Archivos diarios: 12 de agosto de 2014

Es el divertido eslogan, What’s Hard to Understand is Classical Mechanics, Not Quantum Mechanics, que se inventa Peter Woit como punto de partida para mostrar el aspecto, para él, realmente confuso de la mecánica cuántica: pasar del formalismo matemático al comportamiento en el mundo macroscópico.

While there’s a simple, beautiful and very deep mathematical structure for fundamental quantum mechanics, things get much more complicated when you try and use it to extract predictions for experiments involving macroscopic components. This is the subject of “measurement theory”, which gives probabilistic predictions about observables, with the basic statement the “Born rule”. This says that what one can observe are eigenvalues of certain operators, with probability of observation proportional to the norm-squared of the eigenvector. How this behavior of a macroscopic experimental apparatus described in classical terms emerges from the fundamental QM formalism is what is hard to understand, not the fundamental formalism itself. This is what the slogan is trying to point to.

When I first started studying quantum mechanics, I spent a lot of time reading about the “philosophy” of QM and about interpretational issues (e.g., what happens to Schrodinger’s famous cat?). After many years of this I finally lost interest, because these discussions never seemed to go anywhere, getting lost in a haze of complex attempts to relate the QM formalism to natural language and our intuitions about everyday physics. To this day, this is an active field, but one that to a large extent has been left by the way-side as a whole new area of physics has emerged that grapples with the real issues in a more concrete way.

Lo mejor es que ofrece una lista de enlaces para profundizar en la cuestión (casi todos ellos sobre Decoherencia). También recomendables los comentarios a la entrada.

A pesar de haber escrito una de las verdaderas obras maestras de la ciencia ficción, The female man, Joanna Russ es una autora casi desconocida. Uno de esos casos de un reconocimiento público muy inferior a los logros.

Quizá su caso podría considerarse un ejemplo de lo que la propia Joanna Russ contó en How to Suppress Women’s Writing, una lúcida y extraordinaria visión de lo que significa escribir siendo mujer. Lo leí cuando estaba en la universidad (por suerte la biblioteca tenía un ejemplar), me impresionó mucho y quizá ha llegado el momento de releerlo.

Mientras How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, un comentario con muchas citas que sirve para hacerse una buena sobre el contenido del libro:

The cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing captures its heart perfectly: much like the image above, Russ provides a smart and witty analysis of all the variations of “she wrote it BUT” people fling at women’s creative work, and which intentionally or not erase and belittle it. She lists eight interconnected forms of suppression (bad faith, denial of agency, pollution of agency, the double standard of content, false categorisation, isolation, anomalousness, and lack of models), all of which were familiar as soon as Russ elaborated on them. I felt jolt after jolt of recognition as I read this book, which was both comforting and not. Comforting: this problem has been named, which is an important step towards defeating it. Not: all these years later, here we are still. I haven’t been in spaces where women’s writing is discussed in depth for all that long, and already I’ve seen all the issues feminist critics identified over thirty years ago. It all goes way back, and all we can do is hope that the circles these conversations move in are slowly becoming more and more encompassing.