As we get older, therefore, the subjects of our research tend to focus on things which will reliably conform to experiment in the same way now as they did a hundred years ago. Constants are the core of reason, many would have us believe. So new theories come about to shatter old theories and it's assumed that the old theory was wrong. Einstein's Relativity has stood the test of time, but it gets battered now and then by a young newbie waving a wand of quantum mechanics at it and shouting loudly about paradox.
Right from the very beginnings of our education, we're bombarded with facts about the world and the Universe which stay the same. Where the other planets in the solar system are in relation to us. How far away the moon is. What things are made of. And so on. The closest we get to perceiving change is in understanding how things grow, like flowers and kittens. As we get older, therefore, the subjects of our research tend to focus on things which will reliably conform to experiment in the same way now as they did a hundred years ago. Constants are the core of reason, many would have us believe. So new theories come about to shatter old theories and it's assumed that the old theory was wrong. Einstein's Relativity has stood the test of time, but it gets battered now and then by a young newbie waving a wand of quantum mechanics at it and shouting loudly about paradox. Conforming to experiment is something quantum particles are fond of resisting, and when they do conform to experiment they often provide some rather weird results. Double slit created a lot of consternation almost a century ago. These days particle colliders are frequently unearthing strange new propositions about superpositional states, whether squarks are likely to threaten supersymmetry, and pondering on neutrinos being lighter than photons which were thought to be massless but now clearly cannot be so. All super, like supermarkets, filled with options and variants on themes sharing values as common as sugar and salt. The squabbling that accompanies particle physics is nothing new, and it'll be the same I daresay for a long time to come. I don't really care whether they get round to discovering strawberry squarks or toffee tachyons. The point I'm making here is that we are travelling through the Universe at a rate of 2.7 million miles an hour, or thereabouts, and that fact alone puts us in a different spacetime - a very different spacetime - to the one we were in, say, seven years ago. Okay, go back thirty years - the world has made thirty revolutions round the Sun, spun on its own axis 10,950 times, and changed the position of its orbit a little bit more. Not to mention the shift in the solar system relative to other solar systems. The trouble is, we don't perceive any of this. We see the stars shining in pretty much the same place as they did a hundred years ago, the Sun rises and sets as it has all our lives, east to west, and the seasons go round with mild variations on a theme we are familiar with, past the point of contempt. I was thinking this evening about my primary school in North London, and what it would be like to visit it. They had a white billy goat penned in the grounds - now I'm old enough to wonder what for, but as a child I just used to visit him at playtime. There were blackboards, and the smell of school - daps and dinners and disinfectant. All gone now, since blackboards are outlawed on the grounds of political correctness, odours must pass health and safety directives and school dinners have to be vetted by Jamie Oliver. So if I went back tomorrow, assuming the school is still there, I'd find a place I'd probably hardly recognise. It wouldn't, in fact, be the same place at all, for it would have moved on to a different spacetime in 40 years, just as I have. As we all have. If only we had more of a handle on change, and how to use it to advantage. Going through my papers tonight I found some notes I took last year at an NHS Trust meeting. The complaints then are still echoed everywhere - too much reliance on paperwork, not enough time for patient care, the 'urgent' need to provide good experiences; the list goes on. It hasn't changed. It hasn't changed, like a lot of things, because we are force-fed a belief system built on constants, and constants don't cut the mustard when it comes to evolution. Why society and science are still relying on them so heavily is as much of a mystery as the whodunnit affair over Dark Matter candidacy. Einstein would have wished, I'm sure, for mankind's baptism of fire to have passed by long ago.
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We live in a world of illusion, hype, peer pressure, instability and uncertainty. Somewhere in the mix of daily allsorts we find truths we can hold fast to, foundations of faith and belief systems across an endless sea of possibilities. One of the truths of quantum mechanics is that truth is fleeting, it changes all the time, and every possibility of everything that could ever be is there in the potential - no rights, no wrongs, just unique individualism. For sixteen years I've devoted my life to researching the world of quantum behaviour and finding links to our own social constructs. Many such links exist. The more you delve, the more synergy you find. Now, one could say that you can read into anything the very thing that you would most like to read, but quantum mechanics has some special loopholes which enable that very subjectiveness to have free rein. And this in itself could be one of the reasons a number of scientists including Richard Feynman, Neils Bohr and Erwin Schroedinger have said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't. What we can understand of it gives us real, unarguable provision for leading better lives in accordance with laws which the universe itself has laid down; that's why Quantumology came into being. Everyone wants a belief system. We all hanker to relate to power greater than our own - we'd like very much to trust that power and to feel that we are connected to it. Our social minds seek connections with others who also link to the same power, inviting a matrix whereby the whole situation explodes into a ‘religion', meaning that "my god is better than your god" which leads to secular exclusivity. Leaders of such secular organisations are typically fond of gathering more devotees and shunning those who fail to accede to their (often peculiar) wishes and wills. The most powerful of post-pagan religions are no different in this respect. However, the universe doesn't work that way. Sure, it has powers. Those powers are kept in a tidy balance through a system called ‘entanglement', or ‘tangled hierarchy'. Unlike the human stage, the universal stage doesn't allow for absolution of power, and corruption is a no-go. Power is as power does and each power has corresponding powers to counteract or support it. Take gravity, for instance. This is a power at work in all our lives all the time, keeping our feet on the ground. Strange as it may seem, the force of gravity has remained a mystery to physicists since Newton and his peers first brought it to light. Even now, with Dark Energy entering the cosmological equation, scientists are having to question whether they need to rethink their fundamental beliefs about gravity and start again with some new theories. Uncertainty is familiar also, and even manages to make its way into current News reports (alongside Austerity which has a rather darker ring about it). The Uncertainty Principle was first brought to our attention