suing is not "causing bad things to others". it is simply asking a judge "don't you think this person owes me money because of his behavour?". The judge said no, case closed. explain to me the harm they have caused to anyone aside from the inconvenience to walk to court? something that incidentally the defendant did not even do?

But then again, if you cannot even muster the sympathy to excuse the act of "slightly inconveniencing" by the injured couple, I don't think we can ever agree.

Of course you don't have to, it is just that for functioning human beings it is natural to be understanding to people that suffered a loss.

insightful? are you kidding me?

Two people lost their legs because the asshole was texting. I'd give them a pass for being a little cranky and suing around!

That an AC could be a sociopath devoid of any empathy is par for the course, but mods, really?

sure, this is good practice. but if you don't know, or are too distracted to notice it is still not your responsibility. being a text, it seems reasonable to assume that the receiver will read it when it is appropriate to do so.

would not work :( as I wrote in http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2808465&cid=39792565

notice that after the comment I did verify in the paper that my expectations were correct.

the short of it is: trying to entangle photons will not always succeed. The procedure will succeed more probably when A and B have seen a correlation.

This is exactly the apparent paradox.

There is a catch, however. The procedure they use is entanglement swapping. Unless there has been a new version of it, it works in the following way.

The photons of the pair 1 are sent to Alice (1A) and Victor (1V), they are entangled, the same for phtotons from pair two that go to Bob (2B) and Victor (2V).

Victor now has to entangle 1V and 2V so that 1A and 2B are entangled as well. He has to do this without knowing the initial state of 1V and 2V though because, being entangled to others far away, they look as random to Victor.

The only way to take an unknown state of two qubits and end up with an entangled state is violating unitarity. In particular in means that you will use at least one measurement and discard the whole thing if it gives the wrong result.

In this setup not all the pairs 1A and 2B where Victor tries to entangle are correlated, only those where he succeeds. So whatever set of 1A,2B results you choose, Victor's procedure will select a subset of them that is correlated.

The use in the first pages of the paper of the word "project" for the operation of Victor makes me think this is the case. I did not bother checking properly because I am lazy.

Much less paradoxical, don't you think?

To me this seems more like the "denial" phase in a different but still well known sequence.

You think there were no US casualties from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How naive... There were prisoners of war.

Maybe only 11 of your soldiers are not worth giving up the opportunity to massacre the civilian population of an entire city. They could have dropped it on a deserted island, with warnings and it would have been just as effective in order to strike fear.

If Japan had used an atomic bomb and then lost the war anyone involved would have been tried and executed Nuremberg style. But US won the war, then it became fair game.

There is no particle-wave duality. Every particle is only a wave and sometimes, if you look from very far (or at high temperatures) it seems to behave as a point-like object.

In any case it is not like path integrals are alternative to the normal schroedinger wavefunction formulation. See the work of Dyson for that, or simply the Feynman-Kac formula. At the fundamental level path-integrals ar just combinations of double-slits experiments in a very abstract space (Trotter's formula).

And yes, in the path integral a particle interferes with itself. You'll notice that you have to take into account and sum paths going through different slits.

I do work in the path integral formulation because I think it is more elegant, but it is not an alternative to the "traditional" wavefunction approach (hey, path integral is not exactly new anymore). It is the same as choosing cartesian or spherical coordinates.

The tagline is: path integrals do not describe different physics.

I believe the difference from the fullerene is that they are detecting the single particles here, instead of a stream. In this sense they can really show that each particle interferes with itself, since while one molecule travels to the screen there is no other particle to interact or interfere with.

Maybe you thought that.

Among the last few generations of physicists it is generally believed that everything is quantum from an elementary particle to whole planets. It's just very difficult to cool planets down to where the thermal length is smaller than their de Broglie's length. Not to mention creating a coherent planet gun and detector... But there was no reason to believe it is fundamentally impossible.