More Profound Things: The Non-Living

There are many things and concepts within the collective worldviews of humanity that are considered pretty mundane. However, there’s certainly a collection of things and ideas which rise to the top in profoundness when compared and contrasted with the ordinary everyday routine. These are the sorts of profound things and concepts which keep you awake at night, pondering the Big Issues. No two people will come up with identical lists. Without further ado, here are some more of mine. 

* Matter: Matter is profoundly just frozen energy. Matter and energy are not different things but the same thing, as Einstein theoretically proposed and the Manhattan Project demonstrated. Even burning a match turns some matter into energy; a nuclear reaction even more so; and the ultimate – matter-antimatter annihilation. Energy is probably more fundamental than matter since it’s much easier to turn matter into energy than energy into matter, at least on the macro scale.  

* Electrons in the Twilight Zone: When an electron rises or falls from one atomic energy level to another, when in-between levels the electron is in a profound limbo, in Never-Never-Land, in The Twilight Zone, in another dimension for all we know. It just can’t be anywhere that’s locatable in-between for if it was – in-between that is – it would possess an in-between energy state that it is not allowed to have.

* Delayed Double Slit Experiment & Time Travel: We all know about the infamous Double Slit experiment, which in one variation allows the experimenter to peek and thus see if one particle (photon, electron, etc.) can actually pass through two slits at the same time, which is what happens when the experimenter turns her back. Of course the particle will only go through one slit or the other if there is a Peeping-Tomboy around. But what if someone, human or independent observation device, peeks, but only after the particle has already passed through presumably but absurdly both slits? That shouldn’t affect the outcome since it’s now too little to late for the particle to change its mind. But again, irregardless, the normal particle-that-passes-through-both-slits that results in an eventual wave interference pattern, that pattern disappears even after the peeking is done, even after the particle has passed through both slits. The one very nasty implication is that the particle travels back in time to just before or when it was emitted so as to now make the correct choice (pass through one and only one slit) to correlate what it does with what is detected - A profound conclusion indeed.  

* Pane in the Glass:  You have one light source. You have one normal everyday clear and clean pane of glass. Some of the light (photons) from the light source will pass clear through the clear glass, but some of those identical photons will reflect off the clear surface of the pane of glass. One set of circumstances yields two differing but simultaneous outcomes. That violates cause-and-effect. One could almost say photons exhibit a restricted form of ‘free will’. That’s crazy, that’s profound, but it happens as you can verify for yourself. 

* Electric Charge: The electric charge of the proton is exactly equal and opposite to the electric charge of the electron, despite the proton being nearly 2000 times more massive. There’s no set in concrete theoretical reason why this should be so. This could be considered a profound example of ‘fine tuning’ that makes our cosmos a ‘Goldilocks’ (bio-friendly) Universe.

* Matter & Antimatter: Theory predicts there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the Universe. Observation shows that there is a massive predominance of matter over antimatter. Something is screwy somewhere. Anytime something is screwy somewhere, profoundness is not far behind.

* Mother Nature: Why are there laws of Nature? Why is Nature organised? Why is Nature creative? Why is Nature self-ordering? One could imagine a universe where there was nothing but an endless cosmic ‘soup’ of quarks and electrons and neutrinos and photons and there were no interactions between them. All was just chaos and there was no mathematics, hence no physics, hence no chemistry, hence no biology. That the in-the-beginning chaotic state profoundly evolved into laws and organization and creativity and the self-ordering of things, instead of remaining forever and a day in a chaotic state, gave rise to Goldilocks.  

* Goldilocks: Why is the cosmos bio-friendly? Well the Universe, or at least our Universe, has to be bio-friendly otherwise we wouldn’t be here to wonder why our Universe was, well, bio-friendly. But why is it so, when one can envision all sorts of universes where the laws, relationships and principles of physics could be just ever so slightly differently that would make your existence, and all other life-as-we-know-it life forms, impossible. That makes our bio-friendly Universe a rather profound Universe.

* Time and Time Again: What is time? We all know what time is, at least until we’re required to actually have to explain it. It’s pretty profound that we have such trouble coming to terms with something so fundamental in our lives; a concept that has been philosophically and scientifically been bounced around like a ping-pong ball since the beginnings of recorded history and probably even before that.

* Grandma, Ma and Baby Make Three: There are three generations of particles. There are three generations of quarks; three generations of electrons; three generations of neutrinos. That’s profound because there’s absolutely no theoretical reason why that should be, especially seeing as how only one generation plays any sort of substantial role in life, the Universe and everything, including those bits and pieces that make you, you.

* Spooky Action at a Distance: It’s not too difficult to imagine two entangled objects or concepts such that if you uncover the properties of one, you immediately know the properties of the other. If you know that Jane goes shopping on Fridays, and only on Fridays, and you see Jane at the supermarket, you also immediately know that it is Friday! Jane and Fridays are entangled. But things get spooky when two objects are entangled but their properties are only statistical probabilities. The vacuum energy might spontaneously produce two particles, one matter, and the other antimatter. Say they separate and eventually are light years apart. You track down one particle and it’s a 50/50 chance that it’s matter, or antimatter. Both are actually in a superposition of state, both particles equally matter and antimatter at the same time until such time as you observe the properties of one (or the other), then the collective probabilistic wave-function of the two particles collapses down into an either/or state. Say the particle you tracked down then observed collapses into a matter particle. You then immediately know that the other particle light years away is an antimatter particle. Somehow the particle you observed communicated to its entangled partner that the gig was up – instantaneously even though it was light years away. And of course you acquired the knowledge about the status of the unobserved particle instantaneously even though it was light years away. So profound was this scenario that Einstein finally rejected the whole concept of quantum mechanics being probabilistic, calling this “spooky action at a distance”. 

* Impressive Space! If you remove all the empty space within an atom, and do that for each and every atom that’s part and parcel of each and human being on the planet, one could in theory fit the entirety of the human race into a volume the size of a sugar cube. But that’s just a baby step towards a theoretical singularity and since the constituents are now already in direct contact (no space, remember), so what’s left to compress. Can an electron be squeezed down and further than its normal volume? 



The Russell Stannard Questions: Part Three

There are many Big Questions in science, many of which go back to the ancients, even back into prehistory in all probability. One of the best modern set I’ve found recently were sidebars in a book by Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard. These are my answers, thoughts and commentary to those Big Questions. Many readers might have ‘fun’ trying to come to terms with these in their own way based on their own worldview.

Continued from Part Two.

