{"id":230,"date":"2006-12-12T00:46:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T00:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=230"},"modified":"2006-12-12T00:46:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T00:46:00","slug":"project-watched-teapots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=230","title":{"rendered":"[project] Watched Teapots"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got an email today from a CUNY student who was evidently blown away when (s)he came across my old MIT site<\/a> and said someone should make a movie about me. I’m tickled pink, but I don’t know how to respond. It made me want to start collecting and publishing my projects again though– maybe I’ll start with this one:<\/p>\n


\nYesterday I happened across a couple ESGers watching for a pot to boil. I think they were trying to make it take longer so they wouldn’t have to go back to tooling. Alas, according to Mr. Newton, it’s just a superstition that a watched pot will take any longer to boil… but I got to thinking: what about Quantum Teapots?<\/p>\n

The reasoning goes that if you’re diligent enough at observing your teapot, you can force its wave probability function to keep collapsing into a discrete non-boiling state. I decided I needed to do some experiments (well, not *real* experiments– I am an intellectual after all).<\/p>\n

The Technicals: So I built some Newtonian and Quantum Teapots in MATLAB. For simplicity, I only consider conductive heat transfer (no actual boiling in these pots!) across discrete water column elements. Every time step of the Quantum Teapot, I evolve the Schrodinger uncertainty of the water elements in the teapot and then apply the heat equation as a probability superposition of 10 possible discrete energy states.<\/i><\/p>\n

Sadly, the verdict is that even a zen master meditating on a teapot could not stop it from boiling. My dreams are crushed. Like a PhD comic, gobs of work don’t warrant more than one graph:
\n
\nNo matter how hard I looked at the teapots, I couldn’t get them to diverge from the Newtonian curve in even vaguely interesting ways.<\/p>\n

So I’m unexpected surrounded by boiling quantum teapots. Anyone want some quantum tea?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got an email today from a CUNY student who was evidently blown away when (s)he came across my old MIT site and said someone should make a movie about me. I’m tickled pink, but I don’t know how to respond. It made me want to start collecting and publishing my projects again though– maybe … Continue reading [project] Watched Teapots<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}