I’ve had a few people say to me lately some variant of, “I wish I had your life.”

No. I have a great life, no doubt. Wonderful partner. Enough money to travel, to buy the things I want. I generally do what I want to do when I feel like doing it. But the thing is to get where I am and to be who I am, they would’ve had to endure the experiences I had to withstand prior to all this. All of those days of dread and fighting that made me the person I am, that gave me my ambition, my smarts, my outrageous stubbornness and perseverance in the face of vicious detractors.

You have to walk that path to make it here; there is not another way. Most people who say they want my life would have no interest at all in any of that. Sure, a lot of life is luck and circumstance. But another part is how you deal with those two vicissitudes as they arise.

I am capable of the things I am because I was forged in the fire of neglect and implacable bullying and hatred over many years, followed by five hard years as a paratrooper. I can be so carefree and bold and brave because of all that, not in spite of it.

Walk that path, you can be me. Trust me, you don’t want it that bad.

new business card:
FOONE TURING-
ANGRY AT PIXELS

— foone (@Foone) July 5, 2019

This could be my business card as well. I am angry at many, many pixels.

By the way, when you hear Quantum Trajectory Theory, the “trajectory” there is not a trajectory in normal space. This misleads many, I think. This trajectory is in Hilbert Space, which is an abstract vector space. The reason that QTT requires a Hilbert Space (good lord, I am simplifying a lot here) is that calculating anything superpositioned (before decoherence) is that it evolves through an abstract vector space that does not correspond to normal Euclidean space.

This is the trajectory to which QTT refers, a trajectory through Hilbert Space.

When magazines pay people to write articles like these about quantum mechanics, I wish they’d find people who know what they were talking about. That article is total, utter, worthless crap and you emerge from reading it less knowledgeable than you were before.

Read here for more information about the actual result.

In short, what the paper actually succeeded in doing was measuring and “observing” a quantum state transition occurring, which had never been done before. However, that such a state transition is not instantaneous and takes time is a standard part of QM, is nothing new had been known for 50+ years. This is just the first time it’d ever been measured and reversed.

Quantum trajectory theory does NOT makes predictions that are impossible to make with the standard formulation, contrary to what the Yale researcher claimed in the Quanta piece. Why a scientist claimed this, I have no idea. But nevertheless, he is 100% wrong. Perhaps he was misquoted.

The researchers did achieve something and that is notable. But they did not achieve what the Quanta article claimed, nor is the researcher correct about what exactly they discovered.

Also, that quantum state transitions are predictable once they start occurring has also been known for 50+ years — and that’s because the Schrödinger equation itself is completely deterministic. What is random and always will be is when and where a quantum transition will start — in other words, a specific uranium atom cannot ever be predicted to emit a photon, but when it starts to transition, we can predict its states and how long it will take.

As I said, the researchers did achieve something quite cool and that had never been done before. However, they did not discover anything new at all about QM and this changes that theory in no way at all. Quantum energy state transitions have always been deterministic once they start and have always been known to take time.