
10:31 Summary
11:23 Outro
11:46 Sponsor Segment
12:52 Featured Comment
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Pog
So, we should drop the "superposition" term, or use it everywhere... like: we live in a superposition of space dimensions which happens to be 3 and to be orthogonal to each other.... So, when you walk, you do it along the superposition of these dimensions...
Hey great job. I need to contact you because i had formed a similar hypothesis like you did before 1 year ago which solved many problems of quantum mechanics so please tell me the way i can contact you
Following the analogy... It means that you can "align" the measuring device, so it always measure along the quantum state and give it's mixed Smooth-Rough value 100% of the time? ... For measuring other states 100% of the time by one end, you would need to re-aling your measuring device
Please make a video about how attraction forces work?
Up until now, I've never seen someone explain quantum mechanics in a way that actually left me thinking "that makes sense." Thanks for making me feel a bit smarter than I was before.
If quantum mechanics makes sense to you, then you don't understand it (paraphrasing Richard Feynman.)
Corollary: If someone thinks he explained quantum mechanics in a way that it makes sense, then that person doesn't understand it either.
@@raphaelklaussen1951 Feynman didn't literally meant that
And QM and can be understood Feynman understood it he was just being Humble
@@alice_in_wonderland42 What we call "understanding" is actually a mental state of acceptance. For Physicists, this means no conflict with previously learned and accepted principles (conservation laws, etc.)
By the way, since we are on this topic, the hypothesis of the video is incorrect. The concept of a vector rests on the very idea of superposition. A vector pointing North-West is the superposition of one vectors, one pointing North and the other pointing West.
Cheers.
@@alice_in_wonderland42 This. It was a "first day of class" greeting to prepare the minds of university students. It's humor. Context matters; I'm not sure why people mythologize instinctively, even with short and inconsequential phrases.
@@alice_in_wonderland42 Sure you can understand the mathematics involved, but I don't think anyone can truly mentally conceptualise it - that's what he means. That's why it has to be explained in metaphors like this video does with rough/smooth ball detectors, Schrodinger's cat, and my new favourite, the cube attached to ribbons that makes a single full rotation by spinning 720 degrees. The world of quantum mechanics is truly a topsy turvy curly wurly inside out and upside down thing.
It has always driven me nuts when someone says "particles can be in multiple states at the same time" because it makes it sound like quantum mechanics is mystical or magic when it's not. It's really unfortunate because it also plays into the myth that quantum mechanics cannot be understood on some level. This explanation was excellent.
The whole universe with all of his properties a pure magic đȘ, and this is still a understatement.
quantum entanglement is mystical or magical to me still. Has The Science Asylum demystified that yet?
@@boogieboss I dunno about your universe, but my universe is a girl.
@@polychoron What about us grils?
Nobody is trying to make quantum mechanics sound mystical or magical. If you find the notion that subatomic entities are waves that occupy a big chunk of space but once measured they "collapse" into well-defined "objects" that occupy one particular spot to be magical, then blame yourself, not those who describe reality.
Looking at that Vector graph with the rough and smooth axis suddenly made it click in my head and hit me like a ton of bricks why it's so completely useful to use complex numbers to represent Quantum States. Holy crap it makes so much sense now! Thank you!
Glad I could help! đ€
@@ScienceAsylum - Do you fully appreciate how many lives you have improved by making videos that allow people to grasp concepts in very difficult fields? I hope you understand the positive impact you have had on the world, you have a life well spent. And you are an inspiration to us with autism, it shows we aren't limited by our difficulty with social interactions. Thanks man. You are a legend.
@EvilSandwich can you please explain why it's so completely useful to use complex numbers to represent quantum states?
@@-Sinister - Using complex numbers basically gives you a 2d plane while making it simple and elegant. So you can represent a full wave that way.
@@-Sinister It also, if those states are chosen carefully, allows us to convert between trigonometric and exponential functions, allowing us to solve equations we couldn't otherwise solve.
Outstanding explanation! There are a lot of smart scientists out there but very few can break it down to a laymanâs level like this. Youâre doing more for science than you can imagine!
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
"we're going to be traveling light" if not that scene with laughter i wouldnt even realize the wordplay
When I heard it I uttered "agh" and a split second later I saw "agh" on the screen.
A good pun is what it is.
I'm even only getting it now. I think.
