What we have here is a recently abandoned car dealership. It’s a slightly eeerie sight. Not too long ago, this place was alive with shiny new SUVs and pickups and vans and sedans. There were real live salesmen preying on the vanity of real live customers, recommending package options that included 8-way power seats, cruise control, lumbar adjustment, performance suspension, power sunroof, alloy wheels, all the stuff you really do need. They were there to talk about trade-in value, financing terms, sound systems, matching floor rugs, “get you a special deal with my manager”, and on and on. Now the manager is gone, the service bay is empty, the lot is desolate, and the phones ring no more. The last shiny new Explorer and Mustang and Ranger have been driven off the lot (this was a Ford dealer). It almost seems as though a bit of the American dream has died.

Well, actually not. This isn’t the start of a social revolution; gasoline hasn’t hit $10 a gallon yet. This was one of the last of the small, in-town car dealerships that were typical back in the 1950s. The trend today is toward big mega-auto malls out on the highways along the suburban fringes. (Their locations are very inconvenient for most people to go to for service — which is just fine with the dealers, as they don’t want to hear about your problems once you’ve signed the dotted line; the days of the local merchant who stands by his product and is there for you is a thing of the distant past, with cars and with most everything else).

But let me dream for a moment. What if American decided to finally bite the bullet and end its century-old love affair with the car. What if we decided to set up a high-quality public transport system with plenty of busses and trains and computer-assisted paratransit systems that could respond to your pick-up requests within a half hour. What if we perfected some kind of rechargeable electric-assist motorized bicycles for short trips, and allowed you to bring them on board all the new busses and trains that you would now depend on (with recharging outlets)? Yea, I can hear the objections — what about the snowy winters, especially up north? And on rainy days? And do you want to ride a bike three miles on a humid 100 degree day in Florida or Texas? (And yet, people still buy motorcycles). What about the elderly? Or pregnant women? What about people who live way out in the middle of nowhere, in the Kentucky hollows or Nevada desert or in the wheatfields of South Dakota?

Yes, leaving the auto (and its small-truck cousins) behind is a whole lot more complex that it sounds at first, just because over the past century our way of life has been built up around it. But someday the oil that all of this depends on may not be there, not in sufficient quantities anyway. And hydrogen and battery power (or hybrids) may not come to the rescue either, at least not at the volume and price levels that are necessary to keep the party going. So perhaps it isn’t too early to ponder the sight of this abandoned car dealership and consider what a world without autos (or with fewer and much smaller autos) would be like.

A lot would have to change here in America, and some people would suffer for it. But with enough Yankee ingenuity, I think it would eventually be all right. There would be some major changes; some towns would shrink or disappear, others would grow. Life would be different. But it might be healthy and even pleasant to use your own muscles to get around again along streets filled with pedestrians and bikes, mostly free of cars and trucks (other than occasional paratransit buses and delivery vehicles). No more 8 mile traffic jams, no more horrible high-speed collisions out on icy Interstates, no more road rage, no more drunk driving tragedies, no more honking and flipping the bird at the guy who just cut you off, less smog and less global warming . . . . and no more car dealerships and “I’ll talk to the manager.”

Really now, just why are we fighting to preserve all of this?

OFFICE SPOUSES AND GHOSTLY SIGNALS: I heard a lady talking this morning on the local NPR radio station about “office marriages”. These are close, somewhat flirtatious friendships between a man and a woman in the workplace, where both (hopefully) are otherwise committed. According to the rules of the game, as spelled out this morning, office spouses know enough not to overstep the boundaries of propriety, but crowd the line nonetheless. They go out to lunch sometimes, exchange gossip regularly, and maybe even share ‘innocent’ innuendoes of sexual interest now and then, so long as these are made in good taste and are not acted upon (but are simply greeted by a sly and understanding smile). According to the NPR report, such office relationships are a dime a dozen.

