<![CDATA[Quantumology - Blog]]>Tue, 17 Aug 2021 16:08:24 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Photonic Inference]]>Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:55:25 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/photonic-inferencePicture
The speed of Light is all very well. As a measurement, it's useful in gauging distance between stars and galaxies. But to say that nothing in the Universe can travel faster is a statement reminiscent of the age when the Earth was said to be the centre of the galaxy, or the solar system, even at one point the centre of the Universe.

We have a tendency to adopt a hugely inflated opinion of ourselves. When that opinion comes crashing down to earth we don't much like the effects, so tend to avoid inviting such catastrophes. Sometimes, though, catastrophe is unavoidable, much as the Ultraviolet Catastrophe was unavoidable in physics. When something absorbs/emits every frequency of everything that is, something has to give. Constants might well be first in line.

Look at any paper describing an equation and you'll see text that says something like, "If X equals Y then Z can be A, and B will be equivalent to C." Everything the maths tells us is coming from a place of safety, where symbols are sacred and the numbers don''t really matter because it's all relative anyway - the solution a product of its own device.

This video slashes the speed of light into silos for further management, asking questions of the constant that even Max Planck might approve of. Where there's light, there are things to be seen. The trouble is, we can only ever see a tiny slice of the bigger picture.

<![CDATA[SuperSystems]]>Sun, 07 Mar 2021 21:29:34 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/supersystemsPicture
The word 'Super' is all very well but when it precedes a description in physics it means something beyond the state of goodness we generally ascribe to the principle. Something that is 'superb' is a great thing, a positive thing, a thing of beauty. So it should be across the board, one would think, but in quantum mechanics 'Super' is relative, superlative not as an expression of praise, but more often one of despair.

The superlative qualities of the quantum realm are yet to be defined; including as they do Uniqueness and Entanglement, therein being the classic juxtaposition of One versus All, for we do not know to what extent we are subject to entanglement as it's not a measurable commodity in the real world, but we do know that we are all unique. Our uniqueness is something we take for granted unless we're placing ourselves in the well of humanity and bemoaning it as we are wont to do. 

How many people, I can ask myself now, can sit at their desk with a collared dove on one side and a tawny owl on the other, both more than happy to be there, for the owl is blind and the flightless dove has worked that out, so their relationship with each other is ambivalent while their relationship with me is mutually affable. This situation might be shared by others with different birds, by people with animals of all kinds accompanying them on the journey without destination. But these birds beside me are unique, and that satisfies the desire to be One which humans seem to possess and other creatures ... well, do they perceive?

Our separation within the Supersystem carves out for us an illusion of grandeur, an unfortunate trait that has led to where we are now, on a planet suffering the consequences. Supermarkets buy into the system no matter what you choose to buy from them. They sell a lot of tuna. Most of us buy milk. Coffee. Palm oil - who checks the ingredients? Lives don't matter here. No wonder we are fraught with fears of loss on a promise of infinite nothingness. What have we to look forward to, when things are unlikely to change? These relationships of ours, where are they going, when neither can see a way to put right what is so often determined to be wrong? You're more than likely asking now what the hell that has to do with quantum mechanics. 

<![CDATA[Uncertainty in Principle]]>Mon, 08 Feb 2021 23:38:12 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/uncertainty-in-principlePicture
A hundred years have passed since Werner Heisenberg proposed the Uncertainty Principle as a description of inability to measure two things at once in the quantum world. Due to the fuzzy nature of particles like electrons, you cannot measure the speed or trajectory of such an object at the same time as knowing its position, and vice versa.
The best way to capture this mentally is to remember that while you're looking at the speedo in your car, you're not looking out the window at where you are, and while you're clocking the road-sign to tell you where you are, you can't also be looking at the speedo.