Just like the photon: we are going to be traveling light....
(Photons are traveling light)
Edit: (and have no mass)
Where was the drum roll?
I didn't get the pun until I pondered your comment for a good half minute... the Agh finally makes sense!
nick i cannot overstate how much i love this and your channel in general. the way you manage to take unintuitive concepts that are generally regarded as "impossible to grasp if you're not in the field" and actually explain them without oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy the way they're often presented shows the incredible pedagogical talent you have developed, and i'm unimaginably thankful for having found your channel
Thanks! đ€
@@ScienceAsylum That emoji looks like your 'nerd clone' đ
@@pratikdedhia Ha. So true
@@pratikdedhia Haha Ikr
It makes us happy doenst? By far my favorite channel in the whole internet!
I just can't imagine a more intuitive way to understand this. As for the quality of the video animations... there are no words to describe how well done all this is. Thank you very much!
You're welcome! Glad you liked it.
The version I was taught used sphere and cube as the two basis vectors. The superposition was drawn as a smoothed cube (or a flattened sphere).
The detector was drawn like one of those playdough toys that squeezes the playdough out of a shaped hole.
This extends to multiple states by drawing the detector with a round hole, a square hole, a triangle hole, a star hole, and so forth.
Avoids having to talk about rough balls and smooth bras :P
Science-Denial comes in Huge Waves and always has come in huge Waves from Religion
or at least Unhealthy Religion;
a Thing that Atheist-CZcamsrs criticize and cover.
I hope you give me one single Chance to convince you 'Smart+Funny'
is what they are, when i now recommend you Holy Koolaids Video-Series
"Revising Gods Prophecy".
My comment is random but meant so share Sicence-Fun,
so c'mon, give me this 1 Chance to convince you Atheist-Content can make
you laugh and/or keep you Updated.
They all go in the square hole though
I always accepted this concepts of quantim superposition without giving it much of a thought, since I'm not a physisit it really didn't matter that much to me, but as a mathematician I love this concept, it is waaaay easier to understand and makes absolute sense to me. So thank you Nick
The infinite spectrum of superpositions between smoothe and rough. The infinite number of quantifiable single states. That's a tongue twister...
If you are a mathematician, just know that the video misleads a bit in order to not intimidate the audience: The vector space is actually a complex vector space. Where he says the probability is proportional to the square of something, it's the square of the modulus of that thing. It took me a long time to figure out this basic fact about quantum mechanics, because physicists will most of the time mislead you in this kind of way.
You'd probably find the first chapter of "Modern Quantum Mechanics" by Sakurai interesting. It focuses on this formalism (ie: it's mostly linear algebra : p), and I think it's pretty accessible to someone with a background on math.
@@alonamaloh can you explain that simply?
If we're recommending books: I recommend SurjĂĄn PĂ©ter: "Introduction to Second Quantized formalism" once you got a basic grasp on introductory quantum mechanics. It will equip you with very powerful mathematics for dealing with multiple particles.
8 years after graduating and going into a career that has nothing to do with physics, I thought my PHYS 486 knowledge was lost forever. But this video, even though it's fairly high level, brought back SO much; much more than I thought it would. I'm with Nerd Clone wanting a video on eigenvectors now.
I also await eigenvector with baited breath
3blue1brown did a video on them several years ago as part of their 'Essence of Linear Algebra" series. It doesn't have the same tone and style as Nick's videos, but it is really good. 3b1b in general is really good an explaining math concepts intuitively using both animations and verbal explanations. czcams.com/video/PFDu9oVAE-g/video.html
@@garetclaborn 3blue1brown did a video on them several years ago as part of their 'Essence of Linear Algebra" series. It doesn't have the same tone and style as Nick's videos, but it is really good. 3b1b in general is really good an explaining math concepts intuitively using both animations and verbal explanations. czcams.com/video/PFDu9oVAE-g/video.html
Thank you. I struggled with the perception of things existing in Superposition. Just because we can think of it like that, doesn't mean things have to be until we observe them.
Thank you so much, the way you explain everything is amazing, and i love all the humor and characters, it is really useful to follow the conversation! loving your content for years now
You are an amazing science communicator. Thank you for your hard work.
Nick has the Best Science Channel on CZcams! đ
My man's really pondering the orb right now.
Also, that "smooth vs rough" vector space seems to imply the properties of negative smoothness and negative roughness.
