Saturday, April 30, 2011

Town scenes

Down to Glastonbury this afternoon, Clare and myself in the car; Alex and Adrian cycling. There's a narrow path up the north-east slope of the Tor, less climbing than on the main route from the town but quite exposed, high on the steep, grassy slope. Today the wind was trying to whip us off. How brave we were: we even took the same precipitous route going down!


Prior to this excitement, Adrian borrowed my camera phone to take some snaps of Wells: instant nostalgia before returning to Canada. His first stop was the Falklands Island shop pictured.

How can this be a viable business? It's obviously a front for the SIS.


Wells town market was buzzing today. If this is what it's like at the end of April, it will be a colloidal soup of humanity in the summer.


Finally, here's a practice shot he took of us on the couch.

I've been working hard at decoherence. I've grasped that it's all to do with superpositions entangling with the environment and the differing phases of the superposition thereby losing phase coherence. I have not yet succeeded in integrating this understanding with the treatment of mixed states using the density matrix/operator.

Trouble is, the material on the net is not really suitable for self-study: it assumes someone already outlined the conceptual connections and did a few examples, so the texts simply provide the formal derivations. They're not difficult but I keep asking myself, 'what does it really mean in the physics?'