The entries you'll find while scrolling your search engine will tell you, variably, that it's not simply a matter of measuring two things at once, while others insist that it is no more than just that. Science has reached a point of no return with the U.P. and has had to grant it an extension - so now there is Expanded Uncertainty, but it's still a tale told in maths and resists implications of the wider variety. However, you'll be familiar with the fact that snowflakes and grains of sand are unique, for Nature doesn't like symmetry or straight lines, Nature likes asymmetry and turns out varieties that are all different from each other. The extent of this law, if we can call it that, is quite mind-boggling and we've no idea how far Uniqueness goes, or even why Nature is so insistent upon it.

This video looks at the implications of the Uncertainty Principle and asks politely (refusing to lower itself to Brian Cox's level) where the U.P. might be going from here.
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<![CDATA[Symbiosis and Synchronicity]]>Tue, 22 Dec 2020 18:53:25 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/symbiosis-and-synchronicityPicture
Symbiosis is a feature of Nature crossing species and circumstances all over the cosmos. We have little idea of how deep symbiosis may go in quantum terms, but the more we delve into the realms of particle physics, the more symbiosis we seem to find.

In this video, correlation between symbiotic features of the Universe and synchronicity is explored. There is much further to go, we can be sure, in our search for what lies at the depths of physics. While we're waiting for next steps to be taken, enjoy a few minutes with me and my owl...

<![CDATA[Einstein's Waiting, Talking Italian]]>Sun, 20 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/einsteins-waiting-talking-italianPicture
Albert Einstein is well known for fluency of thought. He came up with General Relativity virtually in his bathtub which as we all know is the place where deep thought gets most traction. Whether that's got anything to do with being surrounded by water molecules has yet to be determined. At least bubblebath formula doesn't seem to impede it.

From his mind came the concept of light speed and the constant that came of it, determined by the maths to be forged into a constraint so that other things could be seen to work around it. The strategy worked for more than 100 years. Light speed as a constant remains unchallenged, except by non-locality and possibly the behaviour of neutrinos.

Neutrino - Little Neutral One in Italian, the beautiful elusive font of all things in the Universe that streams through us from the Sun (and other places of mysterious origin) is a persistent contender for anything going that's odd, from Dark Matter to Majorana. Their oscillation is a mystery, no-one can see it happening any more than they can see the evolution of new species in the rainforest, so everything is guesswork except that it happens. 

Einstein knew all about variables. He wasn't, it seems, as dead-set on a Constant as some people want you to believe. He had a more esoteric mind than that, one that could ride light beams and picture the bending mechanism of gravity. We're waiting for another Einstein, one to bend the rules and give Standard Models the slip in searching for what lies beyond the subtle knife.

He's there, you know, somewhere in the quantum soup, waiting for the kettle to boil even though it won't while he's watching it. In such spirit, this seemed the link to share, the only one really necessary, as the research for this piece dug well beyond the topsoil of standard capability and it's worth a couple of minutes of Time in the reading, promise.
​Even if Time is a relative thing.

It's Behind Him...
<![CDATA[What's Special About Neutrinos?]]>Sun, 30 Aug 2020 19:03:51 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/whats-special-about-neutrinosPicture
We've every reason to ask. Neutrinos ("little neutral one" in Italian) are notoriously the most elusive, and apparently the most numerous, particles in the known Universe, and they hold a certain fascination all their own. What is it about the neutrino that makes it so special? And why do so many people seem to gravitate towards that 'specialness'. Could it be we're in some kind of relationship?
Neutrinos come in three flavours, just like ice cream. The article behind Elementary Particles adds contextual flakes. Take a lick of time there - the rest is here.

So now that you know about ice cream and its relationship to neutrinos - when is an ice cream not an ice cream? When it's oscillating. Changing (morphing sounds better when you're talking about an unseen, unknown event) from one version of itself into another, without being observed. 

You can't see it, and can only see what's produced when it reacts with something. You have to then measure it in terms of what it's reacting with (do you not?)? Which is why the neutrino was named after the particles it seems to relate to, being electron, muon, and tau. Back to Fermilab for the briefing.