Ah, but he said it was just a metaphor. Since we really can't say exactly what a _state_ is, implying it's negative would be really hard to accept. Quantum mechanics, I don't care if it makes sense shut up and calculate.
Not really, quantum amplitudes are separate from the properties of the states. Also, multiplying a state vector by a complex number of length 1 doesn't change the probabilities of observing any outcome so |x> and -|x> are the same state. Amplitudes only matter when things interact, e.g. you could have destructive interference between |x> and -|x> if you had to add them during some calculation.
It is kind of like an "affine" state if you have heard that word. In essence, if you draw a line that crosses the tip of the point and the origin, that line represents the state.
@@alexrecuenco the term is actually projective, not affine: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_projective_space
The negative smoothness is _technically_ different from positive smoothness, but it only matters during interference because of the square.
Amazing that you could explain this so well. Even my old physics profs and books for the lay person use analogy to explain superposition. Now, take that leap and apply this easy to understand logic to quantum entanglement/bell's theorem!
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
here and now@@ashifarman4813
Don't know how I missed this one. This is the most straight forward thing I've ever seen on qm. Good one, Nick
Thanks! Glad you liked it đ€
I always thought quantum mechanics was something I could never understand, but I think you've completely changed my mindset with one video. I'm not saying I truly understand it, but this is the first time anything about quantum mechanics has made some amount of sense to me. Great video
Glad I could help! đ€
They say if you think you understand quantum physics then you probably don't. So you are on the right track if you say you don't truly understand it. :)
@@ScienceAsylum Can you make a video or just answer me, what would happen when magnitude fights a vector? I meant to imply that magnitude and vector can change/fight each other? Does changing the magnitude can change vector and vice versa?
Finally someone said it!! It's not a superposition of states. It's only 1 quantum state. It's a superposition of classical states, or of observable states...
Exactly!
It is just so weird. Why does it always collapse into one state? Bell's theorem implies that there are no hidden variables (among other possibilities like non-locality), so everything is truly probabilistic. Why is it probabilistic at the quantum level? When a wave function collapses into one of its probable states or positions, is it instantaneous or does it take time for it to happen?
@@ElectronFieldPulse Maybe because our mind cannot think in superposition ;) so we get entangled with one result (and our other multiversal-self with another). There are multiple interpretations of it, I have just used many-worlds although I myself prefer Copenhagen's: reality is inherently random (within rules and probability). Why? I don't know. Why gravity is and why time flows in one direction? I don't know, it just seems to be this way, the theory gives good predictions.
@@firdacz - Ya, I am not sure it will ever be possible to declare that rhe CI or the MWT is correct. I don't think we can test for it.
Not really, it's not a superposition of *classical* states, it's a superposition of states with *some* measurables having definite values. E.g. a classical state of a point particle would have both definite position and momentum, but no quantum state can have such a property because a state with definite position would also be a superposition of states with different values of momentum and vice versa.
actually, when the orb goes through the detector they become entangled and in a superposition of the orb leaving both ways. itâs only when the orb and the detector interact with the environment the two options decohere, wave function can no longer âflowâ from both to a shared state. being part of the environment we find ourselves on one side of the split. the probabilities work as described though ;)
Isnât that simply the âCopenhagen interpretationâ, and as such only one of a number of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics?
âŠPlease donât slay me for asking btw, I am but one simple layman among a great many.
This is one of the best materials out there! Keep the good job man!
This makes more sense than any other superposition videos I have watched in 10 years
"I called in back up" holy damn, I'm cracking up. I love how complex your clone world keeps getting.
Nick, mysteries become obvious when YOU explain them! Love it!
This is my favorite channel. Would be nice if you do a video on âSuperdeterminismâ
Wow, it feels like the superposition is on a Hawking's radiation level of "simplified to make it misleading".
I love this channel
It is starting to sound like someone gets some profit from this.
In my opinion, one of the biggest issues with this analogy is that it kinda seems as though the "quantum particle" is in some pre-determined and specific state in the basis. But that isn't accurate at all. In general, simplifying a quantum in superposition to a particle is not a great approximation of reality.
@@thestralspirit He said pretty clearly that it is based on statistical probability, so I am not sure where you got that interpretation from.
@@okaydetar821 to me it sounded like the quantum had some exact probability. It cannot have defined magnitudes on both axes and to me this video doesn't make that clear.
