The video “Why Quantum Mechanics is Weird” (25k views) won the 2005 Berkeley Video&Film Festival Best of Festival Award in Education. That is second place, behind a Grand Festival Award which went to a film on polar bears (much cuter than me talking for 27 minutes). In this blog, I will go through the math behind the video which provides a novel, entirely mathematical explanation for why causality is different between classical and quantum mechanics. Calculus done correctly in spacetime may turn out to provide the correct answer, completely philosophy-free, as it must be.

Why does local realism being wrong imply that non-local reality is true? Such is widely opined to be the only sober solution because it conserves good old reality, the scientists’ fort that is to be defended against the onslaught of magic.

However, reality with “spooky actions at a distance” is not non-magical either. Nevertheless, the issue is known as “non-locality in quantum physics”, never as “non-reality in quantum physics”. How about keeping localism and instead accepting that realism is a god of the gaps in retreat? Don’t like it? Well, how about at least not being so sure about it for starters?

A new study finds that stress does not appear to increase a person's risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). 

Researchers studied two groups of women nurses from the Nurses' Health Study. The first group of 121,700 nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 were followed starting in 1976. The second group of 116,671 nurses between the ages of 25 and 42 were followed from 1989. Participants were asked to report general stress at home and at work, including physical and sexual abuse in childhood and as teenagers. Of the first group, 77 people developed MS by 2005.

There is water inside the moon.  A lot, it turns out, according to the first measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions, which show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth’s upper mantle.

Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new findings show lunar magma water contents are 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.

Contrary to what you might think by the name, Greenland is rather frigid and Iceland is often quite nice.    Nice for Vikings, anyway.  But for a time Greenland became so miserable even Scandinavians had enough.

Henry Ford - Quote: "History Is Bunk"

It isn't an urban myth: Henry Ford really did say: "History is bunk."

It is somewhat ironic that Henry Ford's words - "history is bunk" - are now a part of the historic record.  What is not clear from most writings about Henry Ford is the context in which he gave his views of history.  I hope to remedy that defect somewhat.

"Understanding Henry Ford is more than a puzzle; it is a pursuit."
The Detroit Saturday Night, cited by -
Henry A. Wise Wood, The New York Times, May 17, 1916

Let us try to model the experiment described in “Disproving Local Realism” with help of tennis balls. 800 pairs of tennis balls are each prepared, say some instructions are written on them, and then split. One ball is always thrown to Alice on the left; the second flies to Bob on the right.

Every of the 800 trials starts with the preparation of a pair. When the left going ball is about half way to Alice, Alice randomly rotates a setup, called her “crystal”, either so that it is at an “angle” a=0 or a=1.