Neutrinos share a feature with the material field in which we're based, the quark-gluon field, in that quarks are doing the same thing (in tandem with their gluons) as the neutrinos are - morphing from one version of themselves into another. So nature being what it is, it stands to reason that if the quark has a gluon to dance with, the neutrino might have the same thing, only because it's so invisibly elusive (unlike the quark, that tends to stay where it is) and zipping along at the speed of light (at least), we'd be hard pressed to see what that thing might be, and have to rely on some kind of equation to find out in advance of seeing it. As seems to happen with most particles these days. Incidentally, it's really useful too to know what sea quarks are. 

We know that the anti-particle of the electron is the positron, but you won't find the positron up there in the Standard Model because it's an outsider, the electron wins every time because the electron belongs here in our familiar world. So he (the electron) annihilates the positron and produces - any manner of potential particle pairings. And anyway, the positron goes backwards in time, which makes for a potential infinity and sure as hell's a mousetrap we don't want any of those. Here you'll find the Feynman diagrams that put this into context - they tell lots of stories about particles relying on other particles to become what they are and do what they do. Then you get to realise that all particle relationships that involve these interactions take place forwards and backwards in time at the same time.

The three generations of matter are rated according to size rather than age. Symmetry Magazine terms it thus:

Stable forever? Is anything forever? Electron neutrinos can - and do - become muons and taus and there's any permutation of the aforesaid you'd care to mention in the probability well. (Scroll down to "Flavour oscillations" here). Anyway, while the electron itself is "as far as we can tell, stable forever" and the electron neutrino carries on doing what it likes, can we ask - is this some kind of horrible game we're playing? It seems that electron-positron annihilation can produce almost anything - I've seen two photons, a quark and an antiquark (which then produces a gluon), And anyway, what happens to that gluon? 

If these questions are of interest, and you want to explore the bridge between quantum physics and human experience, you might like to check out the group at  
<![CDATA[Wiggle Room for The Higgs]]>Thu, 13 Aug 2020 08:08:01 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/wiggle-room-for-the-higgs"Knowing the path is not the same as walking it," said Morpheus to Neo.
Peter Higgs didn't know he was going to discover a particle.
 ​Now that he has, Higg's Wiki entry describes the history thus:
Higgs proposed that broken symmetry could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.[8   Picture
The 'Higgs mechanism' turns out to be the breakage of symmetry in the electroweak field. You'll know from my writings that I'm no fan of symmetry, and agree strongly with Frank Close in this regard (Lucifer's Legacy - a great read). SUSY seemed to me to have too many scientists up her skirts and not enough brains to see what was really going on.
This mechanism exists as a field, where asymmetry rules ok, enabling mass to have a place in a scheme where the maths says mass shouldn't be. Again from Wiki (love or hate this really useful reference point): 

A Boson being a carrier of force, a mediator of some kind, an ethereal being in the quantum foam, makes the Higgs a contender for being one of those particles that aren't particles at all, they hold no spacial reference, they exist beyond the material world and flourish in the virtual zone. Gluons (holding our quarks together) and Photons come into this category. Particles that are something definable, the fermions - quarks or leptons, of which matter is made - even these have questionable properties that raise suspicion as to their 'real-time' placement. But bosons - there are two kinds, scalar and vector.  Confused?... well, so was I, so here's BBC Bitesize rushing in to help:
 Scalars have a size, while vectors have both size and direction. When adding vector quantities, it is possible to find the size and direction of the resultant vector by drawing a scale diagram.

W and Z are the vector (gauge) bosons and Higgs joins them as a scalar boson. The only one, at time of writing, that accounts for there being any scale in our universe at all. Thinking on this....
If there were no scale, created by asymmetry as Higgs' original proposal (above) says it must be, the forces and the material elements would have no form to take that physical observers could recognise. Quarks (you're made of those) and neutrinos (they fly through you all the time) oscillate - change from one thing to another. Why? What for? Well, these questions seem important enough for people to find particles that fit the boxes. And if you read this from CERN, you'll find the quark and neutrino sharing a stage. The weak force - miniscule in spacetime, massive in effect. And the Higgs, another force altogether. High-five to the field where the Higgs comes out to play - may the Force be with you that pieces reality together, the constructive cement that mass depends on, but which of itself is - what? Energy? The Higgs has something to do with asymmetry...
 You've followed the white rabbit far enough to know there are answers to questions many people don't even want to ask. What's more, you're unique, by virtue of asymmetry as we all are, with reason to be drawn to this track in the first place. Our planetary play is now well into Act lll - we're working out what it means, where to go from here, how to live with what's to come. Physics is a guiding light, a beacon of reason, the nuts and bolts of the reality construct. Do we really have room for so many constraints? 