Q. Does the loss of simultaneity for events separated by a distance invalidate the notion that only the presence exists?

A. This is one of those ‘paradoxes’ of those Theories of Relativity whereby, since things are relative, to one observer A happens before B; to another observer A and B are simultaneous happenings; and to yet a third observer, B happens before A. Since all observers are correct according to their specific frame of reference, the concept of ‘now’ is flexible. There is no absolute ‘now’. Another example is that whatever you observe, you observe ‘now’ yet what you observe actually happened in the past. The sunlight you see ‘now’ is now eight minutes old. However, it’s quite conceivable that you could instigate a universal ‘now’ and freeze the universe by snapping your fingers “STOP NOW”. That “STOP NOW” message would propagate instantaneously throughout the entirety of the universe. You, being immune from that “STOP NOW” command, would be free to navigate and explore the cosmos and see the universe as it appeared at that one ‘now’ instant – ‘now’ being of course the present. Only the present, the universal snapping your fingers ‘now’ exists. The interesting thing is that ‘now’ is such a short interval that your definition of the length of ‘now’ is vastly longer than what ‘now’ exists in in reality.

Q. What is time?

A. Time is a not-thing. Time is a concept that resides in the mind and cannot be detected with any of your senses. Time has no physical properties. Time is mathematics (a human invention), a way of measuring a particular thing. That thing is change, or rate-of-change. If there is no change, it is meaningless to talk about time. Time does not exist independently of change.

Q. Does the perceived flow of time require there to be two types of time?

A. The two types of time in question are physical time (the tick-tock of a clock; the cycle of the lunar phases) and mental time (where an hour can seem like a minute; a minute can seemly last for an hour). So there is real time, and subjective time. But time in any guise is a not-thing; an illusion; a concept. Only change is real and the rate of change, real or perceived, is what we call time – physical or mental. One could, if one wanted make a variable rate of change into a constant. Normally we hold physical time as a constant – tick-tick-tick-tick – at a rate of one-second-per-second (or one-day-per-day, etc.). We can count the number of ticks between say two red cars passing by on the road in front of our house. But you could say the interval between any two red vehicles is a constant. It is one unit or one tick per interval of red car time. That means that everything you associate as being regular like one-second-per-second or a 24-hour-day would become irregular. One ‘day’ might equate to 100 red car interval ticks. The next ‘day’ it might be 200 red car interval ticks long (since there happen to be double the number of red cars passing by on ‘day’ two as compared to ‘day’ one). If you define a ‘day’ as say 100 red car interval ticks, then ‘day’ two above would really be ‘day’ two plus ‘day’ three. Well, you can see how that sort of reckoning would screw up your biological clock! You’d have a ‘day’ off work between 1000 and 1100 red car interval ticks; the next ‘day’ off work between 2000 and 2100 red car interval ticks, etc. In the case of the 1000-1100 interval, that might be a long and restful ‘day’ but the 2000-2100 interval could be extremely short! You could do the above time experiment, at least as a silent and private intellectual exercise. Otherwise people would carry you off to the funny farm! However, if time were really real, then time couldn’t be manipulated as per the red car interval example. But time isn’t real so you can twist it around your little finger. Thus, the flow if time is indeed perceived, but that doesn’t make it something of substance. So, one kind of time, two kinds of time – it’s irrelevant.  

Q. How are we to understand the built-in creativity of the physical world?

A. Human beings are highly creative beings. We create 2-D and 3-D art and architecture; sports and games; music and storytelling; designing experiments; create new food recipes, create computer simulations, etc. We love to indulge in the ‘what if’ game. Apparently so does the Universe! From a primeval ‘fireball’ of elementary particle ‘soup’, the cosmos created forces and fields, atoms and molecules, and stuff and structures* like galaxies and stars and solar systems full of planets and associated debris, but from our biased point of view or perspective the Universe created life and us. If this creation in particular was inadvertent, it borders on a near miracle given all those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that have to come together just so. If life was a deliberate creation then you are down to postulating either an infallible supernatural deity (or deities) or a probable flesh-and-blood and fallible Supreme Programmer. 

·        But not just galaxies but spiral galaxies and barred galaxies and elleptical galaxies and irregular galaxies; not just stars but dwarf stars and giant stars and neutron stars and quasars and Black Holes and binary star systems too as well as stars that burp and stars that explode; not just planets but gas giants and icy giants and rocky planets (and I’m sure there’s no planet ever envisioned by any science fiction writer that doesn’t have a real counterpart somewhere out in the cosmos).

Q. What significance, if any, ought we to attach to the self-ordering nature of matter?

A. The cosmos is a highly ordered place. The only real question is why it is so. There are roughly about 60 elementary particles (and antiparticles) grouped into three generations. There’s no theoretical reason why there couldn’t have been trillions of elementary particles grouped into hundreds of generations, or no generational structure at all. The fundamental particles can only combine in just so many ways – you can’t have an atom consisting of one neutron, 5 protons and ten electrons. Atoms can only combine in just so many ways. There are a lot more ways atoms can’t combine than ways they do. The same applies for molecules combining. The ancients noted this ordering by suggesting that everything has its natural place in the cosmic scheme of things. Solids (earth) seek ground level; liquids (water) go down too but rest on top of solids; gases (air) hover above solids and liquids and heat (fire) tries to rise through gases and occupy the top rung. The planets don’t orbit the Sun in a square orbit one year, then switch to a rectangular orbit the next year and switch again to a triangular orbit the year after that. The lunar cycle follows its steady rhythm; ditto night follows day that follows night that follows day, etc. Thunder follows lightning. Plants grow upwards while plant roots grow downwards. In other words, causality operates. If you have X, Y follows (but not A, B and/or C). So the fact we have ordering is significant. But, consider this. Software is the same. Your PC is predictable. If X, then Y (but not A, B and/or C).

Q. The problem of understanding things in themselves.

A. No matter what sort of thing you wish to describe, its properties, you eventually exhaust appropriate concepts and language to dig any deeper. You often hit an ultimate barrier when you come up against the ‘what’ and ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. We know there is gravity but ‘why’ gravity at all and ‘how’ does gravity actually work. We know an electron has a negative electric charge of one unit but ‘what’ exactly is electric charge and ‘why’ does the electron have the value of electric charge that it has. The problems disappear if one suggests well, this is the programming, the software code that gives us the illusion of all things gravitational and another software code that determines that there be an negative electric charge on an electron and what the value is, also properties that are totally an illusion, or virtual reality. Ultimately those ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions like why introduce gravity and why have an electric charge can best be answered by those who do the (supreme) programming.

 

Q. Why are there three generations of particles?

A. Only the bottom generation of particles plays any role in our day-to-day perception of life, the universe and everything. The second and third generation have bugger-all to do with life, the universe and everything. There is something screwy somewhere! Mother Nature went over-the-top and made way too much of a good thing which is not how we tend to view Mother Nature. Mother Nature is frugal, not extravagant. However, all these additional generations of particles might be the consequence of programming. Natural or software, it’s a mystery that has no obvious rational explanation which suggests to me the irrationality of intelligence. A common theme when it comes to intelligence is that if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.