It's not like I think the analogy is terrible, but it isn't really describing the wave-like nature of quantum.
@@thestralspirit Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant, but the exact probability IS well defined by the wave function of a given sytem.
The bra vector isn't important until we start taking measurements :)
Glad I'm not the only one đ
đ
I didnât get all of what was said in the video so Iâm content with getting this joke. I guess Iâm more a real world guy than a QM guy.
Hands seem best for this measurement despite their bias.
@@brothermine2292 Warm hands.
The connection with vector spaces omg it was awesome! Thank you so much. â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïž
You're the first person to successfully explain a quantum superposition to me, "successfully" meaning that I (think I) understood. Thank you very much for that!
Thanks Nick! This really cleared up the superposition myth that has permeated all of physics. I'm a former computer programmer (but not much math), but I'm learning so much from your channel. On the question of German, I had three months of German in 10th grade, then we moved to a school that didn't have German as a course. I'm going to use Babble to continue my learning. Thanks for this wonderful double whammy of excellence!
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
computer programmer (but not much math) BRUH programming is a branch of math, u are just being humble
You can very much program without much math. Source: I'm a programmer lol
That makes way more sense than being in multiple states. An electron could absolutely be moving 30% left and 70% right if it's moving 100% in a vector that can only be calculated by us to be 30% left and 70% right. Once we launch it against something to see if it's 100% left or right we knock it into one of those. I suppose an interference pattern could then be caused by blocking a specific range of vectors it could be following causing any that would be moving along those to change directions, and while it looks like it's interfering with itself reality is that we merely blocked a vector range that makes it look as such.
but your not blocking the electrons in the double slit experiment, you just measure where they hit the screen.
â @Fritzzz3 We could be blocking superposition vectors without blocking basic vectors.
@@chiepah2 But to "block" any of the vectors you would have to measure a property of the system along a specific axis, eliminating aspects along different axes. Here, we are just measuring the end position of the electron. That's the exact point of the double slit experiment: The probability function of the electron interferes with itself. This does not mean that there are multiple states of the electron that interfere with one another.
It is this entity of a wave function (or vector, just different formulations of the same reality) that interferes with itself as it evolves through time.
@@fritzzz1372 I'll be honest, I don't fully understand the concept I'm thinking of so I can't fully explain it. We are trying to pinpoint the position of an electron along an xyz axis, but for some reason we can calculate that it has multiple true xyz coordinates(with some degree of probability). This could be because of where it is on it's q axis, and it's orientation along that axis makes it cross multiple points on the xyz plane (field? space?). In the double slit experiment the setup may not allow some orientations along the q axis and therefore the electron is forced to adjust to fit along that axis the same way liquid is forced to adjust to fit though a funnel.
@@chiepah2 If that is what you mean, the wave function (or vector in Hilbert Space, physically the same thing) is forced to adapt to the shape of the slits because of the potential wall. (uncrossable barrier except where the slits are)
What do you mean with the q axis though?
Thank you! Yes, this helped a LOT. I have been wracking my brains for years trying to figure this out. I am very literal in the way I interpret linguistic meaning so your explanation helped tremendously.
This is the best video about this topic I've ever seen. It made me feel like I could understand it a bit better and I don't have to be satisfied with the explanation that quantum mechanics is simply strange and not really understandable. On top of that, your videos are so interesting and funny, it never gets boring to watch them.
And by the way, your pronunciation in German is absolutely well.đ
Greetings from a crazy girl from Germany!
Glad I could help đ€
the point where it really clicked for me is the cookie's momentum having only one state in spite of having two component vectos along the axes
That has really taught me something I didnât know or understand before. I love the way you have simplified this concept and the fact that there is only one state described in vector form. Thank you.
Happy to help đ€
Man, this was an insanely brilliant and robust explanation. Thank you!
This channel is pure gold. Awesome video. Informative and entertaining.
I have my introduction to quantum physics course next semester and I feel like your videos really give me an edge in the reasoning behind the concepts. I just love how completely radical thinking is required for this stuff! You're a gem mate!
Good luck with the quantum course!
I've read a lot on this topic and have watched many videos, and while I had grasped the basic concept of super position being probability, I didn't really have a mental framework for thinking about it until this video. I have no idea why I haven't yet subscribed to your channel because I've watched tons of your videos and have loved them all... subscribed now!