Hmm. Can’t say that I’ve been in any such relationships. Nor that I want to be. But now that you mention it, I can think of some happily married women at work who seem to want to be my friend. To a guy like me, whose brain was never wired to “read the signals” that most people recognize instinctively, such approaches are usually confusing. At first I wonder, are these chicks interested in dating? (I’m not very nosy, so I don’t keep track of who is “available” and who is not). Then I see the ring (or rings, in many cases) on the left hand, so I wonder, what the hell — is this an invitation to adultery? Oh goody, that’s all I need; a jealous hubby coming after me following a rushed and probably not very satisfying little attempt at orgasmic exchange somewhere.

But now that it’s all been explained, it makes more sense. Nonetheless, I still very much dislike it. I hate all the “unspoken rules” and complex signals that go on between people, especially men and women. I believe in denotation, not connotation. Basically I don’t pick up on subtle signals that people send my way; and as far as I’m concerned, that’s all for the best. It’s a “fail-safe” situation; i.e., nothing happens (other than my reputation as a dork grows).

But then again, I’m not a total reptile. I still try to be nice to people who are nice to me. So, there are some married women who keep flitting around the edges of my radar screen at work. Just today, one of my “clients” came over to my cubicle to borrow a pen so as to correct something on a document, then stood next to me as she made her corrections on my desk, chatting pleasantly all along. Then about an hour later, she and her hubby (who works for the same agency as I do; luckily he’s usually assigned to a different location, as he carries a gun!) were near by, discussing things in the manner that definitely-married couples do.

Well, OK. So now I know. But still, I wake up some mornings and say, just how the heck did I get stuck on this planet?

I’d rather have talked here about quantum theory and how a non-mathematician like me can best understand it. After reading about 10 different books on quantum theory over the past 20 years, I’ve finally formed my own way of thinking about quantum particles and their weird, weird behavior. In a nutshell, I think of them as mixtures of particles, little spaces where the particle can jump around in, and waves. The wave defines probability zones within the little space where the particle jumps, defining where it should be more frequently and less frequently, on average.

For the next big insight, you need to use what you remember regarding the concepts behind differential calculus to understand how the particle jumps around within the little space. I.e., it sits still for an infinitely small differential in time, then moves at random to another point within the little space over an infinitely small differential in time, at an infinitely high speed (yes, faster than light speed), then repeats the process over and over. What happens? The system becomes a cloud, a “superposition” where the quantum particle appears at least once (and in the high-probability areas, much more than once) everywhere within the little space, during any finite interval in time. The particle is smeared over the little space, which can travel thru the air like a ghost. In fact, the beam of electrons in your TV or CRT is like a conga-line of ghosts, flying across the tube.

The final concept is that this wave, and the little space around the particle that the wave governs, can get warped and twisted when it slams into something substantial (i.e., meets up with a high-energy situation or a wall of many, many quantum particles organized together into atoms and molecules). This sometimes causes “wavefunction collapse”, where the ghost wave shrinks into a tiny particle at a definite location, e.g. a little dot on that TV or CRT screen.

Well, I’ll stop here, but I hope to post a page on my site in the near future to flesh out my “rough” way of thinking about the quantum particle. I think that it helps explain (to the non-scientist mind) all the weird stuff like interference, Young’s double slit experiment, Schrodinger’s Cat, decoherence, faster-than-light speed quantum travel, quantum tunneling past a barrier that particles should not otherwise be able to get through, etc.

And it does all this without totally abandoning “realism”, without getting lost in the abstractions of universes that split up each time a particle comes to a fork in its pathway (such that all possibilities are realized) and other way-out-there explanations that physicists and philosophers offer. I don’t claim this to be a 100% accurate view of quantum mechanics (or even as accurate and precise as presently possible). But it’s still a whole lot better for the average Joe than going on Wikipedia and looking up the various articles about quantum physics, reading stuff written by young grad students who discuss eigenvectors and Hilbert spaces and tensor operations with glee (knowing full well that the average person reading the article has no idea what that gibberish is all about). They’re just being show-offs.

But nonetheless, sometimes I wish I was in back in their nerdy world (I went to engineering school and learned a fair amount about basic physics), dealing with those obtuse but ultimately rational mathematical concepts and symbols. As opposed to my little office environment of today, with its even more confusing realm of ghostly and slightly dangerous signals from married women.

