How did Max Planck come up with the quantum theory of light?

Reposted from Quora

Back in 1900, Max Planck just wanted to find the right formula – which we know as Planck's law now – saying how much energy a black body (which absorbs everything and doesn’t reflect any light) emits in electromagnetic waves in any interval of frequencies (or wavelengths) when it’s heated up to a given temperature.

At low frequencies, it was known that the Rayleigh–Jeans law – a simple power law – did a good job to describe the density of energy per unit wavelength. A classical derivation from the first principles was known, too: it’s based on the simple Boltzmann distribution applied to the possible values of energy carried by the electromagnetic waves.

Klaus: stuck in the coronavirus loop

By Václav Klaus, second president of the Czech Republic



The Covid hysteria is culminating. The words "coronavirus" and "Covid" have conquered the news media once again. But it is no second wave of the disease that rules (the disease has no waves) but the second wave of the alarming news which has been scheduled by the fearmongers for a long time in advance. Is Covid-19 a mere disease? Or is it an instrument designed to transform the society?

Czech PM is currently more Covid-hysterical than the nation

Maybe his Slovak ancestry (and Slovaks are less rational than Czechs) is showing up?

On Monday, the Czech government underwent an apparently negative development. In the morning, the minister of healthcare Adam Vojtěch resigned, mentioning "previous careful thoughts about the current situation". Many pundits describe the situation by saying that "he has been a scapegoat who was prepared to be sacrificed at a favorable moment for a long time". Now, Adam Vojtěch has been rightfully praised as a key man who helped to minimize the impact of Covid in Czechia in spring and summer.



Let It Be, sung by the fired minister when he was a minister a year ago. It is occasionally out-of-tune but you can hear that he's still a guy with some singing background.

OK, this young man became well-known to many Czechs already in 2005 when he participated as a singer in the Superstar (American Idol) contest. He completed a law school later and was rising in politics, going through the ministry of finance and then ministry of healthcare. Later on Monday, at 8 pm, PM Andrej Babiš thanked Adam Vojtěch and framed him as a child whom "Babiš raised at the ministry of finance".

Discrimination of dead-alive superpositions allows resurrection

...but the confusion about these simple insights shows some people's trouble with the state-dependence and indeed, with the universal rules of quantum mechanics, too...



In a new, 12-page-long quant-ph preprint,

On the Hardness of Detecting Macroscopic Superpositions,

Aaronson and Atia (Austin) and Susskind (Stanford & the Google Evil Corporation) make an interesting observation, and I think that it is basically a correct one:

If you had the measurement of Schrödinger-cat-like superpositions \(\ket{{\rm dead}} + \ket{{\rm alive}}\) under full control, you could slightly extend your gadget and the extended gadget would also allow you to resurrect the cat.

In this form, I think that the statement is correct. The detection of complicated superpositions is mostly equivalent to the reversal of decoherence; and it is also, perhaps less trivially, equivalent to the ability to transform the distinct states onto each other (which means to turning dead cats into alive ones).

A somewhat technical intro to quantum computing

First, news on beyond the Standard Model dark bosons: In an MIT search (PRL) involving transitions in ytterbium nuclei, a 3-sigma deviation from the expectations was found; while in a Danish search using calcium (PRL), there was no deviation. The MIT excess may be due to some higher order effects, however. See a popular summary.

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Classical computers operate with classical information, e.g. bits encoded in the voltage of a capacitor. \(5 = 00000101\). Their working should be deterministic.

Additional reading if you wish: books such as "The Physics of Quantum Information" by Bouwmeester, Ekert, Zeilinger (a hyperlink appears later)

Richard Feynman was the first one to propose that there could also be computers that follow the laws of quantum mechanics instead of classical physics. While a tremendous progress has taken place in the recent year or two, a practical construction of a useful universal quantum computer remains a dream for the future (although the leading teams promise that it may be done within a few years; some limited algorithms or a simulation of quantum chemistry have already been achieved), nevertheless a lot has been learned about the theory and the algorithms and some preliminary steps to overcome the technical difficulties and realize the idea have been made.

Dishonesty of the Coronazi fearmongers and bullies is too obvious

You Are My Lord, from the musical Dracula. Music by Karel Svoboda (the genius who shot himself dead).

The celebrities meet more people than the regular citizens and they are also more likely to be tested (or to need tests) which are reasons why the percentage of "known" positive Covid cases is higher among celebrities. The Czech ones (singers and actresses etc.) who have undergone the virus include Ivana Andrlová, a princess from 1980s fairy-tales, singer Hana Zagorová, her husband Štefan Margita (who is known as her husband in Czechia but he is also an opera singer LOL), Mr Ladislav Frej, Mr Láďa Vízek, Mr Lukáš Konečný, and more.

The latest announcement came from Ms Lucie Bílá (*1966; some YouTube videos). Since the 1990s or so, she has arguably been the #1 Czech female singer. To say the least she has won the Czech Nightingale contest 20 times, one-half of Karel Gott's 40 victories in the male category LOL. She announced her victory over the coronavirus in this Facebook video (92 seconds).

Czechia, Israel have many more daily "cases" per 1M than any Covid powers ever had

...and still nothing is happening...

The radical leftists have rebranded themselves as carriers of the gospel that a flu-like disease named Covid-19 will kill everybody and they made billions of gullible sheep obsessed with the number of "cases" which means positive tests. So all the media for morons have been filled with irrelevant factoids about XY "cases" in this or that country, in the world, during a day, week, or month, "cases" surpassing one psychological threshold or another.

