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Tantalising Torments

1/8/2023

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In the Stargate episode "The Torment of Tantalus", four ancient races bring the elements we know as the Periodic Table into a universal language for mutual benefit. Their Alliance is a peaceful, powerful force upholding the cosmic cause for positive value proposition without violence. Paradoxically, while studying the array of structures and symbols appearing above him, Daniel points his gun in a random act of unthinking demonstration.
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We live in a world that we largely take for granted, without much consideration for our universal fate. We know there is evidence for the existence of other species but we find it hard to accept, driven as we are to believe that we are the centre of a Universe we barely understand. Regardless of files, encounters, film footage or government facilities, there are still many people who firmly believe that we are the only form of life on an intergalactic scale.

Instead we have readily accepted the introduction of a Metaverse, an illusionary superpower that has our social interests all wrapped up in the form of scrolling media, a relatively new invention that has reduced our attention span to just 3.5 seconds, typically less than that of a goldfish.

If we were to equally readily accept the existence of a Multiverse, an array of interlocking dimensions that allows all possibilities to simultaneously occur, we would unlock our own potential and break through to the realms of quantum mechanics where advanced intellect belongs. For 100 years we have dragged our feet, wiping them nervously on the mats of academia whose corridors refuse to welcome new ideas until they can first be proven correct, a chicken-egg paradox that has left us in the scientific Dark Ages since Einstein first thought about 'spooky action at a distance'.

‘As above, so below’ is a common saying in certain circles. We are so infinitesimally small that we become invisible from a few hundred feet in the air, yet so enormous that we count ourselves out of the quantum mechanical equation altogether, claiming that it doesn't apply to the world we know. How wrong we are in this juvenile assumption. Should you be ready to embrace the bigger picture, you will find the track opening up to a whole new realm of probability.
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New Data, New Era

7/17/2022

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Some considerable time has passed since I last wrote. Not without good reason, I might add. Only those reasons are likely to incriminate me so I won't go into them here :) 

With new data coming from the LHC in the form of Beauty Quark experiments (yes, my frequent indignation at its demotion to Bottom Quark paid off) we know that quark matter takes many forms and some of those are still beyond peripheral vision. Here's a link to latest findings:    home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-discovers-three-new-exotic-particles


Heartening it is to see new particles coming into focus, more heartening still that arguments now rage over quantum mechanical consciousness and the conditions in the brain which may be harbouring said phenomenon. This article from last year cites new research which could prove groundbreaking:  singularityhub.com/2021/07/25/can-consciousness-be-explained-by-quantum-physics-new-research/
An article came out in 2020 from which I quote:  "The neurons in the brain oscillate in activity in a coherent pattern during specific thought processes. This synchronous oscillation may be what allows communication between different regions of the brain and establishes memory. Different frequency oscillations occur at the same locations in the brain in order to avoid information traffic when communicating to other regions of the brain. Quantum mechanics may explain how so many different subsets of oscillating connections in the brain can be generated at once.
One way these oscillations may occur is if the microtubules within neurons are constructed like quantum computers. Microtubules are like the brain of a brain cell. They’re rapidly changing structural molecules that respond instantly to mental events by reconfiguring the structure of dendrites and axons, the input and output branches of the neuron. The array of microtubules in the brain may exhibit a quantum effect similar to those in quantum computers."
medium.com/whiteboard-to-infinity/is-consciousness-a-quantum-phenomenon-fcbb65bed950

Echo my missives on microtubules and I daresay you'll notice some ground being re-surfaced there:​
www.quantumology.org/blog/soul-and-the-cellular-strangeness                      ​


​Or this one, which didn't hit so highly in popularity but perhaps says more about the subject matter:
www.quantumology.net/blog/dr-lanza-microtubules-and-the-multiverse
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Quantumology has been here for some time. In no rush for anything to happen on the grounds that I have no control whatsoever over the timing of things, I'm simply glad to be chatting with physicists and still immersing myself in the territory with a YouTube channel, a Facebook group holding steady at 2,200 members and a Page attracting plenty of Likes. 

Whether you're a newbie or an old hand at all this, have fun and enjoy your explorations. If anyone tries to kick you off a forum for asking the wrong questions, or gives you a hard time for holding true to your views, get in touch with me. I have a few T-shirts in those kinds of departments.

Stay with it, enjoy the journey... see you soon! x

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Multiversal Symmetry

10/12/2021

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There are articles out there talking about symmetry and bemoaning its reluctance to be found, articles puzzling over the prevalence of matter over antimatter in the Universe, and articles about the Multiverse and what it might look like. There are no articles on electron-positron symmetry and the possibility that they could be two sides of the same coin.
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​If they are two sides of the same coin, we could potentially be living in a multiversal situation wherein matter has the propensity to appear more prolific because, and only because, if symmetry exists then we have to exist on one side or the other. Unless you take superposition into account, of course, and take it that you could be living in both states at on
ce.


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Photonic Inference

3/14/2021

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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.


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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.

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SuperSystems

3/7/2021

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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. 

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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. 

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Uncertainty in Principle

2/8/2021

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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.

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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.
To join in Live discussions with me, visit the Group at www.facebook.com/groups/quantumol 
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Symbiosis and Synchronicity

12/22/2020

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​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...

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Einstein's Waiting, Talking Italian

12/20/2020

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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...
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What's Special About Neutrinos?

8/30/2020

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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. 

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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:
"Most of the generations differ in mass by a lot. For example, the tau lepton is roughly 3600 times more massive than the electron, and the top quark is nearly 100,000 times heavier than the up quark. That difference manifests itself in stability: The heavier generations decay into the lighter generations, until they reach the lightest, which are (as far as we can tell) stable forever."

​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  
https://www.facebook.com/groups/quantumol 
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Wiggle Room for The Higgs

8/13/2020

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"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  
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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 key feature of the necessary field is that it would take less energy for the field to have a non-zero value than a zero value, unlike all other known fields, therefore, the Higgs field has a non-zero value (or vacuum expectation) everywhere.

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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...
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 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!
Live Videos every Monday at 6.00pm GMT
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    Kathy Ratcliffe has studied quantum mechanics since 1997 in a life surrounded by birds and animals, She's a metaphysicist, if such a thing exists, looking as we all are for the inevitable bridge between humanity and particle physics.

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