Q. Can we ever be sure that GUT is correct if we cannot experimentally test it at the appropriately high energy?

A. A GUT is a Grand Unified Theory, some sort of unification between the three quantum forces – the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. One suspects that at the time of the Big Bang event all three forces were unified, only separating or undergoing phase transitions into distinct entities as the universe expanded and cooled. Unfortunately, the energy levels at the point of the Big Bang are such that they are beyond our abilities to achieve and thus any GUT cannot be experimentally confirmed, only theoretically ‘confirmed’. So, if there are competing GUTs, it will be difficult to separate the men GUTs from the boy GUTs. No, unless there’s a breakthrough in experimental high energy physics, the answer is “no”.

Q. Shall we ever be able to verify proton decay?

A. If protons theoretically decay, akin to how neutrons can decay, and you have a large enough collection of protons (that’s easy to accomplish) then it is a straightforward exercise to verify proton decay, even if on average it takes any one proton trillions of years to go poof since if you have trillions of protons on hand, you should see several go poof every year. Such experiments have come up empty. Protons don’t decay so there’s something screwy with the theoretical concept somewhere.

To be continued.



String Theory: A Knotty Theory

String Theory suggests the substitution of tiny vibrating strings for little billiard ball particles, but requiring in the process an extra six spatial dimensions. It gets the thumb’s down until such time as proponents of String Theory get some experimental runs on the board, something not accomplished in over four decades.

String Theory is one of those proposed challenges to mainstream physics and replaces the standard model of particle physics by substituting tiny vibrating strings for all those little billiard ball particles, like electrons and quarks and neutrinos, etc. that we know so well. Differing string vibration rates determine whether some particle is an electron or an up-quark or a down-quark or a neutrino, etc. That in itself isn’t too bad an alteration. Where String Theory falls off the rails IMHO is that in order to work, the Universe has got to be comprised of not the standard three spatial dimensions and the one dimension in time we’re used to existing in, but a total of nine, even ten spatial dimensions (plus one of time). Sorry, it’s those extra spatial dimensions that tip the weirdness quotient off the scales.

Spatial dimensions are just a useful mathematical concept consisting of points, length, area and volume that has no actual structure or substance. There’s nothing magical about a right angle. Spatial dimensions are a not-thing, a human invention.  That there are up to ten spatial dimensions (not three) if Superstring Theory or M-Theory* is correct turns a useful concept into nonsense. In the words of the late physicist Wolfgang Pauli, that’s “not even wrong”** which was a phrase adopted by and which gave rise to the title of the anti-String Theory book by Peter Woit (2006).

String Theory wouldn’t be too bad were there the slightest tad of experimental evidence for string ‘particles’ and those additional spatial dimensions. There isn’t. String Theory just resides as a pure hypothetical, albeit elegant (and extremely difficult to understand), branch of mathematics (you could hardly call it real physics). That wouldn’t be all that unusual a situation if String Theory were something that was brand new. However, String Theory in its earliest form dates back to the late 1960’s with Gabriele Veneziano hence Leonard Susskind and others. So, alas, this theoretical can-of-worms is now four decades old without the worms even reaching first base, far less getting so much as even one run on the board. In fact, nobody has even ever seen one of the theoretical worms, which is obviously why they are still theoretical four decades on. Pioneering string theorists nearly qualify for a pension by now and should be looking forward towards downsizing to their retirement village, albeit not quite yet a nursing home!  

String Theory just is not going anywhere. It’s a dead end. As far as I’m concerned, String Theory is impossible physics (even if elegant mathematics) until such time as even the tiniest shred of experimental evidence is on the board. String, Superstring, or M-Theory (as substitutes for the standard model of particle physics) is pure bovine fertilizer on the grounds that after four decades it remains a purely abstract mathematical concept with no experimental verification.  I’m not holding my breath that experimental verification will come anytime soon, if ever.

In conclusion, never in the history of physics have so many spent so much time and energy for so little results. 

* M-Theory is a unified String Theory or Superstring Theory that incorporates differing versions of String Theory that has no substance or structure apart from pure abstract mathematics an thus gets the same thumb’s down as String Theory itself and for the same reason. Another negative is that it must postulate the existence of even a further extra spatial dimension, as if an extra six weren’t already too much of a good thing.

** If you’re ‘not even wrong’, well that’s just about the ultimate insult to a practicing scientist since it’s no crime to be wrong, and most scientists are wrong a lot of the time.



The Return of the Hidden Variable

There are many anomalies from the macro-world that can be ‘explained’ by resorting to a Simulated [Virtual Reality] Universe scenario, from statues that walk (on Easter Island according to the natives) to the concepts of an afterlife to those feelings of déjà vu to recollections of previous lives to crop ‘circles’ to ghosts, and so on and so forth. However, most of these anomalies can be classified as belonging to the paranormal or as a pseudoscience and dismissed. Not so easily dismissed are anomalies from hardcore particle (quantum) physics, the most experimentally verified science every known and responsible in gismos and gadgets for over one-third of the world’s economy.

The key to reality in general, including yours in particular, lies in the basics (i.e. – the Standard Model of Particle [Quantum] Physics) and how it builds from the ground up. That reality includes those anomalies and how they can be explained. It’s time to think the unthinkable, so here are a few more reasons why you might wish to consider our Universe to be pre-programmed virtual reality, where heaven knows, anything goes!

Further examples of simulation arguments if any more are necessary.       

* There’s the Pauli Exclusion Principle which notes that no two electrons can occupy the same ‘orbit’ if they have identical quantum numbers or quantum properties. Of course all electrons have the same mass and the same electric charge and the same energy (if they are in the same ‘orbit’) and if in the same ‘orbit’ the same angular momentum and orientation. Pauli came up with another property however that can differentiate between two electrons – ‘spin’. So if there is an electron in ‘orbit’ with one value of ‘spin’ and another electron with the same value of ‘spin’ tries to enter that ‘orbit’ it won’t be able to. If the electron has the opposite ‘spin’ however, then it’s allowed to join in that ‘orbit’. The question is, how does one electron ‘know’ or ‘sense’ what the ‘spin’ of a fellow electron is. That they apparently do is not in question, but it’s damn odd. Take two basketballs and place them close to each other. Spin one clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Neither basketball gives a royal stuff about what the other is doing!  

* Why are all the fundamental particles identical to each of their own kind? Aren’t all up-quarks the same? Aren’t all electron-neutrinos the same? In the macro world no two ‘identical’ products, inanimate or animate, are actually identical down to the Nth detail – not even identical twins. But in the micro world that’s not the case. All photons are identical, even when they have differing energy levels. All heavy hydrogen atoms are identical, ditto so are all those up-quarks or tau neutrinos. Why are all electrons identical? Why this should be so is not readily apparent from first principles on up the line. However, it’s easy to software code any particle, and whenever that code appears, you have an identical particle appear. 

* If something should be but isn’t (say equal amounts of matter and antimatter); or if something is and shouldn’t be (like entanglement’s spooky action at a distance), either is suggestive of artificial manipulation.

* The acceleration of the universe (Dark Energy) and Dark Matter are just the result of the Supreme Programmer not paying enough attention to the finer details when programming the software that serves as the cosmic background wallpaper. It makes sense to skimp on the bits and bytes when it comes to the background wallpaper, but that skimping can backfire.

* If I understand the standard model of cosmology, that Big Bang event, implies that first there was nothing; then there was something. That means the Big Bang event created both matter and energy out of less than thin air. That’s a free lunch. Fortunately, software has a starting point thus explaining the cosmic philosophy of some cosmologists that do indeed claim that first there was nothing; then there was something.

* That Big Bang event also created both time and space out of less than thin air. The day I see a cosmologist replicate that point of view by creating time and space in front of her professional peers (as well as a TV audience), I’ll change my tune. Meantime, IMHO it’s all bovine fertilizer, or software. 

* Apparently the density of Dark Energy remains constant while the volume of the Universe expands. That’s something from nothing. That’s also a free lunch. So how can Dark Energy create more space thus forcing space to expand and the resulting expanding space creating more Dark Energy since Dark Energy is an intrinsic property of space in an endless free lunch loop?

* Apparently, when faced with an energy barrier, particles that lack sufficient energy to surmount the barrier in classical physics, can ‘tunnel’ past the barrier and come out the other side. Now the upshot of that is that this tunneling happens instantaneously. The particle is on the left hand side of the barrier then immediately tunnels and appears on the right hand side of the barrier – instantaneously. Now quantum tunneling implies a velocity faster than the speed of light, which if true would have Einstein spitting chips. Something is screwy somewhere.

* When an electron rises or falls from one energy level to another, when in-between the electron is in limbo, in Never-Never-Land, in The Twilight Zone, in another dimension for all we know. It just can’t be anywhere that’s locatable in-between for if it was – in-between that is – it would possess an in-between energy state that it is not allowed to have. How does an electron vanish from the cosmos or go into a state of non-existence when quantum jumping from one energy state to another?

* Traditional wave-particle duality is according to one interpretation a complementary but either/or phenomenon. Sometimes light/particle experiments show results that prove a pure 100% wave phenomena is responsible; sometimes however other light/particle experiments show results that prove a pure 100% particles phenomena is the only possible interpretation. I’ve also oft seen it described that at point of origin and at the point of detection, you observe a particle. In-between emission and detection it’s a wave. That doesn’t make a great deal of sense unless there is a higher power (a Supreme Programmer) pulling the strings – or programming the program.

* Symmetry holds in 11 out of 12 cases – four forces (electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces) times three symmetry operations (time, charge and parity) with only the parity of the weak force being the odd one out. There’s something screwy somewhere!

* Entanglement (Spooky action at a distance): Pick and remove a card from a standard deck. Don’t look at it. Bury it in a time capsule. Send the rest of the unobserved deck of 51 cards via rocket ship off to the Andromeda Galaxy. Leave instructions. Generations upon generations later, with the deck of 51 safely in the Great Galaxy of Andromeda, you’re great, great, great (add lots more greats) grand-person can dig up and look at lone card in the time capsule. Say it is the Ace of Diamonds. You do not now need to observe the rest of the original deck in Andromeda to know 1) it contains 51 cards, and 2) that it is missing the Ace of Diamonds! That’s entanglement. And entanglement is something that Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ because you can come by information/knowledge instantaneously – faster than the speed of light. Thus, Einstein was not amused!

* Though bordering on the fringe, some bona-fide astronomers strongly suggest from actual observation that the extreme large-scale structure of the cosmos exhibits a fractal pattern (and there is some extensive literature on the subject). To me however, fractals are primarily a mathematical construction; the product of a mathematical mind, and as such, if there is a fractal cosmos, that’s very strong evidence for a Supreme Programmer. 

It’s just about time here to cite Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, which notes that “any sufficiently advanced technology (i.e. – a Supreme Programmer, for example) is indistinguishable from [quantum physics] magic”. 



The Hidden Variable

You don’t have to read too many books on quantum or particle physics, especially the more popular tomes that replace advanced and technical mathematics for English, to realize the number of times free will and awareness terms like how particles ‘decide’ or ‘choose’ or ‘know’ are used.

If one were to actually suggest that the fundamental building blocks of our reality, those elementary particles like photons and electrons had some sort of ‘awareness’ or ‘self-awareness’ and an ability to exhibit ‘free will’ and make ‘decisions’, let’s just say the vast majority not just of the scientific community but even the general public at large (the great unwashed) would view that person as a loony. Well, since I have no academic reputation to defend, I’ll wax lyrical and promote that point of view, while noting that a particle’s ‘free will’ would be restricted, just as your own free will (assuming you have such a property) is restricted. You can’t flap your arms and fly and live long enough to challenge Methuselah’s longevity, free will be damned.

Here are several quantum reasons why one could adopt such a worldview.  

* Firstly there’s the famous (or infamous) Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum phenomena. This philosophical interpretation of quantum physics suggests that something (micro or macro composed of micro bits) only has reality and thus either/or fixed properties when somebody (or a measuring device proxy like a camera or a screen) is observing whatever that something is. Just like you are aware, even if sometimes via a 6^th sense, that you are being watched (you of course are always either/or since you observe yourself), the Copenhagen Interpretation implies that from the micro ground up, fundamental particles are ‘conscious’ or ‘subconscious’ of the fact that somebody (or device) is watching them. I believe the technical term is that the observer collapses the wave-function of all that is possible down to one actuality. If the elementary particles didn’t ‘know’ you were observing them then everything you observe would remain in a superposition of state and your reality would be a living nightmare.

Schrodinger’s Cat would really be both alive and dead when you looked into the box. But let’s substitute something else for the cat since in theory the cat is an observer and observes itself. Instead of the cat, let’s have a box of a chemical (Y) that will react with the vial of gas (X) that may or may not break depending on whether a radioactive atom does or does not decay in a certain time frame. If the atom decays then the hammer will fall and then the vial will break and release the gas and there will form a new compound (Z). It’s only when you open the box that you find Z, or not Z, though before you looked Z/not-Z was in a superposition of state of both Z and not-Z. When you look, how does the constituents of Z or not-Z (not-Z being the intact gas X and the intact chemical Y) ‘know’ you’ve opened the box?

So how does an electron (or other fundamental particle) ‘know’ you are watching? It can’t. If a photon bounces off an electron, the electron has no way of ‘knowing’ that the photon is heading towards your eyeball. For all the electron ‘knows’ the photon is heading off into the depths of deepest space never to be observed by anyone or anything.

* A particle apparently also ‘knows’ when you are peeking, as in for example that famous, or infamous double-slit experiment (and variations on the theme). The late Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist, Richard Feynman, thought the double slit experiment (and variations on the theme) was the heart and soul behind the anomaly that is quantum physics. It was the ultimate anomaly in a sea of anomalies that could not, in any shape, manner or form, be explained by any sort of, or resort to, classical physics available in the observable Universe. 

If photons, electrons, Buckminsterfullerene molecules (Bucky-balls), etc. are fired in rapid succession at a single slit, with a detector (like say photographic film or a TV screen) behind the slit, then a quasi-blob of impacts are detected. Particles rule, okay!

If photons, electrons, Bucky-balls, etc. are fired in rapid succession at a double slit, with a detector behind the dual slits, then a classic wave interference (constructive and destructive interference) pattern emerges. Waves rule, okay!

If photons, electrons, Bucky-balls, etc. are fired one at a time, at a single slit, such that one photon, etc. completes the journey before the next one is fired off, again with a detector behind the slit, then a quasi-blob of impacts are ultimately detected. Particles rule, okay!

If photons, electrons, Bucky-balls, etc. are fired one at a time at a double slit, such that one photon, etc. completes the journey before the next one is fired off, again with a detector behind the slits, then ultimately after enough firings, a classic wave interference (constructive and destructive) pattern emerges. Waves! However, that implies one photon, electron, Bucky-ball, etc. somehow manages to go through both slits at the same time and thus interferes with itself. That’s absurd. But you ain’t seen anything yet!

The above assumes nobody (human observer or independent measuring device) is peeking and taking the slightest notice of what’s going on – the non-observing nobodies are just looking at the pattern on the detector screen after the fact; after the experiment has concluded. 

However, if someone, human observer or independent measuring device, is peeking and taking absolute and total notice of what’s going on, and determining at the precise time of passage which of the two slits the lone photon, etc. is actually going through (on the grounds that one entity cannot pass through two doors at the same time) then the wave interference pattern doesn’t eventuate and you get a quasi-blob of particle hits on the detector behind each of the two slits. Somehow the photon, etc. is ‘aware’ that it is being observed and changes it’s self-interfering behavior accordingly – keeping in mind that the very act of observing before-the-fact unobserved properties of a photon, etc. alters those properties after-the-fact, since you can’t observe something without mucking around with it.  

The Delayed Double-Slit Variation:

What if someone, human observer or independent measuring device, peeks, but only after the photon, etc. has already passed through presumably, but absurdly, both slits simultaneously and self-interfered with itself? That shouldn’t affect the ultimate wave outcome since it’s now too little to late for the photon, etc. to change its ‘mind’. Or so you would think. But again, irregardless, the wave interference pattern disappears even after the peeking is done after the photon, etc. has passed through both slits and self-interfered. The one very nasty and anomalous implication is that the photon, etc. has traveled back in time to just before, or when it was, initially emitted so as to now make the ‘correct choice’ and thus will pass through one and only one slit to correlate what it actually does with what is actually detected. How can ‘free will’ and time travel be accounted for in the delayed variation of the double-slit experiment? 

Summary: If you turn your back and don’t peek, and there’s a double slit available, the detector screen, and therefore you, will detect a wave pattern at the conclusion of the experiment because the photon, etc. will pass through both slits and self-interfere.

If you don’t turn your back away from the action, but do a peeping-Tom act, double slit notwithstanding, the detector screen and therefore you will detect a particle (quasi-blob) pattern behind each slit.

The two very disturbing facets are that a photon, etc. displays ‘awareness’, and ‘free will’, as well as exhibiting the ability to travel backwards in time. Photons, etc. not only ‘know’ before-the-fact whether or not both slits are open (two open slits equals wave behavior); or that one or the other slit is open (either/or equals particle behavior), but also whether or not someone is peeking. If both holes (slits) are open and nobody is peeking we end up having wave interference behavior; if someone is peeking even if both holes (slits) are open, we get particle quasi-blob behavior. That means the photons, etc. ‘know’ (how is that possible?) and adjust and exercise their ‘free will’ (how is that possible?) accordingly.

* But wait, there’s more! How does an electron ‘decide’ to emit a photon and thus drop to a lower energy level (and where the hell is the electron anyway while between energy levels). That an electron will drop to a lower energy level by emitting a photon for absolutely no reason at all is strange given that an electron will jump to a higher energy level by absorbing a photon’s worth of energy. There’s no causality in the downward direction; there’s causality in the upwards direction. That’s nuts! 

* And how do the constituents of an unstable (radioactive) nucleus ‘know’ when it is their turn to go poof in order to maintain that precise mathematical half-life relationship of whatever substance they represent (i.e. – uranium, radium, technetium, etc.).

* Quantum Tunneling: Apparently, when faced with an energy barrier, particles that lack sufficient energy to surmount the barrier in classical physics, can ‘tunnel’ past the barrier and come out the other side. Now the upshot of that is that this tunneling happens instantaneously. The particle is on the left hand side of the barrier then immediately tunnels and appears on the right hand side of the barrier – instantaneously. Now that implies a velocity faster than the speed of light, which is a no-no. Strike one. Quantum tunneling also apparently happens for no reason at all. It just happens. Strike two. But the real question is, how does a particle ‘decide’ to tunnel at all? Not all particles will tunnel when trapped behind an energy barrier. Strike three. Something is screwy somewhere.

* And then there’s that pane in the glass.  You have one light source. You have one normal everyday clear and clean pane of glass. Some of the light (photons) from the light source will pass clear through the clear glass, but some of those identical photons will reflect off the clear surface of the pane of glass. One set of circumstances yields two differing but simultaneous outcomes. That violates cause-and-effect. That’s crazy, but it happens as you can verify for yourself. So how does a light photon ‘decide’ whether to pass through or reflect off of the pane of glass? Alternatively, how does a radio photon ‘decide’ whether or not to pass through your brick walls and enter your radio, or reflect off of your brick wall and thus fail to contribute to the strength of your radio’s broadcast transmission? 

Conclusion:

To his dying day, Einstein insisted that there were hidden variables that would, when discovered account for all these various quantum anomalies – quantum magic. Those hidden variables would ultimately unite quantum physics with classical physics. Unfortunately for Einstein, experiments have since ‘proved’ that there are no hidden variables of the type Einstein had in mind. That’s because IMHO the hidden variable, which Einstein couldn’t have envisioned in even his wildest imagination, is a Supreme Programmer who creates our Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe. 

