Today I have a few thoughts to share about science and reality. First, is there a difference between science and reality? Isn’t science the study of reality, i.e. the seeking of the real in reality, the standard by which reality is judged real? Yes, up to a point. But science requires repeatability in order for some phenomenon to be counted, and a lot of things and events in the world don’t repeat themselves. A lot of stuff is one-of-a-kind, one time only, or continuously changing at the most fundamental levels. Science has a hard time getting its arms around stuff like that. (E.g., science still hasn’t definitely answered Freud’s question “what does a women want” . . .)<\/p>\n
But science is still a very useful, powerful and beautiful way of looking at the world. I was recently perusing some articles on some modern science topics, including the standard particle model<\/a> and dark energy<\/a>, the force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. <\/p>\n This stuff amazes me. It’s amazing just how much humankind knows about the universe at the tiniest and grandest levels. And yet \u2013 if the new theories (as yet unverified) that the universe and all its \u201cmechanics\u201d (actions, movements, change) are ultimately just a hologram formed from some interaction with a static surface or volume of information bits \u2013 then all of this wonderful stuff about forces and leptons and energy is just a big side-show. It’s all \u201cepiphenomenal\u201d, of secondary importance, not the main event. <\/p>\n If so, then 99.99% of science as we now know it is the study of secondary effects. The real story is in the information sheet or box, whatever it is and whatever it is all about. Where the heck did it come from, what is it related to? That’s where science is going to sputter out and stall. But let’s give science credit for leading our great minds (and not so great minds, including my own) up to the point where the \u201cit from bit\u201d reality<\/a> can be seen or at least pointed to. <\/p>\n Another interesting thing about science, specifically quantum physics, is the way that it uses the word \u201ccoherence\u201d. Generally we think of coherence as unity, consistency, something that makes sense to us. A person or thing is \u201cincoherent\u201d if it utters nonsense or acts in a random, unorganized manner. In a way, quantum physics uses “coherence” in an opposite fashion. In the quantum world, a fundamental quantum particle like a quark or a photon is said to have \u201ccoherence\u201d if it is out on its own and exists in a superposition of all possible attributes. If an imaginary particle could be either hot or cold, it would be both at once when in its superpositioned state (i.e., when it is “coherent” — even if that seems to the common person to be a bit “incoherent”). <\/p>\n In quantum physics, a particle does not become \u201cincoherent\u201d, but goes through \u201cdecoherence\u201d when it interacts with another particle. Instead of being a blur of all its possible positions and energies and other attributes, as when isolated, it suddenly takes on a precise identity; it exists at one point with a precise energy and with set specific attributes (although you cannot know all of those attributes at once, given the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle; if you know one thing precisely, e.g. velocity, then at least one other attribute goes fuzzy on you \u2013 i.e., its \u201ccoherence\u201d is maintained for that attribute). <\/p>\n So, when a particle is in the contradictory state of possessing multiple exclusive attributes all at once, then it is \u201ccoherent\u201d; when it seems simple and non-contradictory, it is \u201cdecoherent\u201d. This somehow relates to the \u201cmany worlds\u201d hypothesis<\/a> i.e. that at every point when a particle \u201cdecoheres\u201d, i.e. manifests one particular characteristic while interacting with another particle (or system of particles), every other possible outcome exists somewhere else in some bizarrely huge series of parallel universes. So, in the Schrodinger’s cat experiment<\/a>, were it really to be done by some animal sadist, the cat might die because the atom decayed during the one-hour exposure period; but in some other universe the atom did NOT decay and the cat is alive and just fine.<\/p>\n