parallel processing of quantum optics and Donald Trump

Light stuff first ------------------------

As I was getting up this Saturday morning, it was especially striking how strong the two independent parallel threads were in my ... thinking. (I do not say "two tracks" because the word "tracks" has other meanings for me, as in multiverse quantum mechanics.) One, a quantum optics thread, and the other, a Donald Trump thread. I put a lot of energy into thinking about quantum optics yesterday, and almost none into active thinking about Donald Trump, yet the threads of thought and inputs back to my mind were substantial for both.

I do not entirely know what to make of the Trump connection, which seems rather odd and curious at one level, but exactly what I would expect at another. "This is something I really need to be super careful and gentle about," I told Luda this morning. Lots of censorship needed, and various levels of detachment. Yet we are all part of the same noosphere, too, and we all have a responsibility to the whole, which we are called not to shirk.

A few days ago, at the height of election intensity, I commented to a friend by email: on most days,
I can hear some piece of music in my mind, sometimes a piece of classical music I know from long ago, sometimes a popular song or melody I may even look up on google. But that day, the background was just a line from the Bible: There was a silence upon the face of the earth. And I felt called to reduce complexity that day, to relax and detach and not get so deep into any of the complex puzzles around me. That same day, I did watch a little CNN, and there was Donald Trump saying to everyone out loud (to the great astonishment of the press): "Stay calm, Donald. Calm, relax, Donald..." Not so veridical, but as part of a pattern...

And today, my last dream was an assumption type dream, set in a luxurious resort. (Luda and I have been to a few luxurious places from time to time, but not quite these...). The final theme was about control of angry feelings, which is an issue for all humans but hasn't been such a big deal for me lately. (It was a big deal on my first tenured job, but I felt so bad when a couple of people developed sudden medical problems I had not intended but could easily see, and worked to manage such things more than most people do, long ago.) "Not my dream." And there was a kind of miniature wild lion
in this resort... which would be very scary if it were bigger... but thank god it was miniature. Still, it was big enough that it really did concern me seriously. I interpret that as a representation of the demonstrations going on. Not at all veridical, since I knew of the demonstrations before I went to bed... but the form of symbolization was familiar by now, and not how my brain fills in.

Did I even THINK about Trump and his issues at all, other than watching a bit of CNN earlier in the day? Not much, but briefly. At a "cosmic consciousness" kind of moment... thinking of all the winds of spirit blowing through our lives... at a kind of in-focus moment... yes, I understand and accept the basic reality that we are all really together here in the noosphere, with the responsibilities that entails.

----------- then light itself

But my own initiative was entirely towards quantum optics yesterday. A curious little set of issues, which I enjoy as much as a dog sometimes enjoys chasing a duck or a bone, maybe more a duck since it seems to move. One such duck: what is the proper quantum mechanical model of what a quarter wave plate (QWP) does? A few years ago, I looked for the proper quantum mechanical model of what a polarizer does, and was surprised that I could find nothing more than the baby aggregate model they teach in quantum mechanics 1: the collapse of the wave function, a simple projection model, as a model of the polarizer. What of all the solid state physics out there? There was a lot of classical physics for the two most common types of polarizer (birefringent like calcite, or dichroic like polaroid or sunglasses), but not a quantum model.

Yesterday I did first pass of a similar search, for the QWP, an important basic circuit element for complex photonic circuits.    This time I did not find even an aggregate quantum mechanical model, so far.

In addition to texts on classical optics (most notably by Lipson and by Born and Wolf), I rely a lot on 4 texts which, so far as I know, cover all the basics of what humans know about quantum optics:
(1) Scully and Zubairy; (2) Mandel and Wolf; (3) Walls and Milburn; (4) Carmichael, volumes 1 and 2.  I found just one reference to the QWP in Scully and Zubairy (the leading text for the broad empirical or device side of this field), page 153 -- less than half a page of discussion, really just discussing a Bell's Theorem experiment USING a QWP. It cited a paper I had seen before, which I knew was important, but I had not really studied why they inserted a QWP. I will now study that paper more carefully, to see what they say about the right way to model a QWP at a quantum mechanical level. (It also cited two papers with no QWP in them, and google scholar showed me a later paper by the same group doing more with QWP). Nothing at all in any of the others; too applied and practical for them.

I may search more today, using web search into journal type papers, or just study the two papers I downloaded yesterday, or just think. In really proper quantum mechanics, as in various flavors of quantum electrodynamics (QED), one would want to model the quarter wave plate as a function of the underlying creation and annihilation operators for circularly polarized photons (the only kind which really exist, according to QED). That's important here in complex circuits, because a proper representation of circular polarization is crucial to what a QWP actually does. (In classical physics, it converts linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light, but what does it do in QED?)
So all I saw last night was a picture of that QED type model of that object.... today I will try to fill in the details. Unless we all get Trumped somehow.

==================

Later: Clinton now blames her defeat on the Comey affair. As I have noted, the Comey affair was serious indeed, and if Trump has a strong enough sense of self-preservation he will rise above past hostilities towards her and work with her in rooting out the very risky and unAmerican chains of pressure and reporting which led to such a gross violation of American constitution and rights and spirit in this case (and in the Peter Worden case), as hinted at in the final chapter of the book "A G Man's Journal."

However, let's face it, the shifts in the last day or two went beyond that. I view Trump's surge as a kind of authentic "miracle," an outcome of "spiritual" energy in the noosphere surprising those who ignore such important realities. Some CNN people have started talking about "the narrative" which is a nice and sophisticated intuition, enough I can't help think: "Why don't I try to shift my resonance more to THEM?" Well... but I am on the trenches side, not the PR side.

Whose fingerprints are on that miracle? Hard to say. If at all local... there is some whiff of some folks in the Mormon world with a special worldview (NOT ATK or THEIR centers of corruption!)... and some of Russia itself (not a weak place)..... or maybe even something much further... BUT certainly not ANY stream of thought which would be encouraged by anything anti-female.