Daily Archives: February 8, 2021

QM 101: Vector Spaces

Whether it’s to meet for dinner, attend a lecture, or play baseball, one of the first questions is “where?” Everything that takes place, takes place some place (and some time, but that’s another question).

Where quantum mechanics takes place is a challenging ontological issue, but the way we compute it is another matter. The math takes place in a complex vector space known as Hilbert space (“complex” here refers to the complex numbers, although the traditional sense does also apply a little bit).

Mathematically, a quantum state is a vector in Hilbert space.

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