Questions are being asked of consciousness. Suggestions have been made that there's a particle to account for it. To quote Cern (from behind the picture here of a Higgs interaction:)- 
At the subatomic scale, the universe is a complex choreography of elementary particles interacting with one another through fundamental forces, which can be explained using a term that physicists of all persuasions turn to: elegance.

Over at Quantumology's Facebook group, live discussions are going into the mix so that we can look at these anomalies more deeply. Physicists are there, along with those who've never been a physicist, and some who never wanted to. Everyone is on the same quest - to dig into these questions deeply enough to find some serious answers surfacing from the digging. Come and check out the excavations!
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<![CDATA[How does Bell's Theorem relate...?]]>Sat, 25 Jul 2020 16:37:38 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/how-does-bells-theorem-relateHere I must confess that I've only just looked into this one. Recently it seemed to pop up all over the place with that demanding gesture that science seems often to flourish, proclaiming there's something in there worth knowing. So having stumbled across the Scholarpedia entry, which makes for a lot of reading but seems to be worthwhile (all quotes bar the first one are from there), the basics of Bell's Theorem come to an unusual kind of light. 

What does Bell's Theorem mean?

A lot of things, it seems. There are variables, hidden variables and invariables in quantum mechanics, tricky even for Einstein to pin down. John Bell was intrigued - possibly even annoyed by - hidden variables, and probed deBroglie/Bohm's pilot wave theory for answers. From Wikipedia : "The many-particle case shows mathematically that the energy dissipation in inelastic scattering could be distributed to the surrounding field structure by a yet-unknown mechanism of the theory of hidden variables." And Wiki goes on to say, "For a hidden-variable theory, if Bell's conditions are correct, the results that agree with quantum mechanical theory appear to indicate superluminal(faster-than-light) effects, in contradiction to relativistic physics."!

The problem Bell turned into a theory was published late in the day for particle physics, in 1964; you'll see in the story why it is that science gets itself tangled up in the maths, why scientists find it so hard to step away from conventionally accepted principles, and why nonlocality has proved to be such a pain in the ass. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen conspired to quash nonlocal phenomena in the 1930s giving rise to what's now known as the EPR Paradox. Rants raged.

Bell's Theorem means that everything gets to be non-local. No exceptions. Except for the exception in real life, when we get to experience direct contact with those furnishings and beings in our immediate spacetime. Even then, though, we still may be left with room for doubt - doubt which Einstein famously disliked. For something to exist and be nonlocal, it has to be a beable, which I read to rhyme with 'beagle' for a while, and to be a beable means it is able to be present in a version of observable reality. Being Beable is also dependent, with some deference to the Uncertainty Principle, on asymmetry - inequalities, in other words - which leans heavily towards the argument for uniqueness being underpinned by the U.P..

Nevertheless the Theorem can't go so far as to account for a Multiverse, where any version of anything that's possible can theoretically exist at the same point in Bulk spacetime, so Multiverses are mentioned only in post-published despatches. Bell seems to have concentrated on the observer-subject paradox and the problem of disentangling apparatus from particles subjected to experiment. That this problem exists at all is hugely elucidating, for how therefore do we disentangle ourselves from the everyday situations and relationships we face? Can we? Or can we not?

The Scholarship study from which most information has been taken for this post comments on the Multiverse as follows: 
A formulation of a version of the many-worlds interpretation which includes, in addition to the wave function, some local beables, was presented in a recent paper, but it was found by the authors to be non-local. The question of whether a many-worlds (or relational) approach can be taken advantage of to create a local (and empirically viable) theory thus remains open — as does the question of how seriously one should take a theory of this type, should it be successfully constructed. ​For prediction regarding the likely outcome of such a theory being proposed, see below*.

