Jazz and Quantum Entanglement
As regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will know, among the various things I write about apart from The Universe and Stuff is my love of Jazz. I don’t often get the chance to combine music with physics in a post so I’m indebted to George Ellis for drawing my attention to this fascinating little video showing a visualisation of the effects of quantum entanglement:
The experiment shown involves pairs of entangled photons. Here is an excerpt from the blurb on Youtube:
The video shows images of single photon patterns, recorded with a triggered intensified CCD camera, where the influence of a measurement of one photon on its entangled partner photon is imaged in real time. In our experiment the immediate change of the monitored mode pattern is a result of the polarization measurement on the distant partner photon.
You can find out more by clicking through to the Youtube page.
While most of my colleagues were completely absorbed by the pictures, I was fascinated by the choice of musical accompaniment. It is in fact Blue Piano Stomp, a wonderful example of classic Jazz from the 1920s featuring the great Johnny Dodds on clarinet (who also wrote the tune) and the great Lil Armstrong (née Hardin) on piano, who just happened to be the first wife of a trumpet player by the name of Louis Armstrong.
So at last I’ve found an example of Jazz entangled with Physics!
P.S. We often bemoan the shortage of female physicists, but Jazz is another field in which women are under-represented and insufficiently celebrated. Lil Hardin was a great piano player and deserves to be much more widely appreciated for her contribution to Jazz history.
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Another example of Jazz and Physics combined – and feamle – is Deirdre Cartwright’s 2005 album ‘Dr Quantum Leaps’, which contains tracks ‘Dr Quantum’, and ‘String Theory’. (I realise that may respectable physicists do not accept string theory to be ‘physics’ in its proper sense). I first heard ‘Dr Quantum’ when Humphrey Lyttleton played it on his Tuesday evening BBC Radio 2 show at the time of its release – and found the CD a week later in a record shop just off Charing Cross Road. A decade later and it still gets a regular outing in in-car CD player while driving home from work.
Deirdre may be better known to some as the presenter of the BBC’s Rock School in the early 80’s and also the composer of most of the pieces for the electric guitar grades 1 – 8 which, coincidently, can contribute to UCAS points for university admissions to study, amongst other things, physics.
The Deirdre Cartwright Trio normally play at Jan’s Bar in Stoke Newington on the last Friday of the month.
http://www.deirdrecartwright.com/shop/dr-quantum-leaps