Word: quantum
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...same course. Tutorials—seminars in most other departments—are taught by grad students in their area of research. As such, they have a high student-teacher ratio, high grading curve, and even higher esoterica index. Hardly Social Studies 10. However, economics, philosophy, and quantum mechanics classes all count toward the mathematics concentration, and writing a good proof is similar to writing a good legal argument. Though official data isn’t released, anecdotal evidence suggests a gender ratio that could only be described with the technical terminology “sausage fest”. Despite...
...findings contribute to one of the most basic theories in physics, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), which determines how light and charged particles interact...
...breakthrough that allowed for this new precision include a new technique to cool an electron until it reached its quantum-mechanical ground state, according to physics graduate student David A. Hanneke, who co-authored the paper. The researchers then carefully controlled the planar and axial motions of the electron through a combination of electric and magnetic forces to measure precisely the frequency responses of the electron...
There were good reasons for the theory's appeal when it first emerged in the late 1970s and early '80s. At the time, physicists found themselves facing a crisis: the two most important ideas of 20th century physics, relativity and quantum theory, were known to be fundamentally incompatible. Quantum theory describes the universe as intrinsically discontinuous: energy, for example, can come in bits just so small, but no smaller. Relativity treats time and space and gravity as a smooth, unbroken continuum. Each theory has its purposes, and they usually don't overlap. But when dealing with very large masses...
...which turn out to exist not just in our familiar four dimensions of space and time but in 10 or more dimensions. Bizarre as it seemed, this scheme appeared on first blush to explain why particles have the characteristics they do. As a side benefit, it also included a quantum version of gravity and thus of relativity. Just as important, nobody had a better idea. So lots of physicists, including Woit and Smolin, began working...