At what point does something become dangerous?
There's been a lot of hype about spin. Integer spin and half-integer spin, up and down spin and things that go round more times than they ought to. Electrons can spin faster than science can put a handle on and the discovery of electron capabilities in this respect has led to the birth of 'quantum computers'. At the same time, Dark Matter remains a mystery and everyone is wondering where to go in the wake of the Higgs Bosun - sorry, Boson. While we're busily striving to accept that quantum mechanics is beyond understanding, what stands in the way of advance time? How can we have so many principles at our fingertips and throw up our hands with the 'unintelligible weirdness beyond fathoming' plea?
We know that the wave packet collapses under observation. Until something is observed, it isn't a particle. What makes this so is irrelevant - what might be happening on either side of the wave/particle fence, on the other hand, matters very much. It may be that the fine, wavy line between something being 'alive' and 'not alive' has something to do with the fence itself, and we can take it for granted that since the fence is made of quanta, it's very wavy indeed.
I'm going to suggest that the image at the top of this post is some kind of clue. With six protons, six neutrons and six electrons, the carbon atom is uniquely balanced. Bohr gave us an image of the atom that's pretty hard to shake off, the whole nucleus/orbiting electrons thing, which since discovering that electrons don't actually 'orbit' in the sense of going round and round, has left us with a minds-eye photo of a tight little nucleus tucked inside a buzzing electron cloud that's rather fuzzy at the edges. But what if the electron cloud only 'happens' at the point of observation? What if, while the waveform is undisturbed, the whole packet of neutrons, protons and electrons is a free-radical compound of particles doing whatever they want with their time?
What if the ordered, protective shell of electrons guarding the sensitive preciousness of the nucleic material is only actually necessary when an Observer comes along to threaten its credibility?
Until that time, nature being what it is, we could say that balance is everything, that the sub-atomic can adopt whatever position it wants to but, even then, it must stay within the confines of quark-based reality. Could 'spin' be a topcoat of visible/invisible gloss on a colour we've yet to see? Because we can only hope to see it when the light is in the right place and that probably means it's got something to do with photons.
What if the ordered, protective shell of electrons guarding the sensitive preciousness of the nucleic material is only actually necessary when an Observer comes along to threaten its credibility?
Until that time, nature being what it is, we could say that balance is everything, that the sub-atomic can adopt whatever position it wants to but, even then, it must stay within the confines of quark-based reality. Could 'spin' be a topcoat of visible/invisible gloss on a colour we've yet to see? Because we can only hope to see it when the light is in the right place and that probably means it's got something to do with photons.
So before shooting the Bringer of Enlightenment down in flames, perhaps we might consider that the clues laid there before us are only for our benefit, but if we think the seeking is dangerous, we're not likely to consider that at all.
RSS Feed
