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Chaos, Covid, & Climate Change with Professor Tim Palmer (#267)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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The Square Root of Negative One in Quantum Mechanics

I've always been fascinated by this operation that you can do in classical mechanics, which is to form a Poisson bracket. You get the square root of negative one and this funny constant, Planck's constant emerges. And I don't know, it must be something very deep, right? Because it's saying that not only do you get non-vanishing, you don't get zero anymore. We would just think quantum mechanics is hard. But really, it's just the analog of the square rootof negative one.

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