Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)

I'd disagree with the title of this a bit. Rather than describing it as "probability to allow minus signs", I'd describe it as "probability in L^2 instead of L^1". The author actually discusses this a bit towards the end. It makes sense to ask what is the distance between two continuous probability distributions. It's given by: \int | p1(x) - p2(x) | dx L^1 (the space of all functions for which \int |f(x)| dx < \infty) is a weird space…

I took 2 courses on Quantum Mechanics during my undergrad and I'm taking the Coursera course now as well for fun. My biggest quibble with how QM is presented is that it is, paradoxically, never tied into physics. Quantum Physics is really a Linear Algebra + Statistics but with extension to complex numbers. In my experience it is just another math course and there is no Physics anywhere. There's always talk of measuring states, applying Hadamard gates and writing down…

For another take on the "computer science" approach to QM, check out Chapter 9 in my book on linear algebra: https://minireference.com/static/tmp/quantum_chapter_excerpt... I think it's important to understand linear algebra before doing matrix quantum mechanics, this way you can focus on learning the new quantum concepts and understand we are just using vectors and matrices as representations for them. - quantum state = vector - quantum gate = unitary matrix - quantum measurement = set of projection matrices that…

Ah, I see that it is time to raise my objection again. As I wrote before [0], I think that what Aaronson's calls "the theory" is a somewhat bastardized version of quantum mechanics that might suffice for quantum computing but, in my opinion, not for physics. I discussed the difference here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255476 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39627618