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University of Kansas
PPP Seminar- John Ralston (University of Kansas), "How to Get Real in Quantum Mechanics”
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US/Central
Description
The foundations of quantum mechanics are a legitimate topic in theoretical physics nowadays. Yet much of what’s publicized is concerned with strings, quantum gravity, and other areas incapable of leading to anything observable. This might be the right time for real theorists to have new ideas that will lead to new observable consequences. We will discuss working entirely with real numbers, creating a larger structure which contains ordinary quantum mechanics as a special case. Not too surprisingly, we can make real-valued spinors and other things our textbooks mistakenly told us need complex numbers. We were surprised to find a clean group-theoretic characterization of the arbitrary restrictions quantum mechanics assumed for no well-documented experimental reasons. We were even more surprised to find a table-top experiment potentially capable of falsifying a foundation postulate of quantum mechanics.
