r/QuantumPhysics

I was sitting around thinking about a fairly general question: why is our universe so full of constraints in the first place — the speed limit (c), uncertainty relations, no-cloning, Born’s rule, conservation laws, and so on. The second though was about our world as a biological system - life is always try to avoid peaks, everything we know exists within the area of possibilites (of different species to adopt to the environment). Also, life tries to prolongate it's future and even more - to find the way to have more and more possibilities in future, thus raising their chances to survive (better in all possible futures).

That led me toward the idea that maybe constraints do not simply reduce the space of possibilities. Maybe they are what create a space of stable possibilities.

Imagine a universe where any state can instantly turn into any other state. Formally, that universe has maximum freedom. But it would be very hard to have persistent objects, memory, causality, accumulated history, or evolution. It would look more like noise.

At the opposite extreme, imagine a universe where every state has only one possible successor. Very predictable, but with almost no open future.

So I started wondering whether complexity appears in the regime between those poles: a huge state space, but transitions strongly structured by invariants.

From there I started looking at quantum mechanics a bit differently. Could Born’s rule, uncertainty, no-cloning, and the relativistic speed limit be less like an arbitrary collection of prohibitions and more like parts of a deeper constraint on how distinguishability can be distributed, preserved, copied, and transmitted?

This also seems interesting in the context of unitarity and decoherence: globally, quantum dynamics preserves the structure of possibilities, while locally we get stable classical records and apparently definite histories.

I realize this can very easily become vague philosophy, so I’d be especially interested in the perspective of people who know the foundations of QM better than I do.

Is there already a formal framework or line of research where quantum constraints are understood in something like these terms: preserving structured possibility, distinguishability, or consistent information flow?

And a second question: is there anything substantial behind the intuition that Born’s rule and relativistic no-signalling might not just happen to be compatible, but could reflect a deeper common restriction on the allowed structure of states and correlations?

Curious what you think about this approach? I'm sure there are many articles about the topic, feel free to share

P.S. I've studied physics in Nuclear Univercity in Moscow long time ago, so please don't judge me heavily. I'm just a guy who is still curious about the world composition. Thanks!

I found an at-home quantum entanglement experiment described by George Musser in a 2013 Scientific American article. I decided to reproduce it, but also modernize it, using an Ardunio-based microcontroller for coincidence detection, USB logging to a computer, and python scripts for statistical analysis and graph generation.

After a favorable experimental outcome, highly suggestive of quantum-entanglement (2.47 observed scattering ratio vs. theoretically ideal ratio of 2.6), I decided to create an open source repository for all the code, as well as detailed documentation enabling anyone to replicate the process should anyone else wish to follow these same footsteps. Note that if one doesn't have any soldering tools, it will cost around 500 USD to put together, if one has soldering tools already, it could be done for closer to 300 USD. The main costs are the two Geiger counter kits, each at 115 USD, and the positron source (Na-22) which can be obtained for around 60 USD.

I welcome any feedback or critiques about the experimental design or my results.

We solve the eigenvalue problem to determine the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and understand their geometric and physical significance.

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i’ve been meaning to get into quantum physics for a while as my brother has been obsessed with particle for a long time & got me interested. i’m a biology student, hoping to study microbiology, so this is a bit out of my understanding.

i bought this book, which includes "the origin and development of the quantum theory" by max planck & "on the quantum theory of line-spectra" by niels bohr. i understood enough of planck’s text to get through it, but reading the section written by bohr is very difficult with not much prior education other than gcse physics lol. none of what it’s saying or the equations mean much to me right now.

any advice on where to learn the basics so i can understand this? i thought this book would give me that but its still a bit too complex.