Bell's Theorem itself sets up a paradox, for in defending nonlocality it also insists on locality being a fundamental necessity and true to our observation of reality, it is. To cover this, there exists a "no-conspiracy assumption", described thus: "The "no conspiracy" assumption... is strictly speaking just that — an additional assumption (beyond locality) on which the derivation of Bell-type inequalities rests."

What can Bell's Theorem do for me?

So then we have inequalities setting up our version of spacetime: "...the crucial assumption from which one can derive various empirically-testable Bell-type inequalities is locality. (Bell sometimes also used the term local causality instead of locality). Bell explained the "principle of local causality" as follows:
The direct causes (and effects) of events are near by, and even the indirect causes (and effects) are no further away than permitted by the velocity of light, In relativistic terms, locality is the requirement that goings-on in one region of spacetime should not affect — should not influence — happenings in space-like separated regions."

But they do, influence that is, and we see evidence of this all the time in our relationships with people, situations, opportunities and random events. We experience synchronicity because of this influence, and know instinctively that a Thing in one region of spacetime can have a direct - nonlocal - effect on anOther. For these, and other reasons, we cannot definitively dismiss an integration of quantum mechanics into classical physics as being a sound, affordable probability.

Bell has contributed, as much as anyone in the quantum field, to the belief that reality is a flexible commodity. That he avoids Everett in his interpretations is perhaps unsurprising but that leap of faith is waiting to be made by someone else, unafraid to face the *Ninja gauntlet of fierce opposition* that would undoubtedly ensue. Meanwhile, what his Theorem can do for us is to shore up the certainty that we do have an effect, no matter what we do, on the world at large, and since we have no idea what may come from those effects, we might as well trust that all is ​as it's meant to be, and get on with the Purpose, whatever that is.

<![CDATA[Time and The Constant]]>Tue, 14 Apr 2020 11:24:03 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/time-and-the-constantPicture
The Speed of Light - it's everywhere. Constantly in-your-face, it's the speed limit nothing can break, it's a measurement of spacetime, and it's something that photons themselves don't experience at all. Check out this article from 2014 in Phys.org - to quote author Fraser Cain:
 According to relativity, mass can never move through the Universe at light speed. Mass will increase to infinity, and the amount of energy required to move it any faster will also be infinite. But for light itself, which is already moving at light speed… You guessed it, the photons reach zero distance and zero time.
Note the words "according to relativity". Relativity doesn't help anyone get rid of those pesky infinities that keep turning up in quantum calculations. Relativity says that wherever or whatever you are, you're relative to something. And in the quantum world, the most significant relationship relating to reality is that of the observer with the subject. 

​Time has a special relationship with light. For brief elucidation on that relationship, see this article on space-time. And for more fun with Infinity, see here. If you type "infinity in quantum equations" into your search engine, you'll find lots of scientists claiming lots of different things, including the option that infinity doesn't exist.

There's a problem with the Universe. We can see (thanks to Hubble and his remarkable telescope) way back into the dim, distant history of the Universe because the objects that were around then are still relaying their signature of light which is travelling through space for us to find. And they tell us that the Universe is, well, a bit of a paradox. Here, Ethan has a go at it.

Hubble wanted a constant, and got one; Hubble Constant = rate of universal expansion. Only, what if the expansion rate is not constant at all? What if it's greater than can possibly be imagined, because we'd have a hard time keeping up? What if we see 'visible light' because we exist at the same resonant frequency as visible light? What if that resonance is the fabric of our very reality, the material on which the laws of physics rests, the only thing we know to relate to? Electrons can, in certain circumstances, travel faster than light, and when they do, they 'live' longer than their counterparts. Speed and time have a strange mode of interloping.

The Big Bang is supposed to have happened 13.8 billion years ago, but Hubble's telescope sees stars across the Universe 92 billion light years away; yes, the Universe is expanding.... we haven't seen the half of it yet.

