Google TechTalks
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2012–2025
1:03:43 · 1.8M views · Jan 12, 2011
Ron Garret's Google Tech Talk argues that quantum mechanics is no harder to understand than relativity and that popular accounts wrongly rely on the Copenhagen interpretation. He presents measurement as entanglement and explains phenomena like the quantum eraser.
HN commenters repeatedly recommend it as the talk that finally made quantum mechanics click, especially for programmers.
20 comments from Hacker News
This Google Talk this video uses entanglement and quantum information theory in a clear and understandable way to explain 'spooky' quantum phenomena, like the quantum eraser, de-coherence, the aspect experiment, and the measurement problem. Even if you don't know any QM, just basic algebra and calculus, it's really approachable. I used to be a fan of the Many Worlds interpretation, but after seeing this, I'm now a big fan of the Quantum Information Theory explanation. Starting about 43 minutes in, he goes into the QM Information Theory explanation, but I'd recommend watching the entire prezo. Link to my original post on the subject: [LINK]
Before you invest three hours to watch these lectures you should know that the title is terribly misleading. These lectures are not about QM at all, they are about the history of QM, albeit told by someone who was actually part of it. But the coolness of hearing the history of QM firsthand is undermined by the fact that Bethe is clearly well past his prime, and he's not particularly good at telling stories. If you want a video that is true to this title I'd recommend this: [LINK] EDIT: And if you want to really understand QM, there's this: this video :-)
This is the video that finally made it click for me[1]. Despite the somewhat click-baity title ("What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know") it actually goes into quite a bit of detail of what is and isn't a measurement, in the sense of interactions in a quantum mechanical system that strongly resemble classical behavior (it can be said that the quantum mechanical world is a simulator that can run classical mechanics). [1]: this video
If I may recommend a lecture given at Google Tech Talks-- "The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know", It really clarified some things for me. this video
There is a very important and often forgotten caveat to the Bell's inequalities: it covers local hidden states. If we are to assume that measurement and particle creation apparatuses are entangled with each other (after all, they had plenty of opportunities since the big bang), then we have a global hidden state and the quantum measurment randomness becomes a simple artifact of removing global state from the picture. This interpretation of QM is usually called "superdeterminism" and, personally, I like it much more than the black vodoo measurement magic with collapsing wave functions or creation of whole new worlds on each tiny measurement. This video can be a good introduction to this topic: this video (don't mind the clickbaity title, the video itself is good)