Just a bit of background: Emmanuel Faber is the CEO of Danone, and was asked to do the graduation speech for the HEC business school in France. The first 5 minutes are unfortunately in French, and then he switches into English.
IMHO this speech is at the level of Job's "stay hungry, stay foolish" - very inspiring.
Let's be honest, it is actually the brutality of the French revolution which forced the British royalty to hand over power to the people. And before doing these "peaceful" transitions, all neighbouring countries tried to smother the French with war in order to preserve the priviledges of the remaining monarchies.
You kinda throwing the thousand years of gradual maturing of democracy in UK out of the window with that common. The "royalty" didn't suddenly give power to the people after seing horrors of French revolution; it happened over ages of internal conflicts and civil wars.
So you are implying that a add-hoc democracy like in the cold war country's or post-war Germany, is not a real democracy? Cause it had no time in the barrel, going to the irish-famine, the scottish conquering s, the Falkland wars, the opium-wars. Dear god, what uncivilized undemocratic huns we outsiders are.
And nothing off value got lost.
The US independance was completely inspired by the "Lumières" (the philosophical movement of the Enlighteners), which originated in France and led to the French revolution as well as the emergence of true democracy accross Europe. So even if the US was already independant by the time the French Revolution happened, this is only because it was way more complicated to achieve the latter. But let's not be mistaken about its origins.
There was a lot of inspiration the other way too, though.
Here are two little instances I came across recently where the french copied their rhetoric and symbolism from America:
In 1787 Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". Then in 1793 Bertrand Barère, in an influential speech to the national assembly advocating execution of the king, repeated "The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants" . In French sources the quote is often (incorrectly) attributed to Barère only.
Similarly, during the American revolution, Americans raised symbolic "liberty poles" in their towns. Directly inspired by this, during the french revolution most cities raised and decorated "Trees of Liberty" in their central squares. King Louis even stooped to visiting and honoring the one in Paris to appease revolutionaries (it didn't help).
(The French took the idea of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" quite literally).
Let's not make nonsensical statements like US independence was completely inspired by the Lumières then.
Most notably, US independence was also inspired by the Glorious Revolution in England (the American Bill of Rights is even based on the English Bill of Rights), about a century earlier.
"The Lumières (literally in English: Enlighteners) was a cultural, philosophical, literary and intellectual movement of the second half of the 18th century"
I enjoyed it a lot as well. This piece is a story about Wright, not cold, raw news about whethers he's Satoshi or not. Quite fitting, given that the Satoshi persona is fictive by construction...
Can you be specific about the country? Where I live a similar thing happened to a friend of mine, and he finally managed to discuss with the employment agency who agreed to grant him assistance in the end. He didn't have to mention the company's name in the end.
No, it's not the same at all. Here you get to select online the product you want to buy, you are not "forced" to receive a box of produce. And there is no monthly fee at all, you just pay for what you buy.
Apologies if I elided mention of how they are different, I didn't mean to do so. This sort of thing is a pretty big innovation and offers the potential to increase the reach of direct to consumer local farm produce sales.
I just read the arxiv paper, but with my limited QM understanding it's tough to really grasp the significance of this experiment. Would you be able to explain it in layman's terms (assuming basic knowledge of QM) or is it too tricky to explain?
In these types of quantum reality-probing experiments, any problems of experimental design that affect the validity of the findings are referred to as loopholes, as though there's some awkward legal wrangling going on, because the experiments were conceived originally to determine whether the controversial Bell's inequalities hold. The inequalities were designed to test Bell's theorem which states that any hidden variables (things not yet observed that have a causal influence on experimental outcome) are required to be non-local if they are to hold with the predictions of quantum mechanics. Non-local here means 'spooky action at a distance'.
Showing the inequalities to be violated (incorrect by experiment) was originally controversial because Einstein and Bohr had differing notions of what the quantum mechnical theory implied about reality. They engaged in a lengthy, open discussion about it which was never resolved. Einstein believed in local realism, in which there is no spooky action at a distance and properties like position and momentum exist even when not being measured. Bohr, on the other hand, insisted that there simply wasn't an underlying reality and that only when measurements are made are properties like position and momentum condensed out of the quantum mechanical reality. So, you see, the significance of the experiment is in line with the underlying nature of reality; by closing another loophole, we get closer to what's what.
