pulp scienceWhen you talk about a quantum leap to a physicist chances are you are getting strange looks. Why that is and why you are not that wrong will be the topic of this post. According to the dictionary, a quantum leap describes a sudden, great and important change. For a physicist, only one of these […]
Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is a unified language, a toolbox, a set of techniques for modern theoretical physicists. And it has had tremendous success with it’s, in my eyes, brightest achievement being the standard model of particle physics, but also the explanation of superconductivity, Hall effect and others. Important things! So what is it? First, […]
Have you ever thought about the engineering and science that goes into the device you’re reading this on? Modern computers (and smartphones, etc.) are very intricate machines. In fact, they are so incredibly complex that no single person in the entire world knows how to build one. In a way, a computer is the perfect […]
Most problems in physics just cannot be determined exactly. I often talk to people who cannot imagine what that means and how this effect arises. To make things a little bit clearer, let us try to understand how physicists describe the conductance of solids. Bear with me and you will get an impression of the […]
One of the most remarkable concepts in modern physics is symmetry. The structure of our world just seems to be organised in different symmetric structures, which, luckily, can be described using mathematics. This approach has been very successful since the mathematical foundation was laid out by Emmy Noether (1882-1935) in 1918 in Noether’s Theorem. Noether’s […]
To understand why quantum computers aren’t just computers which run faster through some kind of „quantum magic“, we need to talk about their history and dip our toe in complexity classes. Don’t worry, it’s not that boring. Quantum mechanics is weird. In fact, it is not even really mechanics. It is a mathematical concept developed […]