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Researcher X
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Are there any theoretical applications of quantum physics that could in the future lead to weapons in the same way that special relativity led to nuclear weapons?
clem said:Quantum physics was more important to the development of nuclear weapons than special relativity.
Researcher X said:How was that?
dulrich said:The laser is a huge application of quantum physics, too.
diazona said:But potatoes are vegetables
(or not, but I always lumped them in with the vegetables in my head)
Dickfore said:lasers
Dickfore said:Quantum computers used in cryptanalysis.
Count Iblis said:Take your cat and measure an observable of the form:
|dead><dead| +|alive><alive|
haael said:You traitor! My cat's quantum state got destroyed after the measurement! What should I do now?
DaleSpam said:Most QM textbooks are heavy enough be lethal with a good swing to the head. Does that count as weaponization of QM?
Researcher X said:I heard some mention that a Bose-Einstein condensate could be weaponized, but I don't see how that's supposed to work. Is that just nonsense?
arunma said:A friend and I once had a crazy idea. If you knew of a way to rapidly turn a large number of bosons into fermions simultaneously, then you could do some interesting things with Bose-Einstein condensations. First you'd have to make a Bose-Einstein condensate. Then, with all of the bosons in their ground state, you would turn them into fermions. The fermions would suddenly realize that they can't all be in the same quantum state at once, and would at the very least need to go into different states until they stack up to the Fermi energy. Fermionic wavefunctions tend to be more spatially separated than Bosonic wavefunctions, so this process might be accompanied by some kind of an explosion.
Of course, turning the bosons into fermions is the hard part. Perhaps exposing bosonic nuclei to a neutron flux might do the trick. But when you've got a bunch of bosons in their ground state, perhaps this is energetically unfavorable, so I don't know if it would work.
Like I said, crazy idea. This is how we graduate students are spending your taxpayer dollars.
Only zombie is an eigenvector of such operator.Count Iblis said:Typo in my previous post: I meant the operator:
|dead><alive| + |alive><dead|
haael said:Only zombie is an eigenvector of such operator.
I thought of a better quantum weapon: take a very large count of fermions (quarks, electrons, whatever), speed it up to a high velocity relative to your enemy and set its trajectory so it goes through your enemy's heart.
pallidin said:I heard somewhere that there is an "agreement", probably informal, that certain forms of directed energy weapons are not to be used against enemy personnel directly, rather only enemy infrastructure.
For example, using high energy lasers to permanently blind the opponent personnel(versus temporary blinding/hearing loss, such as in flash-bang grenades) is considered cruel.