231 karma · joined January 11, 2013
https://youtu.be/LGd8p-GSLgY?t=3512
This is a fairly old talk and if you do a bit more digging I think he has other talks with more experiments.
One thing I never quite understood about the decoherence argument for resolving the measurement problem is that it forces the "collapse" to happen with local interactions. This of course makes sense since you want to think of a measurement as a "normal", unitary process. This means the environment has to "enact" the projection operator through interactions. If you have the most basic EPR pair, how can this happen? How can you decohere the wave function of the spacelike separated counterpart (B) by locally measuring the other spin (A) and then letting the environment project out the state of B through local interactions? In this experiment https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03190.pdf they have two detectors 60 meters apart in a subbasement of a castle. What are the interactions in those hallways that are carrying the correlation from the decoherence/measurement on one side of the experiment to the other, faster than light to maintain the correlations. This seems too basic of a question so I don't know if I'm just missing something obvious, but to me it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that the collapse cannot happen through decoherence. I've only dug out one random paper that mentioned this argument with very little subsequent referencing of it.
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=31913
Nothing that could be implemented in any foreseeable future though.
BTW, |u> = u_i |e_i> would be the correct equation in Einstein notation where the u_i |e_i> would be a contraction in which the summation along repeated indices is implicit. When you're dealing with a lot of tensor multiplication this notation is very useful because of its clarity and compactness.
I was more excited about the content and getting that right that I just didn't test the layout before posting (I have large monitors so my defaults were not geared toward small screen sizes). I had an eye exam today so I could literally only now see these comments since my pupils were dilated.
I hope you can now get to some of the quantum mechanics stuff.
Whatever local (i.e. small scale) energy storage we have in the future you can probably bet (from first principles) with 99% certainty it will be based on the electromagnetic force. Gravity is too weak to be practical for smaller scale storage and cannot give mobile storage units since you have to deal with huge weights. For large scale see the "pumped storage" system already mentioned in this thread. Just for illustration, the "Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station" can produce 175MW of continuous power. If you dropped the 18T weight in the 1km shaft you'd get about 13MW averaged over the 14s fall. Then you have to lift it up again if there are still enough pieces left.
Even if you found a way to store energy in nuclear interactions (i.e. "charge a nuclear battery") you don't want to have a bunch of containers full of radioactive material all over the place. If one thought it through, I wouldn't be surprised if there are in-principle issues for the charging part similar to the ones with gravity.
Since we don't know of any others, this leaves only the electromagnetic force to store energy with sufficient mass (or volume) density in practical ways. Whatever it ends up being (chemical batteries, supercapacitors or something else) the future local energy storage unit will separate and hold charges apart.