michael_nielsen

Try the Heisenberg Picture. Using the Schrödinger Picture to try to understand what's happening in a quantum system is like trying to see what's in an image by looking at a compressed binary file. Compact, ingenious, but opaque.

I nearly put a suggestion along those lines in instead of (or as a complement to) the Feynman quasiprobability paper. I've some sympathy for it, though there do some to be some things easier to think about in the S picture. Though maybe that's just lack of effort/imagination...

i love this use of “en passant”

No need for square roots of 0.6 and 0.8 if the basis states are orthogonal and you’re normalizing...

But @michael_nielsen you can do "nuts and bolts" experiments on the reality of the quantum state and there are several precise mathematical open questions to resolve. In that regard, it is not like the hard problem of consciousness at all.

My note says "reminds me of", not "is the same as".

Dr Nielsen, a nice essay, although I am much less agnostic. I am writing a blog post on your essay. Incidentally, I am confident you didn't want the square roots around 0.6 and 0.8 in the coefficients of the wave function. Without the roots, you get a normalized state!