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
@@yamesotericist4188 Science-Denial comes in Huge Waves and always has come in huge Waves from Religion
or at least Unhealthy Religion;
a Thing that Atheist-CZcamsrs criticize and cover.
I hope you give me one single Chance to convince you 'Smart+Funny'
is what they are, when i now recommend you Holy Koolaids Video-Series
"Revising Gods Prophecy".
My comment is random but meant so share Sicence-Fun,
so c'mon, give me this 1 Chance to convince you Atheist-Content can make
you laugh and/or keep you Updated.
It's the first time that I see your chanel and I think that your explanations are great. New subscriber :D
Although some topics are difficult to understand, ur humorous voice & way of conveying makes it easier to listen n understand. u became
my fav science communicator.
The best explanation of superposition ever. I am interested in quantum computing and no one has made plain where the many many possibilities derive from. This makes it crystal clear. Thank you and please continue the outstanding work.
Bohr's philosophy physics, if you really get into it, allows you to intuit the nature of this phenomenon really, really well. Nick, you did a great job at breaking down the primary misconception in popular parlance about superposition, but when you really dig into what Bohr was trying to espouse during the birth of this whole field you realize where most people lost the plot, especially anyone who ever said "shut up and calculate". Yes, particles are only in one quantum state at a time, best represented by the vectors of a probabilistic wave function composed of a superposition of complex states, but the POINT, is that those states are ONTOLOGICALLY, not epistemologically, complementary. The Heisenberg uncertainty should have been called the indeterminacy principle because it has nothing to do with our inability to NOT KNOW, and everything to do with complementary features of nature that form reality having mutually exclusive effects on the rest of nature upon each interaction, creating meaning only BY INTERACTING, meaning that quantum particles are not things as we understand them but are more so phenomena constantly in the process of manifesting through their relation to everything around them. To think about particles as deterministic objects with objectively defined characteristics at all times is to misunderstand the instructive lessons of QM.
When a detector of any sort measures a particle, it is physically interacting with it, and the differences between the experimental set ups required to enact differential cartesian "cuts" between the observer and the observed, fundamentally exclude access to information about the complex makeup of the former quantum superposition. The crux is that this has NOTHING to do with humans, or our experiments, or our theories. That would make the question of what happens in quantum superposition and afterwards about our knowledge. The complementary nature of quantum phenomena extends to every piece of universe itself. We are not special because we've figured any of this out. All the detectors we use to probe nature are made of nature, it's all the same STUFF. Between the interactions of countless particles that "decohere" to form our world, the universe finds itself excluded from the totality of information about states before and after they've interacted. Someone else below in the comments asked if the orb stays rough or smooth after measurement. If you take this to heart, you immediately understand that the wavefunction begins to smear once again after measurement, and traverse the phase space of possible vectors, until the next "measurement" forces an interaction, and again, and again. There are reasons why you could expect a smooth orb to stay smooth time and again, but its not because it IS smooth outside of an interaction to manifests that smoothness at a scale at which we can read in our medium sized world. This was proven in one of the landmark experiments that Bohr and Einstein could have only wished they'd lived to see: Bell's Inequality, which demonstrates that quantum particles are indeed indeterminate between interactions. Quantum superpostions ARE something singular (if they weren't their probabilities would add to more than one) but that something is probabilistically undefined whether we're looking or not.
what can i read to understand Bohr's philosophy of physics?
@@hasanathasan4651 Look up Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad. It's not an easy read, but its worth it.
" where most people lost the plot, especially anyone who ever said "shut up and calculate"." I'm genuinely quite angry about these people. I lost interest in science as a teenager because of the terrible way the Quantum Mechanics was introduced. It had been my favourite subject up till then. It's only now about 15 years later that I'm learning again how wonderful it is.
" inability to NOT KNOW" What does this mean? We seem perfectly able to not know.
i don't understand. what are they, or where are they, before an interaction (the "particles")? and do we know why/how the interaction changes them (again, the "particles")?
That was a really informative video !
Thank you for clarifying a misconception I have had for a long time. Great video, keep up the good work!
Thanks!
This is fantastic! When teaching undergrad general physics, I didn't realize bra-ket notation could be introduced in such an inutivite way
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
Hello. This was one amazing video Nick. You really put a lot of thought into this and it shows. I think I have never seen a better explanation of the topic anywhere. If I had this in university I could have understood this many years ealier than I actually have.
This is one of my favorite new Channels! ^.^
Glad you found it then đ€
You always find the best analogies to get your point across.
Also
*Texture detector, texture detector, texture detector*
That was the coolest explanation about double slit experiment and wave functions I ever seen!
This was a wonderfully enlightening video. This concept actually kind of makes sense now. Thanks for the great science!
Thank you. I love your videos, and I love that you add âwithout woo wooâ at the end. Similar to your video on Hawking Radiation, you take the approach that your viewers arenât morons, but that theyâre probably too busy to sit down and figure this stuff out.
You do a fantastic job of taking away the âQuantum Mechanics knows that humans are lookingâ hype, and actually give a person an impressive intuitive understanding for how this stuff works.
You should do a lecture for the layman that wants a deeper mathematical understanding while also adulting at the same time, I would travel just to see it!!
this is easily the best summary ever made about this subject. thank you for making videos.
You're very welcome! đ€
Great video, this reminds me why I love physics. More specifically in the case of QM, learning weird stuff that puts into practice what I've learnt in linear algebra and probability.
Linear algebra is _so_ powerful in QM.
Thanks for the information! I love how care-free these videos are ^w^
You're welcome đ€
@@ScienceAsylum and the king also replies to comments! ^w^
Please do a video on eigenstates it would be fantastic coming from you!
Nice to see the complex metaphor of using math to model physics explained in detail, helping everyone to not be confused when projecting expectations using those metaphors. Kudos.
A very clear and lucid explanation! I always hated the concept of Quantum particles Superposition meaning multiple positions at the same time.. this video is a real eye opener giving a clear concept. So far I have not seen anyone doing this before. That is truly awesome! I also love your unique concept of clones and adding a little humor. Thanks a lot Nick!
You are really good at explaining concepts with visuals and examples! thank you for making these videos!!
I'm glad you like them! đ€
This is super enlightening and a much needed clarification. Thank you, very cool
Great video! Looking forward for the _Eigenthings_ video
I have been both educated and entertained at the same time! You've said it before that quantum mechanics isn't magic, other channels videos push the idea that it is. Really like your videos, keep making more.
That was amazing, thank you! And super impressed that when I checked your vector example, it still had unit magnitude. Youâd be amazed how many CZcamsrs would fail to achieve that. đ
Thanks! Attention to detail is important to me. (To be fair though, I do occasionally miss things.)
Hey Nick, amazing Videos! :)
Could you do one on Strange Matter? I think it's pretty fascinating but sadly there aren't many Videos about this topic on CZcams and I would love seeing one from you on that topic.
Keep up the great work, I love your Videos
By far this is the best superposition video I have ever seen, thank you so much for it, Nickđ
I've watched a lot you tube on superposition. This one totally nailed it for me. I feel like I get it a little bit. Who knows if tomorrow I'll be baffled again, lol. Also that cursed bra-ket thing I even understand just a little, tiny bit :) I love this channel. Thank you!
Glad I could help! đ€
I love that you went with a cookie to illustrate velocity vectors. Reminds me of how one way to represent scalar quantities like mass and certain supernatural units is in reference to Twinkies...
Cookies were the first thing that popped into my head.
As Winston might say, "That's a fast cookie."
FINALLY there is a smart person that knows how to effectively communicate and impart complex information to us, the simple minded masses despite our short attention spans. Very well done indeed!
Glad you liked it! đ€
That really makes sense! Now I think I understand what quantum superposition is. Expecting more videos in this topic in future.
As always great explanation.
đđ
Glad I could help đ€
Very well explained, although now I really want an Eigen vector video.
Kahn Academy actually has a video on Eigenvectors. As does 3b1b....which is excellent.
Thank you for making this video. Quantum superposition is probably one of the most mystified concepts in all of QM in popular science texts and videos, even though it's literally equivalent to the superposition of vectors that anyone who's completed high school mathematics should know.
Solid Hard Work put in to this like always!
Wonderful video.
Thanks! Glad you liked it đ€
Not only do I like it
It is clear that you are in to the next giant impact scientist realm, for instance the memorable elders we have from the past.
You will be a memory that will develop our species in larger ways than calculable .