What Is the Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe Hypothesis? #

The human species, especially since the proliferation of the computer and associated technologies, have created thousands of simulated landscapes and virtual beings, from the humble Microsoft office assistant to pilot training simulators to video games that cater to all types of interests and age groups. Entire movies are now computer generated simulations – no actual on-location travel required; no humans need apply in hopes of earning an eventual Oscar for best actor. In view of the explosion of simulation technologies, and it’s only going to increase and get ever more realistic than it already is, the question has arisen, if we can create virtual worlds, might not we in turn be virtual beings ‘living’ in a simulated landscape programmed for some purpose or other, by other beings which might be futuristic humans recreating their past history, or ET’s video game version of “The Life and Times on the Third Rock in the Sol Planetary System”. It’s a best seller on Krypton! Though once just sci-fi speculation, that profound idea that we don’t really exist as flesh-and-blood is now taken very seriously indeed.

Now either you’ve got to believe we exist in The Twilight Zone No. One where denizens of the micro world have an ‘awareness’ of their surroundings and possess some degree of ‘free will’ to react to and within those surroundings, OR you believe we live in The Twilight Zone No. Two where said denizens of the micro world are programmed by higher authority (which I’ll just call the Supreme Programmer) to behave in the way we see and measure them behave.

Either you have to accept that the fields, forces and particles that collectively make up the Standard Model of Particle (nee Quantum) Physics have ‘free will’ and thus are somehow ‘alive’ and ‘animated’ in some sense (although their ‘free will’ comes with some restrictions just like your free will comes with restrictions as noted above – you can’t commit suicide by going back in time and killing your younger self or hold your breath underwater for three straight hours), OR  else it is all programming software which implies an intelligence (that Supreme Programmer) somewhere on up the line.

Okay, having had my rant, now you may all now call those nice young men in their clean white coats to come and take me away, ha-ha, he-he, to the funny farm!

# What I’m driving at here is the hypothesis (not original to me by the way) that we ‘live’ in a Simulated Universe as virtual reality. Interested parties might like to have a look-see at http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Further reading:

Maier, Bruce; Reality is Virtual or Why the Universe is the Way it is; Infinity Publishing; west Conshohocken, PA; 2010:

And the related website: http://www.realityisvirtual.com



Even More Random Thoughts In Physics

Sometimes you have a new thought, an idea, or eureka moment, but it’s not gutsy enough to expand into a reasonable length article or essay. So, here’s yet another potpourri of thoughts dealing with physics and related too good not to record, but with not enough meat available to flesh out. 

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* In reviewing several of my essays I’ve noted that I’ve occasionally said that there is just the one physics, yet I’ve often said for the record that quantum physics and classical physics (General Relativity) are incompatible and forever will be. In other words, there’s no quantum gravity and no Theory of Everything (TOE). Is this in conflict? No. There is the one physics even though you’d be hard pressed to unify thermodynamics with levers, inclined planes and pullies.

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* Universal Parameters: You cannot determine from first principles what the properties of the Universe, or the fundamental particles that make up the Universe, are. They apparently can have free range. A proton is 2000 times more massive than an electron, but you can’t calculate that from the theoretical laws, principles and relationships of physics. It’s only determined experimentally. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the proton couldn’t have been 0.2, 2, 20, 200 or 20,000 times the mass of an electron. The same applies to the relative forces. The theoretical laws, principles and relationships of physics do not require an opposite yet of equal value charge between the negative electron and the positive proton. Presumably the value of each could have been as far apart as their masses – that is a proton could have been 2000 times as positive as the electron is negative. Why not? There’s no reason why not apart from the fact that the Universe as we know it wouldn’t work, but then we wouldn’t be here to worry about that or what might have been. 

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* We’re all taught in high school the above, that the electric charge of an electron is equal and opposite to that of a proton. The ‘why’ of the relationship is never explained in any shape, manner or form. I’ve never seen an explanation given in any popular particle or quantum physics book. Now either the explanation is so bloody obvious authors don’t feel the need to explain the ‘why’ of the matter and insult the reader’s intelligence, or else the ‘why’ is in the way, way, way too hard basket and authors avoid the question and the issue to avoid appearing ignorant about so fundamental a fact.

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* Black Holes would make excellent, in fact perfect, thermos (vacuum) flasks. Pour into a Black Hole the contents of a star, say like the Sun. All that heat is then trapped and I do mean trapped!

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* Light is a thing; gravity is a thing; things can effect each other, so when it comes to the bending of light in a gravitational field, there’s no need for all this nonsense of warped space, time or space-time, which, after all, are not-things but just mental concepts.

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* If something quantum happens for no reason at all (i.e. – unstable nuclei goes poof) why doesn’t everything micro happen for no reason at all. Or, if some quantum happenings are just probabilities, why aren’t all micro happenings probabilities.

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* An isolated neutron has a half-life of roughly 15 minutes before going poof or decaying into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. Neutrons that ‘live’ in a community of neutrons like in the nucleus of atoms; as in a neutron star, don’t decay. They are stable in these community relations. That seems like something is screwy somewhere. Why is it so? I thought that might explain why the hydrogen atom (otherwise known as protium) had no neutron (just one electron and one proton), but then heavy hydrogen (deuterium) does have one neutron (plus one electron and one proton) so things get weirder and weirder.

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* You obviously relate to being a human in a human-sized world. You can imagine being a cat or a dog and living in their world. You can probably extend that down to the world of insects and imagine yourself as a fly or ant or butterfly. At a stretch, you might be able to relate to and imagine yourself as a micro-organism living in say a drop of pond water or in the blood stream. But what about navigating down to the worldview of a photon or an electron? That I suspect is way, way, way too alien to imagine in your wildest dreams.

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* We conceive of nanotechnology as building up from micro scratch what technology we want (say micro devices to traverse our blood vessels and clean them up from the inside) by manipulating atoms from the ground up and building whatever we want from those fundamental ‘Lego’ blocks. But what if the fundamental particles are themselves products of nanotechnology?  



Chemistry Is Weird

Despite the fact that most of us were exposed to the subject in high school, I’d wager that 99.99% of us don’t give a passing moments thought to the reality in our world, the reality which makes you, you – chemistry. Yet, even if you did chemistry in high school, you probably never gave a passing moments thought to how weird chemistry really is. Weirdness aside, chemistry works. We all rely on that, except when it comes to the chemistry that rules the roost of that brain thingy of yours.

Chemistry is really weird if you stop and think about it. The basics from the ground up, those fundamental constituents, protons, neutrons and electrons, have the properties of charge, mass and spin and presumably exist in a solid state at STP (standard temperature and pressure) or otherwise. In other words, they have none of the properties, apart from mass, associated with any of the properties associated with the chemical elements (like being other than a solid, liquid or gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure); having colour;

Given those elementary particles, if you start to pile them up, well charge plus charge equals a greater or lesser overall charge; mass plus mass equals more mass; spin plus spin – well I’m not sure spin is a property that can be added or subtracted.

If it could be so arranged, but we’ll make it so since this is a thought experiment, a baseball-sized collection of electrons or neutrons or protons at STP would obviously have mass, and a lot of electric charge in the case of protons and electrons. But what would the colour be? What would it taste like? What would it smell like? What would it feel like? These are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions.

But assemble these fundamentals in various combinations and all of a sudden you do get all of the elements with their associated colours and tastes and so on. That’s a bit weird for starters.

How many atoms of gold (for example but any other element would do) have to come together or be assembled before you have the properties of gold? It surely has to be more than one atom worth surely. 

But even weirder is when you start to combine the various elements with associated properties into molecules that have properties totally unlike the parent elements. You have hydrogen and oxygen as dry gases at STP that make water which is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is a solid at STP and Carbon is a solid at STP, and Oxygen is a gas at STP, but Carbon Dioxide is a gas at STP whereas Silicon Dioxide (sand) is a solid at STP, yet Carbon and Silicon are like mother and daughter in terms of similarity. Then you have Chlorine, a poisonous yellow gas at STP, and Sodium, which is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough such that if you swallow any you will really do yourself a very serious mischief. However, Sodium Chloride is just pure table salt and a compound your body requires to survive and thrive!

Carbon isn’t a poison, Oxygen you can breathe, but you’d die in a pure Carbon Dioxide environment, or even in a pure Carbon Monoxide environment.

All of chemistry is deterministic and predictable, both inorganic and organic, with the apparent exception of brain chemistry, which I’ll get to shortly. 

You’d think chemistry would be straightforward, but chemistry can act in rather weird, even unpredictable ways. I mean, if you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you get a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). If you have two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen you get, in a straightforward fashion, a molecule of water at STP (wet). Combine Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in a certain way and you get sugar (sweet). Another arrangement can give you chlorophyll (green).

Now how is this weird? Well, the basic constituents, protons, electrons and neutrons aren’t salty, wet, sweet or green. Sodium and Chlorine atoms aren’t salty; table salt is salty. Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t wet at STP; water is wet at STP. Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t sweet; sugar is sweet. The constituent atoms comprising the chlorophyll molecule (Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Magnesium) aren’t green; chlorophyll is green. 

So how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don’t have those properties? It’s not quite as strange as getting something from nothing or something happening for no reason at all, but nevertheless IMHO something’s screwy somewhere. And enigmas like these all lead back to that most fundamental of all issues – what is reality?

Or take another case – Carbon. You’d think Carbon is Carbon is Carbon, but no. Carbon can be charcoal or coal; Carbon can be graphite; Carbon can be a diamond. The various properties of these substances, all just Carbon, drastically differ. Chemistry is indeed weird.

Let’s re-ask the question: How do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being either a solid liquid or gas depending on how you vary temperature and pressure) that all matter (like the fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms/elements, in turn the building blocks of molecules/compounds) has, morph into properties that only some kinds of matter have, like sweetness, transparentness, hardness, colour, malleability, etc. or properties drastically different from their constituents – like two gases making a liquid.

I’ll just note here that while the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans do not. The human body for example is collectively a solid, a liquid and a gas. Actually I don’t even tend to think of the human body as an organism but rather a colony composed of billions of micro-organisms, both the cells that make you up as well as all those other microbes that your body plays host to. But that’s an aside.

Speaking of the human body, the body (including the brain and therefore the mind) is one huge chemical processing factory. What goes in is not the same as what comes out!

When it comes to the most of your bodily bits and pieces, your body chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe in Oxygen and out will come Carbon Dioxide. If you eat X today, your digestive juices process it in the same way as when you ate X the week before. You expect your liver chemistry to detoxify those beers you had with the boys last night. If you take medication, whether it is prescription or self prescribed, you count on the fact that X + Y = Z yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your doctor prescribes various blood and/or urine tests, there’s an extremely high degree of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the doctor to then follow-up on, and you will have confidence in that follow-up.

The brain is just a soup vat of chemicals, organic chemicals and bio-chemicals, but chemicals all the same. Therefore anything and everything rooted within the confines of the brain is rooted in chemistry. 

But it is absolutely amazing what chemistry can accomplish when it is part and parcel of your brain chemistry. Things don’t seem quite as deterministic then. Your brain chemistry holds sway over your sensory inputs, memory, desires, emotions, creativity, etc. and we know that those sorts of attributes in humans can be pretty unpredictable.

Still, perhaps one afternoon you smell (sensory input) your next door neighbour’s southern fried chicken cooking which then triggers off a whole potful of internal responses, all triggered in turn by your brain chemistry. The chain reaction might start off by all of a sudden feeling hungry (desire) then remembering (memory) that frozen chicken you have in the freezer and how it has been quite a while since you had a good finger-lickin’ chicken dinner but you’ll need to pop into the corner store to pick up some of those 57 herbs and spices. But then you get an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you would a turkey and forgo the Colonel’s secret recipe, even though you get all teary-eyed (emotions) when you recall how your significant other proposed to you at your local KFC outlet following the senior prom: all that from what’s basically just chemicals doing their chemical thing.  

If you recall something (as per the above example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You don’t get something, in this case memory recall, for nothing – at no cost to you. But how can chemistry result in memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that make memory a product (and ditto all those other nebulous mental ‘products’ like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity)? Computer memory recall isn’t chemistry of course – there aren’t any chemical reactions going on in your PC – but rather physics (energy expenditure moving electrons around, etc.) Anyway, laptops (to date anyway) don’t have those other nebulous human (and animal) traits like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity that are presumably chemistry driven. But there is more to the anomalies of brain chemistry that just equating a memory or creativity with a chemical, if in fact the two can be equated at all.

Actually I can’t accept the proposition that a molecule (however complex) can equal a memory or be a new creative idea. There must be trillions and trillions of unique memories and creative thoughts (that probably become memories) stored within the brains of the collective of human and animal societies, yet that number would vastly outnumber the possible combos of types of molecules available. It would appear that there has to be more to memory and creativity than just chemistry – it would appear so, but is it so? 

How is it that you can ‘train’ your brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time – no alarm clock – and it doesn’t matter what time you went to sleep and how many hours of sleep you actually had? How is it that your brain chemistry likes one piece of music but not another piece, or how you can turnoff liking a particular piece of music that used to be your favourite, or type of food, or type of animal – the list is endless. How can your brain chemistry remember X one day, but not the next day? Presumably that creative thought you had today could have been thought of yesterday but wasn’t – same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. How does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change over time? How come your brain chemistry can result in sexual arousal from viewing one image but not from another image? And it’s not just human brain chemistry either. Given seemingly identical circumstances, my cats will not of necessity perform identical actions. I’m sure there is a logical chemically driven deterministic explanation, except that it’s all so complex and interwoven that it gives more the appearance of indeterminacy and free will. If 99.99% of chemistry is deterministic, I’m sure brain chemistry will prove to be also.



The Quantum Realm: Part Two

Now the really interesting thing about quantum physics isn’t so much the physics but the philosophy behind it all. Why is it so? What does it mean? That these philosophical issues matter and should be of interest is because you, the macro reader, is made up entirely – from the ground up – out of the residents of the realm of the micro, the inhabitants of the realm of the quantum.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

As a review, with commentary, these are my takes on quantum strangeness:

Case Study #1 deals with that double slit experiment. IMHO photons fired one at a time at the double slit should not form a classic wave interference pattern with or without slit detectors in place. The concept of superposition belongs in “The Twilight Zone”, though apparently, so the scenario goes, what’s emitted is a particle; what’s detected is a particle; but the flight or pathway in-between is a wave-of-probability. It’s the slit detector that changes wave-of-probability into location, but that exact location must have existed even had the detector (our stand-in observer) not been in place. How does that explain the one photon at a time interfering with itself and causing that classic wave interference pattern? It doesn’t, but it’s a better bet than trying to come to terms with the idea of a thing being in two places at the same time.

Case Study #2, dealing with entanglement, well let’s just say that a particle on one side of the Universe should be independent of the fate of a particle on the opposite side of the Universe. More superposition equals more of “The Twilight Zone”.

Case Study #3: There needs to be a bona fide causality inspired reason why an electron gives away a photon and drops to a lower energy level. It’s not a whim thing. Maybe it’s another photon bumping into the electron and discharging the absorbed photon, maybe not, but it’s not a whim thing.

Case Study #4: Neutrinos should not endlessly change their clothes on route. The fact that they do contributed to some serious reflection that the core of our Sun had actually shut down. Scientists when looking for electron-neutrinos emitted by the Sun’s solar furnace didn’t see enough of them and thought the worst. It wasn’t until much later that they realised they had missed all those electron-neutrinos that the Sun had actually given off but which had changed their attire between the Sun and the Earth.

Case Study #5 notes that if you are made of matter, it would not be a good idea to shake hands with your antimatter twin self! But why matter and antimatter should go poof at all is a bit strange. An electron has a negative charge and its antimatter twin has a positive charge (hence the name positron). They go poof upon contact. But a proton has a positive charge equal and opposite to that of an electron and they don’t go poof when brought into contact so there’s more than just opposite charges annihilating each other at work here obviously. There’s no question that chemical reactions can give off energy, but total annihilation – wow. 

Case Study #6: Quantum Tunnelling should happen for a reason – it doesn’t. Quantum Tunnelling shouldn’t happen instantaneously since that violates the cosmic speed limit – the speed of light. The fact that in the micro world, barriers, well ain’t, makes all human inmates wish they were subatomic particles! 

The overall image that keeps springing to mind is all those Hollywood special effects. They would be an excellent explanation for all of the above weirdness. Think about it!

Finally, we should also note that most of the above examples or case histories involve quantum probability, uncertainty, indeterminism, etc. with respect or relative to the observer which could be you or me.

Case Study #1 suggests that photons (or electrons or any other fundamental particle) are in a superposition of state, which suggests that they can be apparently in two (or more) locations at the same time, and it’s only based on probability as to exactly where that location is. But it is in just one location as the addition of actual slit detectors verifies. So, the key point is that the photon or electron or whatever is 100% at a specific set of coordinates even if the double slit experiment suggests that the photon or electron or whatever is smeared out over a wide ranging area and only probably here or probably there.  So probability really bites the dust since location (one slit or the other) is confirmed by observation – there’s location, location, location; not probable, probable, probable!

In Case Study #2 we have more about that superposition of state whereby a particle may actually be a particle or an antiparticle (probability is 50/50) or spin up or spin down (probability 50/50). But you know, and I know, that in reality, one particle IS a particle (probability 100%) and the other IS an antiparticle (probability 100%) or one particle IS spin up (100% probability) and the other IS spin down (100% probability). There is no indeterminacy even if there is no observer, there is only determinacy, positive actuality, whether or not one or the other is observed. There is no across the universe communication. There is no ‘spooky action at a distance’. There is no probability involved other than 100% probability, otherwise known as a sure thing.

In Case Study #3 we have an electron that absorbs a photon’s energy and thus quantum jumps to a higher energy level. It then becomes a matter of probability as to when that electron emits that photon and jumps back down to a lower energy level. But, as in the case of radioactive decay, the odds are 100% that it will happen. Probability need not apply here. Probability is not applicable. The key concept here is again, ‘sooner or later’.

In Case Study #4, we might not know why the neutrino changes clothes, or exactly when and under what circumstances, so, as far as we are concerned it’s all boiled down to statistical probability what clothes any particular neutrino will be wearing when detected. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that causality is operating and that it’s 100% certain that the neutrino is wearing the clothes that causality has dictated. There’s no probability involved, only the probability that we’re probably pretty dumb for not figuring out why.   

Finally, in Case Study #5 somehow particles and antiparticles seemingly ‘know’ when they meet and greet whether to go poof or not go poof. The mystery is how they ‘know’. But it’s total certainty one way or the other and the observer has no relevance or say in the matter.

Case Study #6: Quantum Tunnelling, as already noted, happens for no reason at all. It’s responsible for radioactive decay which happens for no apparent reason at all. There is no way, rhyme or reason that enables one to predict when a quantum tunnelling event will transpire. It’s all probability. Either that, or a subatomic particle has a free will mind of its own and the knowledge and the ability of a Harry Houdini.

I have one other observation while on the issue of causality and probability if you please. If something quantum happens for no reason at all (i.e. – unstable subatomic nuclei goes poof) why doesn’t everything micro happen for no reason at all. Or, if some quantum happenings are just probabilities, why aren’t all micro happenings probabilities. Now IMHO if 99.999% of all physical effects can be traced back to one or more causes, it’s pretty safe to suggest, even conclude if you’re a betting person, that 100% of all physical can be traced back to one or more causes, even if those causes remain as yet unknown.

Lastly, consider and reconsider the quantum mantra: Anything that isn’t forbidden is compulsory; anything that can happen will happen. Does that sound like a probability statement to you?

I suggest this puts the kibosh on quantum physics being steeped in probability. There is no probability once you eliminate the observer and the observer’s fixation on either where things are; where something is, or whether something is or is not going to happen, and when something is going to happen. Before there were observers, things were somewhere, fixed and absolute, things did their thing without any guesswork or decision-making involved, and things happened sooner or later with absolute certainty.