Light speed = a Constant defended with affidavits if necessary. To buck the trend, let's suppose for a moment that we're all moving at the speed of light, along with everything else we can see, and that relativity - general or otherwise - needs to take account of this in order to be able to do something practical with the infinities that keep popping up all over the maths.

You don't need to go anywhere, or even to move from one place to another to exist at light-speed, for if all points in time are simultaneously Here, Now, then relativity can swing all the bats it likes - you and I are still existing in the Constant, which would be how we get to navigate our way around the world we live on. Take the Block Universe theory, and try dallying with Eternalism for a while just to see where it leads. Could be the start of a new kind of journey....

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<![CDATA[Goldilocks]]>Thu, 26 Dec 2019 19:35:39 GMThttps://www.quantumology.net/blog/goldilocksPicture
One day, there's going to be a revelation. A big announcement to tell us that the Solar System has been expanding, along with the rest of the Universe, all these billions of years and that Mars was here before us. There was life on Mars, they'll say with all the conviction of the deeply shocked, when Mars was here in the Goldilocks Zone, which of course it isn't now, and never can be again, its time here in Fairytale Land past and gone, dust to red dust.

We're going to learn that Venus is next in the procession of precessions and will arrive in the Goldilocks Zone we now inhabit in roughly six billion year's time, with luck before the Sun loses its capacity to sustain life and in good time to make the most of all that methane churning around. Venus is literally a fire of storms, a methane melting pot of global proportions - that's why it flashes different colours in the night sky.

Of course, such an announcement would put deep dents in certain belief systems and rock boats in powerful waters, so no need to hold our breath - it might never happen, not in our lifetime. For planets to pass through Goldilocks Zones and enjoy a few millennia of life-bearing idyll would mean most (if not all) solar systems spawn life at some point, so there'd be nothing unique about us at all, except perhaps our quaint take on the laws of physics - adhesion to the Standard Model plus Planck constraints and light-speed busily limiting potential for advances of mind.

A vacation in the Goldilocks Zone may be relatively short-lived, and if we don't use our time well, well, we've wasted it.

This place where dreams are made of, 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, is a bit of an enigma. You won't find NASA being pinned down to a distance definition. On Quora, the fuller answers are a bit baffling but there's a general consensus that it stretches between Venus and Mars. Wikipedia is a bit more helpful. Whatever the case, we don't need to worry about it. Porridge will still be porridge. The question of when the porridge arrives given the options of a 5D continuum is much more relevant than whether it's real or not. Knowing how to live life in the Multiverse must surely be a valuable tool to have, and let's face it, we're all trying to free ourselves of something.
Coincidentally, the Moon is exactly the right size to afford a total eclipse. Exactly the right size. Given a 92,466,000 mile gap between Moon and Sun, that's a pretty neat trick of relativity. All the possible options in the Universe - we get landed with that one. Hail Griffin, he showed us all the way, and did we listen?
Are we not listening still?
Perhaps we never will.

There will be scientists visiting (thank you for coming ^) putting all this down as Woo, incurable sockpuppetry, charlatanism and all kinds of other isms in fear and trepidation of answering difficult questions. Maths doesn't cut it all the time, it's great in a Pi but put maths into quantum porridge and it's going to be lumpy, as you've all proven beyond doubt to everyone including yourselves. Some scientists might feel a bit sick at having some non-scientist sticking their nose into dimensions that don't concern them, but that's only because they're afraid of having to visibly think hard, dump the sums and not know the answer immediately. No self-respecting scientist betrays the mathematical grail in front of others.

Our place in the Multiverse is of humongous importance, and proportionally the greatest riddle we may ever have to solve. How we improve relations with our planetary cohabitants and what comes of understanding how to handle our reality better is anybody's guess, but for sure, only physics can lead the way. Even if it is only our physics, unlike anyone else's - out there where we don't dare go yet there may be all kinds of other physics waiting to get heads around. However many heads you might have. Handy to have three if you want to save time tasting things. 


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