I am proud to be able to go through our common era and see the new brinks of knowledge
Thanks a million! Iâve watched a couple videos that gave me the basics of quantum physics, but Iâve been looking for a more in-depth explanation since the basics all get mostly glossed over for the sake of a shorter video. Thanks for making me laugh as well! â€
Glad I could help! đ€
"Oh no, here it comes" said my brain as I clicked this link. Nick, you're going to be so disappointed in me (or maybe not). At this point in time, I am a quantum mechanics skeptic, because of the application of Occam's Razor. "Particles can phase in and out of existence spontaneously!", "information can travel faster than the speed of light!", "consciousness is somehow intrinsically linked to physics and collapsing the wave function of a double slit experiment actually supports quantum theory!"
... Those sound like fantastical claims to me, and you taught me better than that. Absurd claims in physics need to be held to absurd amounts of rigor, the likes of which we do not yet have the technology to hold quantum mechanics to.
By far the best video on superpositioning. Explained neatly and presented in an understandable way for those first exploring quantum mechanics.
Science-Denial comes in Huge Waves and always has come in huge Waves from Religion;
a Thing that Atheist-CZcamsrs criticize and cover.
I hope you give me one single Chance to convince you 'Smart+Funny'
is what they are, when i now recommend you Holy Koolaids Video-Series
"Revising Gods Prophecy".
My comment is random but meant so share Sicence-Fun,
so c'mon, give me this 1 Chance to convince you Atheist-Content can make
you laugh and/or keep you Updated.
Thank you so much! I've watched multiple other videos and read lots of different things and it never clicked. Finally I can understand superposition (somewhat since you can't really ever understand anything fully in quantum mechanics)
That was a very nice explanation. Can you do entanglement next?
I think I got far too excited when I saw this notification...
No I think I had the appropriate level of excitement
Well I think you didn't have a high enough level of excitement to be honest...
This actually helped understanding so much. I haven't really taken any physics course past AP Physics Mechanics but I have taken a semester of linear algebra and watching this helped things click real nice.
Glad I could help đ€
Best explanation ever! Incredibly lucid! Where can I buy your textbook? You are a true inspiration and a didactic treasure. đ«
You can always find the following links in the description of my videos đ
Advanced Theoretical Physics (Paperback):
www.lulu.com/shop/nick-lucid/advanced-theoretical-physics-a-historical-perspective/paperback/product-24250687.html
Advanced Theoretical Physics (eBook):
gumroad.com/l/ubSc
I'm so glad I found your page!
This was genius. Loved everything, including the humor! Thanks so much :)
For the uninitiated mathematicians watching, the "Hilbert" space used to represent quantum states is actually a *projective* Hilbert space where the "ket" vectors have unit magnitude/norm. This is done so that when the dual-space "bra" vectors are used to create inner products, such inner products yield values having complex magnitudes less than or equal to 1. Norm-squaring these inner products give probabilites as shown in the video.
The projective Hilbert space model also gives us global phase invariance, because in addition to normalizing the vectors (which gives you a hypersphere) you also need to take a quotient by the action of U(1), which gives phase invariance.
@@noobyfromhell: Exactly. I was about to write the same.
I donât know what the replies mean but sound cool. I just about get the ânorm squaringâ I think if it refers to the example in the video.
Minor correction: It's just the norm, not the norm squared. The norm is itself the square of the magnitude.
@@JivanPal When you compute the inner product of an input state ket with a bra that represents an output state vector, you need to multiply their inner product with it's complex conjugate to obtain a probability of that outcome. The norm is the magnitude of the inner product. The "norm-squared" gives the probability.
Pondering the orb of quantum physics. Thanks for guiding me through this stuff. Your explanations are unique and very helpful. Keep up the good work
You have blown my mind again. Thanks for making high level physics, fairly accessible.
You're very welcome đ€
I think it really comes down to how you define a âstateâ. Of course the system is always in a single âstateâ however complex that state might be. But we can also see the state as the combination of several states. That is what we call âsuperpositionâ. More or less, a quantum particle is always in a superposition, whatever state itâs in, due to the uncertainty principle.
However, there exists the simplest, most statistically accurate state that cannot be seen as the combination of simpler states. That is the ground state of QHO, which meets the limit of uncertainty principle.
