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The First Mystery: Interference

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Quantum Sense and Nonsense
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Abstract

In Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the Queen says to Alice that she used to believe six impossible things before breakfast. In this book, we’ll ask you to believe only two “impossible things” (before or after breakfast, as you wish): the superposition of states or the idea that particles can be in two different mutually incompatible states at once and nonlocality , which means that, in some circumstances, one can act at a distance, arbitrarily far, and instantaneously.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As we will see in Chap. 4, quantum mechanics does not assign paths to particles so that saying that the particle went through one slit or the other is not really allowed by the usual formalism. Besides, we will see in Sect. 8.2 that, in a theory that does assigns paths to particles, one can determine through which slit the particle went, but the result is not the one stated here.

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Correspondence to Jean Bricmont .

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Bricmont, J. (2017). The First Mystery: Interference. In: Quantum Sense and Nonsense. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65271-9_2

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