Only top immunologists etc. in countries like mine (e.g. Dr Beran) got the opportunity from the media to explain something that the people should actually know from the high school biology. There is nothing worrisome about a "case" (a positive test). It doesn't mean that the person is actually ill. And the tests on similar viruses including flu would end up positive in a far higher percentage of the tests. Moreover, the number of positive tests is an irrelevant number because it's heavily dependent both on the total number of tests that are being done (and that is always much lower than the full population); and the methodology to choose who gets tested (because the more "suspicious" people you test, e.g. the contacts of recent positive tests, the higher percentage will be positive).

PC cripples technological progress

The unhinged extreme left is ruining the fundamental Western values: freedom, democracy, nation states, family, natural roles of sexes, control of the traditional cultures over territories, integrity of the scientific research, cultural heritage, the historical truth, moral values rooted in the Judeo-Christian religions and the Greco-Roman civilization, and many other things.

These pernicious trends are mostly promoted by "people working in certain convenient jobs" such as education and media (jobs that are subsidized and/or detached from the broader economy – where the employees do well when everyone else is in trouble which really means that the inkspillers and NGO members and others are parasites, not constructive members of the whole) but it is easy to see that the insanity is penetrating to most other jobs and industries, too.



Managements of corporations are increasingly turning into despicable pußies serving far left perverts. But there is still some engine beneath all these things that allows the society operate and the science and technology to advance, right? Well, only to some (shrinking) extent because the technological progress is being undermined by the SJW junk, too. I want to use a seemingly apolitical fact – the fact that the Czech Škoda Enyaq SUV was embraced with far more enthusiasm than other cars based on the Volkswagen Group's MEB brand – and argue that basically everything about the superiority is political in character. And this political disadvantage of the VW brand cars is a prototype of the gradual sublimation of the Western industrial supremacy in general.

A fun trinification \(E_8\) string-inspired model

This funny yet silly 2011 song about Greece's living beyond its means (and how it should be inspired by some Czech tricks; the song targets the Czech character more than the Greek one) has collected almost half a million views. Slovaks recorded a similar song about the Greek debt (secured by Russia), a parody on Modus' Little Pieces of Glass (1984).

Two months ago, I discussed a Mexican string-inspired \(E_8\)-based model of particle physics. "Not quite stringy" but "suspiciously string-like" models with \(E_8\) in ten dimensions must be getting more popular. Today, a Athens-Munich-Potsdam-Geneva paper

\(N=1\) trinification from dimensional reduction of \(\NNN=1\), 10D \(E_8\) over \(SU(3)/U(1)\times U(1)\times\ZZ_3\) and its phenomenological consequences

by Manolakos, Patellis, and Zoupanos uses a compactification of the \(E_8\) gauge theory on a 6-dimensional manifold with some Wilson lines, too. But while the Mexican paper chose an orbifold of the (flat) six-torus, this Greek paper exploits a curved, fancier manifold, namely\[ \ZZ_3 \backslash SU(3) / (U(1) \times U(1)). \] At least I hope that the coset written on both sides is correct, they were a bit sloppy about it. The Wilson lines chosen on the \(\ZZ_3\) transformations break \(E_8\) to \(SU(3)^3\), the gauge group of "trinification" models (a relative of "unification" models that is, in some sense, equally "unified" as unification, assuming a generalized usage of "unified").

The cases for a \(17\MeV\) QCD axion and cosmic strings

Today, after some time, I was intrigued by very ambitious interpretations of two experiments. First, there is the delirium over beryllium, a nuclear signal at \(17\MeV\) observed by Krasznahorkay et al. in Hungary (Krasznahorkay is the Hungarian transliteration of Krásna Hôrka, The Beautiful Little Hill [a castle], in Slovak).

In a new preprint,

Signals of the QCD axion with mass of \(17\MeV/c^2\): nuclear transitions and light meson decays

Daniele Alves of Los Alamos proposes a wonderful conclusion: the excess is real and the particle is nothing else than the QCD axion. The particle's mass is comparable to tens of \({\rm MeV}\) which sounds great, decays to electron-positron pairs, and is piophobic, Islamophobic, and homophobic, which a good axion should be. Note that an axion is a light scalar field \(A\) that is coupled to the QCD instanton density \(F\wedge F\) and is driven towards \(A\sim 0\), thus explaining why the coefficient of the instanton density is tiny and close to the CP-invariant value (zero). The axion is something that can solve the strong CP-problem (the problem why the coefficient of the CP-violating instanton density is so tiny), we say.

Czech PM Babiš: Keep Calm & how the CZ Covid response teams work

Lots of the sensationalist media in Czechia and in the world paint the Covid situation in Czechia as bad. Of course, it's not bad at all. Nothing bad is happening here at all, and I am just 5 km from the district (Pilsen-South) that had the highest number of cases in 7 days per 100,000 folks up to the last night.



In this Sunday video, the Slovak-born prime minister of Czechia sported a "keep calm and wash your hands" T-shirt and he delivered a calm message, indeed. In the spring, I believed that Babiš actually was the right man for a similar situation and he would quickly regain his composure and did a lot to keep the economy running etc. But only in the recent month or two, I am sure about it.

Here is a transcript.

Prime minister Babiš: About the face masks and the death due to Covid

So ciao folks, it's Sunday today. I will obviously talk about Covid-19, about the coronavirus, about the testing, about the lethality rates. And especially, I understand that you're bombarded by negative news from all directions. But I am here to calm you down, to give you some positive news that the Czech media, especially the public Czech Television, are not broadcasting.