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Comment by transitionnel | Hacker News Reader

Great comic! How I visualize this stuff is really simple, and so far it doesn't seem to be wrong...

Imagine 2 tennis balls floating in space, each spinning in some direction at some speed.

The quantum amplitude is the extent to which they are matched, or opposed, when you break down the inertia of each into vectors. In fact I'm pretty sure their measurements are very limited in the extent to which they can measure these things to infinite precision. (Duh)

Is this another case of obfuscation by academics? This is truly not complicated. It's even kinda fun. I think we all have a little fear of being mentally outgunned, and fear does what it's always done to creative thought. Dominated it.

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I'm wondering what you mean by "doesn't seem to be wrong" -- are you doing any calculations? I'm not able to follow exactly what you mean by the quantum amplitude coming from a pair of tennis balls.

My understanding of the spin of a particle is that it turns out, roughly speaking, your spinning tennis ball needs to keep track of a vector along the axis of rotation. This has something to do with the unit vectors in 2D Hilbert space having a correspondence to the group SU(2) (where remembering only the axis is the classical case of SO(3)). Somehow, if you were to take your quantum spinning tennis ball and, by some mechanism (magnetic fields?), slowly rotate its axis by 360 degrees, its spin becomes negative of what it originally was and it can destructively interfere with a tennis ball in the original state. Is this the sort of thing the pair of tennis balls is meant to deal with?

Something I really don't understand is how angular momentum is meant to work... I would have thought it's a Lie algebra thing, but SU(2) and SO(3) have isomorphic Lie algebras.

Disclosure: I don't know any quantum mechanics, just some math.

Very cool, I had not seen Lie algebras before. More fuel for the organic AI ;-). Your description sounds perfectly accurate; uberdelicate electromagnetic manipulation would be the first logical approach. ...Actually Gizmodo just did an article on "Sycamore" a few days ago! Great read. - Perhaps after the microwave pulses they can get even higher resolution by shining very bright images on it.?

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