Behind the scenes of Quantum realm with Dr. Spiros — Part 2!
Comprehending the confusing universe with Dr. Spyridon Michalakis
Disclaimer — The following article may contain spoilers and explanations to some very fascinating albeit mystifying questions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and much more!
“What’s going on? Why is that happening? How is this happening?”
— Scott Lang, all the time in the Quantum Realm
In front of the man who created the Quantum realm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we were as clueless as Scott Lang. To satisfy our curiosity, we asked him many questions ranging from space to the quantum.
Can you explain the workings of the universe in your opinion?
There is something underlying space and time, including the laws of physics. So if space and time are like this (he said, pointing to his t-shirt), then the things that underlie my t-shirt are the threads that make it up. And each thread is made up of molecules and then you can keep going deeper. But it is the relationships between these molecules that make the thread up. Chemistry is all about making bonds. If one electron doesn’t have any relationship with another, then it is the same as thinking both of them to be infinitely apart.
From our point of view, if there is no correlation and no interaction, you can turn off the lights and assume that I am at an infinite amount of distance away. How do we know that we are close to each other, if there is no interaction? If you have ever had the misfortune of going under general anaesthesia, you are gone from this universe, you become everything. You cannot observe the happenings around, since no time is passing for you. You disappear and you reappear, and it’s like no time has passed. This state is not like a dream where you are in a distorted state, but you do register time passing. Here, you disconnect yourself from everything that registers your interactions with your surroundings. Your body is connected to everything but it is just that you don’t register the change. It’s like a switch to turn your consciousness on and off.
You only have to turn it off to understand; you become the universe unto yourself. For you don’t exist relative to something else.
You don’t even know that you change or you exist and that is what death is like.
Encouraged by this astonishing answer, and befuddled on what reality and existence actually are, we asked -
How do we define Reality?
Reality is something funny. We define it in a weird way. Do you think I’m touching wood? (He asked, as he touched a wood panel.)
You have never touched anything in your life. If you zoom in and see, it is electromagnetic repulsion - Pauli’s exclusion principle… No two electrons can stay in the same spin. If they could, then they would have to be entangled. If they are entangled, then they become a higher level object. They are no longer two separate entities occupying a single space, but a single object. Entanglement is not spooky action from a distance. If you take two particles that are entangled through a distance, they are still the same object. According to our point of view, it looks as if they are separated, but in actuality, they are essentially the same object, we are just looking at them from 2 different points of view, and that is what reality is.
Curious to get some answers we’d been looking for, we asked him —
A quantum state has multiple states; but on measurement, it collapses to a single value. Why?
Quantum superposition is not exactly that.
Superposition is nothing but the misalignment of your point of view with everyone else’s point of view. You’re expecting a yes or no answer to a maybe question.
For example, what is the colour of a rainbow? It’s not just blue or red, but a host of 7 colours. But, different people see different colours according to their perspective.
That’s precisely how a quantum state is. When you are in multiple realities and everyone except you are in one, you are somehow misaligned from everyone else’s perspective. All other points of view have locked into the same frame of reference but you somehow have the ability to look at the universe in a different way.
When we probe with magnetism or lasers, we explore internal aspects of reality that we cannot even imagine. We need machines and proxies because we’re limited in the way we think about everything.
Superposition is the misalignment of your point of view with the others’. When you realign yourself with everyone else’s point of view, it feels like all possibilities except the one you see have disappeared and that gives a yes/no answer. If you could reset yourself to the previous point of view, all possibilities would appear exactly as they were before.
Now, a step closer to what we were dying to know, we further asked -
Is time travel possible in the Quantum Realm?
I knew it, you’re fishing for what happens in Avengers: Endgame (he said, chuckling).
The concept of time dissolves away in space. So now what is more fundamental than time? Why is time assumed one dimensional, instead of 4D or 3D like space? What is it keeping track of? What is the ‘something’ without which time would cease to exist? The answer is ‘change’.
Entropic change is always in a particular direction. That’s because it always tends to events that have more possibilities of happening. Basic Statistical Mechanics states that there exist multiple microscopic configurations that all lead to the same macroscopic configuration. The final observation is of the one combination that has the most possibility of happening. Without change, there is no time.
Assume you’re under anesthesia; time disappears for you because you cannot register the change. By turning off your ability to register change, you don’t realize the changes happening around you that is apparent to everyone else. From your point of view, you’ll be eternal and omnipotent but useless because you don’t even know that you exist. With that perspective, one can do so much damage to time in the quantum realm that it becomes unrecognizable. Time, from my research, is our reflection on the other side. There is equilibrium always with the time that completes us. Time is not 1D but infinite dimensional like we are. It balances everything we do because, in the end, there can be no change. At the highest level, something arose from nothing, which is impossible. It is static at this level since the concept of change doesn’t exist. For change to occur, it has to come from within. Though a chemical reaction in equilibrium seems static, internal changes are happening. Time and ourselves are analogous to a chemical reaction in equilibrium.
We are time from time’s point of view. We don’t consider ourselves one dimensional. Neither is time.
Can you explain Feynman multiple histories that a particle can take?
Why did Einstein say that the speed of light is the fastest one can ever travel? How is it possible that there cannot be anything else that can travel faster than this?
For example, consider a highway connecting Trichy and Chennai. How fast does the highway move? What a silly question. From the highway’s point of view, it is already there. Similarly, photons are highways through which the electrons move through space-time. Space-time allows one to take all possible paths from one event to another. There are an infinite amount of pathways. But, from one point of view, it makes certain paths more resonant than others. If there is one point entangled with another point, that creates a possibility of a wormhole through space-time. One path would be to squeeze ourselves through that, and reach our destination point. Or else we could travel through infinite other ways, going through Point 1, Point 2 and so on to reach the same destination.
What is most likely to happen from our point of view is probably the one that will happen, the one we’ll have access to; even though underlying this probability is a uniform distribution of possibilities, i.e. every possibility is equally likely.
It is true that randomness and chaos are at the foundations of reality.
Yet, somehow, when we zoom out and look at it from a macroscopic point of view, these seemingly random possibilities congregate together, forming mountains and valleys. Some possibilities become much more probable than others and we have the laws of physics appear. So, that’s what is really happening.
Our heads reeling, we were left to ponder all the counter-intuitive, unfathomable ideas explained by Dr. Spiros. We touched upon quantum physics, philosophy and chemistry; pulled together Einstein, Feynman and other great personas, and satiated our curiosity with regard to worm-holes, entanglement and superposition in this deep conversation. We thank Dr. Spiros for patiently answering the questions bombarded at him.
This interview was taken in collaboration with Sahil Mittal.