His point is that a combination of multiple states is still one state. In the same way that, e.g. wouldn't say that 10 is multiple different numbers just because 10=2+5=1+9=8+2, etc., The sum of two states is still one state. Or, perhaps more aptly, even though a vector can be written using two scalars, it's still just a single object. It's like the velocity vector he shows at 5:54 -- you can break it up into two other vectors, one on the x axis and one on the y axis, and that's totally mathematically valid, but it's still just one vector and there's still just one velocity.
GREAT!! BUT!! If you really are like this, try to at least roughly explain the essence of the screenshot of my mystical online ROULETTE game, depicted on my icon??? HM...?
This is the SECRET of all SECRETS, isn't it?
***
Consciousness has the property of creating reality. You can influence the creation process. Any method of influence is just a way of influencing the process, the process itself cannot be changed.
@@yamesotericist4188 Are you trolling? The whole point of the video is that quantum mechanics doesn't require anything mystical - it's just counterintuitive.
And consciousness has nothing to do with it at all. That's just woo woo.
@@yamesotericist4188 your kool-aid is getting warm
It seems like the terminology we use to measure the behavior is being confused for the behavior itself. Thank you for explaining this, it's much clearer than I ever realized.
Indeed, I have the same problem when people saying of a thought experiment that we can 'see' this spaceship travelling at such and such a relativistic speed. Are we talking about the actual passage of photons from the ships to our eyes, or something that we could measure if we could somehow 'find out' what's going on without the complexity of.light having to 'get" to us ?
Now uv made it clear ...i always wondered how a particle could be in a superposition...nice narration
one of the best or in fact the best videos i have watched in the internet over the explanation of quantum superpositon. really cleared my mind on this topic and allowed me to understand better. thank you. was hillarious too
Glad it helped! đ€
I find polarization of light to be more intuitive to understand when it comes to superposition and the fact that a superposition is a single state. But this example really helped me get away from the idea that the properties in superposition must have some interpretation in spatial dimensions.
Great video and it really help me to understand Bra Ket notation finally.
Now about those Eigen Vectors âŠ
I suggest LInear Algebra with W. Gilbert Strang from MIT on YT. He makes it so easy.
@TheScienceAsylum, great video! can you extend this method of explaining quantum states to describe the double-slit experiment?
It works the same way for the double slit, but the basis states are: | Slit 1 > and | Slit 2 >
You are one of the very few physicists in the world that actually understands physics to a level that can be explained to a child.
Thank you so much. Everyone forgets that the probability in quantum physics comes from having multiple possible states that could result or would still produce currently observed reality. And when we measure it, we'd change the state such that we couldn't really be sure which state the particle was in when we measured it.
Senpai noticed me.
Yes, for a single measurement. But if you repeat the measurement "Many" times on an ensemble of indentically prepared systems, the state corresponds 1:1 to "reality" (all possible probabilities of measurement outomes). đ€
@@rv706 no, for all measurements. Check Hisenberg. That's the point, there's multiple possible states that would conform with reality and thus, you can never know.
It's like square roots. The only reason we know the square root of 2 apples can't be -1 apple because -1 some doesn't exist.
But if I say you owe me the square of the amount of money I loaned you, which is 2. We can't know from that scenario whether you own me $1 or -$1.
@@xcyoteex: "there's multiple possible states that could correspond to reality" - Well, so what do you mean by "reality", in the formalism of QM?
By "reality", at least in the standard framework of QM, I mean: all possible probabilities of measuring all possible observables in all of theirs eigenstates. The state determines "reality" in this sense by the Born rule.
[Here by "state" I mean, as it is customary, a point in projectivized Hilbert space]
@@rv706 you're a pedantic jerk. You know what it means. You're just throwing around jargon to feel smart. Now you'll either feign innocence or claim that you're making some trenchant point, but I can't understand your huge brain.
It certainly clarifies how physicists think, which is helpful. My biggest issues with QM are I don't think it's *explained* the right away, but you do it!
QM is not interpreted the right way either! So we have no hope đ
Iâve asked my friends in Eng Phys about this exact question, and theyâve never given me a satisfying answer. You just did, thank you!
Glad I could help đ€
This is really good. Great job. I discovered this channel yesterday and I have been having so many "aha" moments for the last 2 days. thank you..thank you
The best explanation of superposition that Iâve ever heard. Itâs clear and insightful.
6:57 Bra vector isnt important until we start taking measurements.
Is that a joke? đđ
This is literally one of the best quantum mechanics videos on youtube