What’s this? A hurricane-season weather map of the Caribbean under LSD? Microbes under magnification? A barnyard floor after a goat gets sick? Or maybe just a really poor attempt at computer art? Well, my blog as been criticized as being overly “word-driven”, so I’m just trying to get in touch with the other side of the brain, with the visual side of human experience. Yea, I know what you’re probably thinking: stick with the left side. Get back to word abstractions, not abstract art (or whatever the heck this is). OK, fine.

Speaking of the brain, I’ve been continuing my readings on the topic of human consciousness. The latest read is A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran. Dr. Ramachandran (aka “Rama”) is a neuroscientist, and this is definitely a nuts-and-bolts approach to the brain and how consciousness is created within it. Not that Dr. Rama, or anyone else, quite knows yet just how consciousness is in fact created amidst all those squishy neurons and electric pulses residing up above your eyebrows. But the good doctor can and does take a lot of interesting guesses.

One point that Ramachandran makes is that experimental evidence shows that conscious decisions to move some part of the body (the finger, the arm, the mouth, etc.) are actually set in place in the brain before we become aware of it. Well OK, that makes sense in a highly instinctual situation like eating, fighting or sex. But even in a calm mood, the decision to get up out of a chair or reach for a telephone is already in motion by the time that you think you are deciding to do such a thing. It’s almost as if there is a “zombie self”, a machine up there in the head, which really decides what to do. The conscious part thinks it is calling the shots, but in reality it is simply watching. (This is called epiphenomenalism). A lot of consciousness scholars would say that it’s even worse than this; my whole description here is totally wrong, as it still assumes “the little man within”. They say that we have to get used to a whole new way of thinking about what we really are.

These are Alice-In-Wonderland times we are living in. Is anything really as it seems to be?

One more bumpy segue here: A guy at work who knows some Middle-Eastern Arab people said that his friends believe that al-Zarqawi’s death was something like an old-fashioned Mafia rub-out. They postulate that there are ongoing arguments and power struggles between the various factions within the Iraqi insurgency, and that some factions recently decided that al-Zarqawi had gotten a little too big for his britches. So they got in touch with the United States military, and we agreed to do their dirty work. It keeps them from walking down the “Arab street” with Arab blood on their hands (especially since it’s an intra-Sunni thing).

Hmmm, something to think about. It’s possible that the local Iraqi insurgency factions, with their Baathist / Saddam Hussein roots, decided that the al Qaeda outsiders represented by al-Zarqawi and their pan-Sunni Arabist theologies were no longer useful and desirable. If so, I see two implications: first the local insurgency in Iraq now feels strong enough and confident enough to work alone; not an indication that the US will successfully establish a stable democratic government in Iraq. But second, the al Qaeda idea of uniting the Islamic world against the west is thus not catching fire. Anti-westernism is still a strong and dangerous current in that world, and the risk of terrorism is going to be with us for a long, long time. But as to the al Qaeda ideology fostering a war of the empires, akin to our rivalry with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s . . . . that probably ain’t going to happen.

Which is still a bad thing for us, as the USA knows what to do against other empires, being an empire ourselves. We don’t do as well when a set of unaffiliated but similarly motivated tribes peck at us from a variety of directions. Throughout the history of the great empires (Chinese, Indian, Roman, Ottoman, British, American), that has often been the beginning of the end. Can American ingenuity keep history from repeating itself? Stay tuned; our accustomed way of life here in Rome, err, America, is riding on this one.

I’ve been reading a pretty good book about quantum theory – you know, about the weird way that really tiny particles inside the atom act. Actually, the book is about quantum reality. Thus its title: Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert. If you really want to get up to speed on quantum stuff and you ain’t got a PhD in physics, this book is a necessity. But it isn’t all you need. I’ve read about 5 or 6 different books dealing with quantum physics, and I’m still not comfortable with it all. It takes a while to wrap your mind around it. Don’t think you can go see What The Bleep (or the new Rabbit Hole version) and know much about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and wave-particle dualisms. Those movies make you think that they’re teaching you all about it, but they really aren’t. Just as The DaVinci Code isn’t going to turn you into a historical Jesus scholar.

