I Just Don’t Get It.

In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear to me that I just don’t get it.

I’ve read Shannon’s keystone paper on communication theory a lot of times. I get it. I’ve internalized it.

But when you tell me that with quantum theory you can take two channels that have zero capacity, and use them together to create a non-zero capacity channel… Sigh. So zero plus zero equals a positive value? Back to the books.

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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.