[The rest here is historical context.]
The familiar refrain, "God does not play dice," is almost always taken out of context - within its original statement, Einstein was also talking about a kind of telepathy required with it - the non-local aspect of quantum mechanics. Einstein said in 1954 'it is not possible to get rid of the statistical character of the present quantum theory by merely adding something to the latter, without changing the fundamental concepts about the whole structure'. He was saying he lost conviction in using a hidden variable theory to replace quantum mechanics.
Bohr's view, like Einstein's later view, is more in line with modern thinking. A team led by Aspect in 1981-82 ruled out either locality or objective reality, by testing the inequalities experimentally. This left possible a non-local reality. In 2006, a group tested Leggett's inequality, and showed it to be violated, which refined experimentally what the nature of reality is, though showed only that realism and a certain type of non-locality are incompatible, without ruling out all possible non-local models. (Nature, April 2007) Aspect remarked that philosophically, the 'conclusion one draws is more a question of taste than logic'.
OK - but what's the difference with previous experiments? Is it that they did it with a single photon?
Or is it because they managed to do it from two remote laboratories?
It may be the combination is new; I don't know the exact state of the field, but: This experiment uses a single photon, so they don't have to sample multiple times and make a statistical analysis on that part. If they did, that might open the efficiency loophole. The communication loophole isn't opened, as they are in sufficiently distant labs, with short enough measurement frames, but that's been done before.
As far as I can tell, the disjoint measurement loophole doesn't apply here, either, as it opens when correlations are drawn from multiple samples; here there's one. I'm not sufficiently expert to tell whether the rotational invariane, or other loopholes are closed here. Can anyone shed some light on this?
That would be most useful indeed. Re-read the paper and still can't pinpoint the main difference vs. previous experiments, and why this is a significant achievement...
I wouldn't really call myself an expert so take this with an appropriate quantity of NaCl, but AFAICT yes, what is new here is an experimental violation of the Bell inequalities with a "single particle" rather than an EPR pair.
Note that the reason I put "single particle" in scare quotes is that there really is no difference between a "single particle" and an EPR pair. Both are single (non-separable) quantum systems. The only difference is that the "single particle" is in a state that constrains it to deliver its energy at a single location whereas the "EPR pair" can split its energy between two locations. So a "single particle" is really just a special case of an EPR pair, which is in turn a special case of an EPR N-tuple.
I'm competent in QM but not a quantum optics expert. In particular homodyne detection is new-ish to me. There is a bit of a description of it here that might be useful: http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2012-5/arti... That said, this is my take, which is mostly me trying to wrap my head around the problem, so take it all with a grain of salt.
The idea is that Alice mixes the (weak) signal photon stream in her lab with a (strong) "local oscillator" of the same frequency (that is the "homo" in "homodyne") and uses the interference between them to perform measurements on the signal without doing photon counting on it, which when combined with Bob's measurements on the other part of the signal photon wavefunction can demonstrate non-local effects. It is important, as always in "spooky-actions-at-a-distance" experiments to emphasize that nothing Bob sees can be used to infer what Alice measures or vice versa: there is no possibility of faster-than-light communication, and it is only when the measurements are combined after the fact that the non-locality becomes manifest.
Homodyne measurement seems to be the key thing that makes measurements on single photons possible, and this may be one of those cases where the notion of "collapse" breaks down in favour of "entanglement": the part of the signal wavefunction in Alice's detector doesn't collapse, it just gets entangled with the local oscillator, and because everything is still coherent her results can still be combined with results from the wave function components in Bob's lab. Entanglement with a heat bath emulates collapse; entanglement with a coherent local oscillator does not. [I'm still agnostic on the claim "entanglement solves the measurement problem" because I don't think it properly answers the question "why is there a classical world at all?", but that may be just me.]
There are a number of loopholes in previous experiments that this closes. I'm pretty sure it closes all detection efficiency loopholes, and there is a subtle critique of Aspect's experiments regarding the timing of the two-photon cascade that this makes irrelevant. There is a small (and in my view fairly implausible) literature on timing and photon-pair-identification issues that goes after two-photon experiments, and this work is not subject to any of these criticisms. I'm not sure how Joy Christian's work on Clifford algebras would be applied to this experiment either, although I expect they will have something to say about it.