According to Herbert, the core dilemma of quantum theory is that it gives up on explaining what scientists observe during experiments regarding tiny things like electrons and photons (light) and other elementary particles. It’s all just too weird. There just aren’t any patterns, nothing to grab on to. Science has thus put a little sign on the sub-atomic map, “here be weirdness”. Don’t bang your head trying to figure it out, because it can’t be figured out. Under the “Copenhagen interpretation”, it’s just random variation; all we have is the ghostly probability wave that tells you where (and how often) the little buggers might show up when you disturb them with your measurement apparatus. A few scientists (the “neo-realists”) still try to hold out against this viewpoint (as Albert Einstein did). But it’s been accepted doctrine for almost 100 years now.

Again, I’m no scientist and I don’t really understand the fundamental math and physics behind quantum dynamics. But I can’t help but sympathize with the handful of romantics who refuse to give in to the weirdness. They just aren’t ready to celebrate a dancing universe of virtual bubbles and blips. They aren’t going gently into that good night of fashionable metaphysical anarchy, despite being seen by the majority as Newtonian dinosaurs. They stand their ground despite rude deconstructionists who tease out white-male, Eurocentric racist / sexist / classist agendas from their viewpoints.

I can’t help but wonder if a glimmer of hope for the romantics is starting to appear on the horizons of cutting-edge theoretical physics. If I understand Herbert, the biggest impediment to an explanatory mechanism for quantum behavior is the limitation on the speed of light. A coordinating force for the behavior of tiny particles would have to spread faster than the speed of light. Einstein said you can’t do that, and every experiment thus far has upheld that theory. But there are still some frayed edges in the standard models of the universe, especially involving gravity. So, scientists are now postulating hyper-dimensional models of the universe. Yep, the fifth dimension may someday be more than a late 60’s singing group (remember Age of Aquarius?).

I can’t work out the math, and I know this may be gibberish. But what if there is another spatial dimension, which we can’t perceive for some crazy reason? If our 3D world lies flat in that extra dimension (like a 2D piece of paper lies flat in our 3D world), then the speed of light remains an absolute limit. But just put a little curve in the topography of our world relative to hyperspace, and voila! A force or particle could leave point A on our world, take a shortcut thru hyperspace, and wind up at point B faster than an ordinary light beam could. It wouldn’t have to break the speed limit of light, just so long as it could get into hyperspace and find a shorter pathway than the one that remains in our 3D universe. Some physicists now speculate that a portion of the force of gravity somehow “leaks” into hyperspace. So, maybe forces can duck out into hyperspace — and maybe comeback at another point, faster than light? If so, maybe the door to an explanatory mechanism for “the dance of the quanta” could yet be found?

Well, admittedly I’m a sucker for sentimental stories about those who keep burning a candle throughout the longest and darkest night, and live to see the dawn. I love a good tale of faith. I still remember those cheezy miracle movies that you’d see on regular TV during Holy Week back in the old days, especially the one about the kids in France or some such place, who talked to the Virgin Mary. The local priests and their parents said they were nuts. And then one fine day, the sun got weird and started to swell up in the sky, and all the adults in the village totally freaked out, ducking into any basement or wine cellar they could find (ah, for one last glass of burgundy). But of course, one of the kids who had a chat line going with the BV, a permanently crippled kid with crutches, looks up at the sun and raises his hands, and lo and behold he can walk again. So his father stops in the middle of the turmoil and says “I’ll never give up hope again!” And then you hear the usual ethereal female voices, and the sun gets back in line, and the villagers all look at each other dumbstruck.

Yea, wouldn’t it be great if something like that were to happen with quantum physics. But I’m not holding my breath. Oh me, of so little faith. No doubt I’ll be in that cellar sipping on vino on the day when the hyper-dimensional sun finally breaks into our world!