Category Archives: Black holes

Open And Transparent

Despite promising an “open and transparent program with appropriate oversight’, Neel Kashkari’s Treasury Department program has blacked out the compensation section of its contract with Bank of New York Mellon.


Looks like an NIE on Iraq.

To Afflict The Comfortable, Huh?

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots14.

Footnotes and references too. Now there’s a concept.

So

Can we assume that the US economy has gone quantum on us?

The uncertainty principle is certainly one of the most famous and important aspects of quantum mechanics. It has often been regarded as the most distinctive feature in which quantum mechanics differs from classical theories of the physical world. Roughly speaking, the uncertainty principle (for position and momentum) states that one cannot assign exact simultaneous values to the position and momentum of a physical system. Rather, these quantities can only be determined with some characteristic ‘uncertainties’ that cannot become arbitrarily small simultaneously. But what is the exact meaning of this principle, and indeed, is it really a principle of quantum mechanics? (In his original work, Heisenberg only speaks of uncertainty relations.) And, in particular, what does it mean to say that a quantity is determined only up to some uncertainty? These are the main questions we will explore in the following, focusssing on the views of Heisenberg and Bohr.

The notion of ‘uncertainty’ occurs in several different meanings in the physical literature. It may refer to a lack of knowledge of a quantity by an observer, or to the experimental inaccuracy with which a quantity is measured, or to some ambiguity in the definition of a quantity, or to a statistical spread in an ensemble of similary prepared systems. Also, several different names are used for such uncertainties: inaccuracy, spread, imprecision, indefiniteness, indeterminateness, indeterminacy, latitude, etc. As we shall see, even Heisenberg and Bohr did not decide on a single terminology for quantum mechanical uncertainties. Forestalling a discussion about which name is the most appropriate one in quantum mechanics, we use the name ‘uncertainty principle’ imply because it is the most common one in the literature.

I would imagine the humor of this is relative to your position, generally, and the velocity of its’ movement in relation to the speed of light.