by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, and has since been fiercely guarded by the scientific community as a strict reference to specific particle behaviour. Any deviation from such rigid application invites people like Brian Cox (Prof.) to write of Uncertainty being "a doorway through which all manner of charlatans and purveyors of tripe can force their philosophical musings", giving no credence whatsoever to the fact that we live our entire lives subject to this very principle, and have an absolute right to interpret its relevance and mechanism as we see fit. Due respect to Heisenberg and his contemporaries for bringing quantum mechanics to light, but shame on those seeking to preserve its sanctums for the exclusive entertainment of their personal cause. Talking of light, the universe has a special relationship with that particular substance which isn't lost for a moment on the scholars of Ecclesiastica. Electrons are the atomic bedrock of everything, including our own bodies. They form ‘shells' around the precious atomic nucleus of neutrons and protons, and the distance between the electron shell and the nucleus is quite considerable (meaning effectively that the electron is all we encounter in relating to the world we perceive). This leaves a lot of empty space in every atom. In orbiting this shell arena, electrons are given to changing their energy states, and in order to ‘jump' to a higher energy level, they must absorb a photon - a light particle. To jump down a level, they emit a photon. In every atom of everything with more than one electron to its name, this up-down energy jumping occurs, and can be induced by temperature and other atmospheric conditions. But electrons, while being rather readily excited, have a predilection for ‘ground state', that is, the lowest energy level the atom will allow. Like us, they are intrinsically lazy. Unless, like us, they are motivated to a higher level of energy, in which case they need light to let them do the job. The Sun, which feeds our planet with the light it needs to maintain life, also emits vast quantities of particles called Neutrinos. Billions of these minuscule entities pass through every square inch of everything every second. They are so small that they pass right through the expanse of space in each atom totally unhindered. Sometimes they collide with an electron, leaving a distinct track which scientists all over the world have set up multi-billion-pound/dollar detectors to study. But even the Sun, emitting unfathomable quantities of neutrinos all the time, cannot produce enough to satisfy the requirements of global research, so the scientists have also built ‘neutrino factories' which beam the little particles right through the Earth, from one observation station to another. We can only guess at the potential of the Neutrino. One wonders at the immense amounts of money poured into observing them. Rather than get carried away on thoughts of political implications, however, we can satisfy ourselves that we have relationships with these and all the other exhibits gathered in the Particle Zoo. We need light, we need energy, we rely on the universal states to maintain what we - and all other things - are. Understanding our relationships with these entities is, I suggest, not merely of vague interest, but fundamentally critical. For if we are to evolve, as Einstein and other great philosophical minds have suggested we really should, we need to know how to go about it. And our going about the business of evolving our minds relies on our appreciation of what we have to work with. The Universe is a big place. Some say it's infinite, some say it's expanding, some still argue the toss over where it's going and where it came from. What we do know is that the Universe has rules, and they are not as complicated as some would like us to believe. Stuck in a rut of over-indulgence and political insanity, it's really up to us to get out of it. We're not going to get far by relying on powers which consider themselves absolute to show a modicum of sense in leading us back to the garden. We have to get back to the garden on our own, and see from there where we can go next. Our own gardens, our own lives, our own relationships, all are subject to the laws of the Universe and when we know more about what those laws are, at least in principle, then we can decide on which track we want to take. There is no restriction, and there are no guidelines set in stone. Information is as much a fabric of the universal continuum as matter and energy, as Stephen Hawking discovered (via Hawking Radiation). There in the plethora of options available to us, we have choices, no holds barred. Our free will exercises these choices, and every time we make one, as any quantum physicist will tell you, the universe splits - but that's another story, maybe for another time. Although the story behind it is humorous, there's a point in there somewhere. Is the observer really inclined to affect the observed, even through a photograph? There are cultures which believe a photo steals part of your soul. If so, what of those who are continually observed through the media? Those who don't feel they have a private life any more? Maybe the effect depends on how the subject views the observation. Joanna Lumley doesn't seem to mind, she's 67 and looks better than most of us. World leaders, on the other hand, tend to go grey rather fast once in office. Maybe they don't feel happy with the way the world views them once they get up to the apex and have to look down. Non-locality is the media by which the Universe transmits information. Bypassing the standard 'constant' of light speed, non-locality enables information to travel to wherever it needs to go without the need for pre-determination. Computers are unnecessary to the Universe, which has no need of any circuitry other than that of its own making. We know that the Universe built uncertainty into its programme, that no moment can be exactly the same as any other moment and no material object truly identical. Structural and positional atomic differences ensure that every one of an uncountable number of manufactured, seemingly identical objects will be unique. Grains of sand are unique. In the natural world, we marvel at how identical birds can know each other as individuals. Clearly to a gannet the uniqueness of his mate is as plain as the nose on your face. How do we use this information to our advantage? By allowing the freedom of unique moments to deliver unique events to be present in our existence, so we can make our realities what we want them to be. We can't do this all the time, of course, as we live in a negative universe (all we encounter of it physically is electrons). The negative charge of our surroundings has to have some effect - despite the trend of the thread in the link behind electrons, there's a reason why we use the term 'negative' the way we do. Call it instinct, or information from non-local sources. We can make huge differences to what we see as real, inviting positivity to be part of the equation knowing it'll reward when least expected. Such is the joy of uncertainty - a Law the Universe stamps firmly all the time, on everything, so why not live by it? Join the Group for more discussions. Get in touch for programme details. Visit the other website for testimonials.
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AuthorKathy 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. Archives
April 2023
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