Episode 050 - Craig Lent: decoherence, entropy, and faith

0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations 2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy 3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field 4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles 5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model 6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum" 8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem 9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems 10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical 11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment 11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work 12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamentally lack of information progress from the special case of thermodynamic entropy, to statistical mechanics, to von Neumann's quantum definition, to Shannon's information theory 21:00 - Craig's career: why is an engineer so interested in the fundamentals of physics? 24:00 - Journey of faith 30:30 - People of Praise in Indianapolis 31:20 - Final thoughts