I am the queen of the geeks

Today I am a scientist and I am going to post something about science, inspired by a talk I went to today titled Relativistic Quantum Walk Algorithms for Superconducting Qubits. I know that is a bunch of scientific jargon that only means something to a handful of scientists specializing in the field. However this talk reminded me of why I love physics and why I became a physicist.

I never had the intention of going “all the way” in physics when I first started pursuing the major. I had the idea in the back of my mind that being good at science and math would get you a great job, and I was good at both. I also loved physics, from my very first class in college (Yes College). In spite of these vague thoughts of the future I did not have any concrete plans after graduation, and I wasn’t in dire need of money so I never really gave it much thought until my first full-blown experience with quantum mechanics. For those of you who don’t know quantum mechanics (QM) is weird! There is no other way to say it, it is just plain weird.

I could not, would not accept the traditional interpretation of QM. Among other things the traditional interpretation of QM states that a particle can be in two different places at the same time!!!! It also implies crazy things like you can have a superposition of half alive cat and half dead cat. I loudly voice my objections to my professor at the time and he would not hear it. He was dead set that this interpretation was correct and there were no objections in his class. I knew right then that I had to learn more because I would not, could not accept the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM, but I just did not know what the correct interpretation was.

Therefore I went to graduate school where I learned there are many interpretations of QM, Copenhagen (most widely accepted), Bohme’s (not complete), many worlds (impossible prove or deny) and my favorite Transactional Interpretation. My undergraduate professor did us an extreme disservice by not introducing us to the debate that still rages among theorist on the physical meaning of QM. However for the most part I now take the view hey is works; who cares if we are using an imaginary things to describe something in the real world?

Today I was reminded that Dirac’s equation (the Transactional Interpretation) is still out there and is still being used and still gives solutions that travel back in time. Now how cool is that, really? I am the queen of the geeks and I am super excited about Dirac’s equation being applied to quantum algorithms, there might even be a future experiment in this! Information traveling backwards in time, hey the physics is there.