That's So Second Millennium

Episode 050 - Craig Lent: decoherence, entropy, and faith

Informações:

Synopsis

0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations 2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy 3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field 4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles 5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model 6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum" 8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem 9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems 10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical 11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment 11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work 12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamental