Last time I channeled my inner music empath→ EDM/Dance Music
One of the things I mentioned in that entry on EDM is how unpredictable and certain it is. Here we move to science, and talk about how reality is actually literally mathematically unpredictable.
One of the early entries in this #37 series was on astronomy, which is reliant on principles of Einstein's relativity and classical Newtonian laws of physics. But I’m just as big a nerd for the counterpart of astrophysics, which I’d argue is quantum physics. However, when we scale down, weird shit happens. None of Einstein's or Newton’s laws make sense. So just want to go through three examples of the coolest quantum physics concepts that illustrate this.
Two-slit experiment:
Start’s with A Bang blog explains:
Involves firing a single electron at a barrier that contains two narrow slits in it, separated by only a short distance, with a screen behind them. Common sense tells you that the electron should go through either the left slit or the right slit, and that if you fire many such electrons in a row, you should get two bunches: one corresponding to electrons that went through the left slit, the other corresponding to those that went through the right slit. But that’s not what happens at all.
Instead, what you see on the screen looks like an interference pattern. These individual electrons are behaving like waves, and the patterns looks like what you’d get if you fired continuous light waves through a double slit, or even sent water waves through a tank with two gaps where the slits are.
But these are single electrons! Where are they, at any given point in time, and which slit did they go through?
You might think to set up a detector at each slit, to measure which one each electron goes through. And you can do this: electron #1 goes through the right slit; #2 goes left; #3 goes left; #4 goes right; #5 goes left, and so on. But now, when you look at the pattern of electrons on the screen, you don’t get the interference pattern you had before. You only get the two bunches. Somehow, the act of observing, measuring, or forcing an interaction has changed the outcome.
The Schroedingers Cat thought experiment is a way to imagine the implications of what’s going on with the two-slit experiment using regular size objects. Say you put a cat and a veil of poison in a box. If the cat eats the poison, it dies, if it doesn’t it survives, right? However, the box is closed so since people don’t have x-ray vision, we can’t determine the cat’s status unless we open the box. So basically until or unless we open the box, the cat would be, not can be, but actually is both dead and alive. But if we try and open the box, we will find it’s either dead or alive. If we were all super super super tiny, that’s what the world would be like for us. This applies to stuff on the quantum scale. That’s how things are in the minuscule universe.
There are some real life implications here. I mean we often encounter situations where we won’t know what happens until we take action. We have agency on how our reality turns out, science, the double-slit experiment in a way is literal physical proof of that.
The other idea to entertain is that anything is possible, even if the probability of somethings are higher. Like it’s literally mathematically possible that an atom from your monitor or screen that you’re reading is really on the moon, it’s must much more likely to be part of your monitor.
Spooky Entanglement:
Let this man explain this phenomenon-
Makes one wonder about things like deja vu, telepathy, twin flames, etc.
The uncertainty principle says that we cannot measure the position (x) and the momentum (p) of a particle with absolute precision. The more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other.
What’s crazy about this is it’s true in theory as much as it is in observation. There is no mathematical calculation where it’s possible to measure a microscopic particle’s speed and position. You can only do one. What’s the reason for this uncertainty? 🤔
We have evolved to see the world through the lens of certainty, things have a place and causes have effects. But that’s not how the foundation of reality works, which has significant philosophical and spiritual implications.
This is incredible, there is a poetic beauty about that mystery.
Street Art of the Day — Einstein (Washington, DC)
