Non-locality takes it home — The Nobel prize awarded this year to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger finds its roots in the former half of the 20th Century. The 1930s saw quantum mechanics take the center stage in the physics world. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen were on one side…

David Bohm: Introduction to Bohmian Mechanics — There is no doubt that quantum mechanics is one of the most irrefutably successful theories in the history of our existence. In the eighty years since its introduction, it has helped to explain phenomena ranging from Cooper pairs in superconductors to the detonation of stars. We have paid a price…

Linear Algebra: a Boring Prelude to Quantum Mechanics — The purpose of this article is to develop the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. Terminology, notation, and conceptual background form the groundwork of this theory. Needless to say, this isn’t the good stuff yet but you need to survive linear algebra to get somewhere. Why is this important? Well, the…

An Introduction to Quantum Eigenstuffs — Schrödinger’s equation is often considered the most important equation in quantum mechanics — just as Newton’s second law takes the spotlight with classical systems. Conceptually, the Schrödinger equation is the quantum counterpart of Newton’s second law in classical mechanics. Given a set of known initial conditions, Newton’s second law makes…

A Transition to Theoretical Mechanics — Hamilton’s principle of least action — really, the principle of stationary action — is the most fascinating idea put forward in 19th Century theoretical mechanics. It summarizes the fundamental principles of not only classical mechanics, but electromagnetism, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and every system we ever have or ever will…

The Other Half of the Picture — For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: that in any reaction occurring in the Universe, mass was conserved. That no matter what you put in, what reacted, and what came out, the sum of what you began with and the sum of…

JWST’s first color images: explained — The world got its first look at the ingenuity of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on the 11th of July. These first images from the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission to unfold the infrared universe. The JWST…

An exposition to kugelblitzes — There is a certain irony to the idea of a kugelblitz. The unpopular German word literally translates to “ball lightning” — an incredibly ominous meaning which probably won’t get you too far alone. The kugelblitz is a black hole made by a seemingly counter-intuitive process. A process that relies on…

A statistical interpretation of the wavefunction — If we wanted to answer the question of what’s truly fundamental in this Universe, we’d need to investigate matter and energy on the smallest possible scales. On such scales, reality starts behaving in strange, counterintuitive ways. We can no longer describe reality as being made of individual particles with well-defined…