11/ So, what are the principles of Quantum Mechanics?. We’ll talk about that next time. ✨.

10/ The physicists called their new maths Quantum Mechanics. (Why? The word “atom” was already taken, so they needed another word meaning “a discrete and indivisible thingy.” 😅).

9/ You know how we love to predict things. So, physicists got to work on figuring out new maths to describe subatomic particles. …and they found that just four principles could explain all this strange behavior. New math, new rules: new computational opportunities!.

8/ A funny thing happens when you look at really tiny things. Newton’s maths no longer predict how subatomic particles move. Particles seem to behave strangely. Sometimes they’re where you expect; sometimes, they aren’t. 😵‍💫.

7/ Things were good for a while. But then physicists started looking at smaller and smaller. and smaller things. We found that stuff was made of atoms, and atoms were made of even smaller things: quarks, photons, electrons.

6/ So, if you’re swinging through Manhattan on your game console and it feels real, you can thank Newton. 🕹️🍎.

5/ More importantly for our purposes, Newton created a system of maths that allowed us to talk about how things moved everywhere. From apples falling to planets orbiting distant stars, Newton’s work let us predict where things should be, and when.

4/ In modern terms, we credit Issac Newton with kicking off the study of classical Mechanics. Before Newton, humanity collected a lot of important observations about Mechanics. Everyone contributed: Greeks, Persians, Italians, and so on. Newton brought it all together.

3/ Of all the things that Physicists study, there’s a group of topics we call Mechanics. When we talk about the relationship between energy and stuff–how stuff moves, and why–we’re talking about Mechanics.

2/ Let’s unpack this a bit to see if we can look at it in a more humane light. History and First Principles are your friends in situations like these. 🧵👇.

1/ #Quantum #Game #Design Part 6. The popular narrative around quantum physics is that it’s spooky, weird, and hard. The narrative isn’t very inviting.

So that’s where it starts: creatively misusing specialized equipment for joy and entertainment. You can try it out on a simulator here:

He designed the game in about two hours. After creating a couple of custom, aluminum knobs to control the angle of the racket, and a button to hit the ball, Higinbotham had a game.

For Brookhaven’s annual open house in 1958, Higinbotham had a very natural idea: create a game that people could play, as a way of showing the power of the computer.

The computer’s day job was calculating trajectories for planets and rockets and things like that. But the trajectories of planets and rockets don’t often hook people, right away.

A two-player tennis game, played on an oscilloscope, connected to an analog computer (the Donner Model 30).

The Ongoing History of Computer #gaming. Do you know what the first computer game was? A game that had people waiting in line for hours to play!?. If you guessed Pong, you’re close, but not close enough. The first game was far more primitive: William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two.

16/ Next time, let’s talk about what quantum mechanics is (easy there, tiger, it’s basically accounting) and how it relates to computation.

15/ Now, start to imagine how computer games work. They use sophisticated models of reality—real or fictional—to predict what happens as players interact.

14/ Voila! You can predict what the photo would look like in sepia without the mess.