{"id":146,"date":"2009-11-21T12:23:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-21T12:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2009\/11\/21\/146\/"},"modified":"2012-02-27T20:15:33","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T01:15:33","slug":"146","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"MORE QUANTUM WEIRDNESS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every now and then, even a guy like me who has a very hazy, non-mathematical understanding of quantum physics comes across an esoteric article on quantum research and realizes that what it’s saying might be dynamite! Important stuff<\/span>, in other words. I believe that I came across such an article<\/a> the other day. It’s on the newscientist.com web site, and is innocently titled “Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds”. <\/p>\n

What the article seems to say, if I’m reading it right (which is a BIG IF), is that gravitational waves — which were predicted by Einstein but are still mostly hypothetical, no solid evidence has been found for them yet — cause quantum particles having mass (i.e., the quarks that make up neutrons and protons) to “decohere”. What is “decoherence”<\/a>? Well, you know how crazy quantum particles can act, being two or two billion places at once (i.e., in “superposition”), and where you can know one characteristic about it but not another (or vice versa). In a nutshell, decoherence is like that line from the Jimi Hendrix song “Fire” — i.e., “stop acting so crazy”. When a quantum particle decoheres, it becomes “classical”. It settles into one place, with certain fixed characteristics, fixed relationships with its fellow particles. <\/p>\n

Again if I’m reading this right, a particle actually needs to have mass, or a significant concentration of mass, in order for the gravitational waves<\/a> (that MIGHT or might not be rippling all throughout the universe) to make the particle settle into one place with one set of characteristics (and not be a quantum blur, i.e. a probabilistic cocktail of various space positions, momentums, charges, spins, etc. all in “superposition”). Remember, mass itself is not inherent to the particle having it, but stems from a “particle interaction” involving the Higgs boson and a “mass field”. <\/p>\n

So, stuff with mass decides to act nicely (while low-mass stuff like light and even electrons get funky with tricks like diffraction and interference and such). Thus, we can’t just put our hands thru a brick wall or a steel door. Thus, everything in our visible world does not appear blurry (assuming your consumption of alcohol is under control !). All because the Universe is (maybe) full of these ripples in space-time that are left-over from the Big Bang, just like a patch of the ocean surrounding a moving aircraft carrier is full of ripples. Without those ripples, the world we know would NOT be the world we know. We probably wouldn’t even be around to know it!!<\/p>\n

Or would we? Well, I’ll leave that to the imagination of the science fiction writers. But it is an interesting thought. If the gravitational wave theory is right, and if somehow there is a universe where there aren’t any such ripples and everything is in a blurry “super-state”, could conscious life and rational, purposeful thinking have yet evolved? And just what would such life be like? Yeah, that might make for a really interesting sci-fi adventure.<\/p>\n

PS, not surprisingly, there are other theories about the decoherence<\/a> of stuff with mass. E.g., the idea that we only see stuff that is bombarded by photons, and it’s that photon bombardment that causes the decoherence. <\/p>\n

Oh my goodness, that makes things even weirder, if that’s possible. That means that if you could isolate some normal bit of matter, say a pencil, in a chamber with a complete vacuum where no photon could get in at it, it would go fuzzy on you ! But you could never see it in such a fuzzy state. No scientific experiment could ever confirm it, because you need something to observe it with in detail, and that takes photons (light or magnetism). So, it’s like the tree that falls in the forest without anyone seeing it . . . yikes!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every now and then, even a guy like me who has a very hazy, non-mathematical understanding of quantum physics comes across an esoteric article on quantum research and realizes that what it’s saying might be dynamite! Important stuff, in other words. I believe that I came across such an article the other day. It’s on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2614,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/2614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}