Enlightenment. A big, out-of-reach kind of word. The kind of word you're reluctant to take too seriously, bringing to mind images of orange togas and Harsesis. But there's no getting away from the fact that it's very popular on social media these days, in the right kind of groups / rubbing keyboards with the right kind of people. Not that there's any right or wrong, you understand, that being the whole point, really. It's as if we've got a kind of new-age hysteria on our hands, where everyone wants to feel it but nobody's quite sure whether it's real.

You're a physicist, right? I like physicists to visit this site. Not because you're brighter than everyone else, although in scientific terms you most probably are, or because I've got some sort of reverence for you, though secretly I probably have. I love you the way people love Sheldon Cooper. The way tigers love water. With a kind of irresistible draw that happens now and then but most especially when least expected.

Love. There's another word filled with improbable connotations. Not the kind of word you'd want to go uttering in the boardroom, or the kind of thing you'd be tempted to write an equation for. Not because you didn't want to, but because other people might find it rather silly. And we don't want to look silly. Not ever.

Photons have been around a long time. You knew about photons when people started talking about them a hundred years ago and they haven't stopped talking about them since. They were the first particles to be introduced to Double Slit and the first to be quantified on a spectrum. Later it became apparent that the entire EM spectrum was composed of photons, so light became more than as we know it, Jim. Light turned into a radican of riddles. When Dark Matter came into view and Dark Energy followed on its heels, Light became another contender in a different kind of race - the race to find its paradoxical counterpart.

Now, it's fair to say that in all the years I've been delving into quantum mechanics, there hasn't been a week go by when I haven't found something new. Today a friend posted up this article on Facebook. I quickly transposed it to Twitter. The question it poses is most interesting. Could light be a communicative carrier? Is it possible that the photons zipping around in our brain are doing much, much more with us than we think?

On the Lambda report (in the menu) you'll find references to questions to which the answer was patently inexplicable. Science struggles hard with stuff that veers out of the Standard Model into territory of the philosophical kind. So hard, in fact, that it's prepared to cook the books rather than face the fact - the books don't balance as required. The audit is always going to be there, Nature doesn't let anyone off for good behaviour. So why is the filling of gaps so difficult? Could it be that there needs to be more photon philosophy in the Income column and fewer constants in the Outgoings?

Spending trillions of pounds/dollars/whatever on neutrino traps isn't going to solve problems with constants or free anyone to shake off the constraints. These steps have to be taken inside, where the answers are, and it's going to have to be a physicist that comes through the smoke and mirrors to give everyone a chance to see the light of day. There in the dark recesses of someone's glowing mind lie the gems of information the Universe wants to deliver. We know it wants to deliver because it's delivered an awful lot so far, and too many scientists have reported their greatest achievements to be born of visions and dreams for anyone to argue that the process of ground-breaking discovery isn't in some sense metaphysical.
Oh, and while we're at it, The Petrino is still mine.

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​Dr Robert Lanza was voted to be the 3rd most important scientist alive today in a New York Times poll, so his weight (in cosmic terms) is significant. His theories about life, afterlife, and our relationship with the Multiverse pass significantly close to my own teachings, and since my lessons came originally from undisclosed sources (which have to remain undisclosed because I could never see them), I have to give credence to this weight by writing an addendum to the purported.

Lanza’a expertise in regenerative medicine and cloning was brought to fusion with quantum mechanics… such a calling has fallen upon many an unsuspecting human over the course of recent years. The conclusion that consciousness is the foundation of the universe, that effectively the universe is alive, seems inevitably to be reached when blending quantum mechanics with anything remotely bio- or socio- logical. It seems that you can take the humanity out of physics, but you can’t take physics out of humanity. As the only species on the planet to be actively engaging in explorations of the Universe, it’s safe to say that humans are the apex of its self-searching exercise, on this planet at least.

The scientist’s analogy with regards to our relationship with spacetime is quaint, in terms of turtles with shells, his point being that we carry spacetime around with us like a permanent appendage, and that we still exist whatever the spacetime conditions may be in which we are existing. In this way he supports the concept of life after death, or rather, the potential infinity of existence, since consciousness is interdependent of spacetime and is non-local in character. Lanza also brings into play the role of the Multiverse, a principle developed by Hugh Everett in the 1950s and hotly contested by the younger batch of quantum mechanics in the latter half of the century. The idea is that multiple universes exist in a constant state of self-creation - at any given moment the universe divides into other instances of itself, to split again at the next moment, each of these moments being ignited, if you like, by a decision making process. Taken literally, every time you make a decision the universe splits to allow for the decision you have made and any other version of other decisions that could have been made. My take on this is that every time we choose to do something, we move into the Multiverse where that cause-and-effect track resides, but just as in the branching mechanism described above, there is no sensation of the transition because the entire infinite structure is all part and parcel of the same thing. Equally, there is no certainty that the track we find ourselves on – or the Multiverse version we find ourselves in – will not loop itself back to the original ‘intended’ track at some future point, hence aligning itself with the choice-destiny paradox we will be arguing till the end of time.

In first learning of wave-particle duality*, my earliest assumption was given to believe that particle reality was given to exist only in the present moment of time, and further, that this was in principle accepted as a given concept across the quantum-mechanical train of thought. On recent investigation, however, I can find no reference to directly support this assumed actuality, and while this may indicate that I have simply not dug deeply enough, it may also indicate that wave-particle duality is more widely a bone of contention than an expression of truth concerning the spacetime continuum.

While scientists hotly dispute the nature and cause of "collapse of the wave packet", there is, in virtually every case of theoretical musing, a place for the observer. Suggestions that wave packets can only collapse into particle state when a researcher is on hand to watch it happen bring subtle smiles at the inference that it only happens in the laboratory, or when someone is sitting with a cat in a thought experiment. Taking implication that observation collapses the wave packet to its more rational conclusion, our collective observations collapse wave packets all the time, and since the definition of what is conscious and what is not is woolly at best, should we dare to venture that all material is conscious at some level of its nature (as the double-slit experiment would appear to indicate), then all material is observing all other material. The relationship between forms of matter, as in the relationship between species, is intrinsically entangled, all the time.

To me, the idea that the world I see around me only exists in particle format at the moment in which I view it is neither alien nor surprising, but this may be because I've held the view for a long time. I remember struggling to get my head around it, recognising that the vision of a house around the next corner was a solid reality to me only when I was in a position to view it, before which it was, to me, merely a wave form, while to the occupants of the house their observation perpetually held the walls around them in the format of solid reality, at least in terms of the room they were occupying at the time. But then, the struggle to get one's head around things takes many forms, and here I must indulge in an analogy.

When I was very young, I fell in love. By "very young" I mean yet to hit my twentieth year. I had little or no experience of over-thinking, I took life more or less for granted, the future was a vague set of rosy ideals and assimilating those parts of my soul torn from its roots was a treat reserved for later. When I was young, it was easy to run. I ran as fast as the next man could carry me to the southern edge of the mainland and vowed never to return to the territory which gravely hinted at semi-lethal danger. But I didn't bargain for circumstance. I didn't bargain for my own naivete and I certainly didn't bargain for divine timing. 32 years later, I was driven back to face those stolen parts of my soul and forced to consider them as a grown woman, falling into the chaos of unpredictability where the energy of passion and the blood of life meet to create the crazy contexts people write songs about.
In between times, I'd learned much about quantum mechanics, and when the train-wreck-in-waiting mowed me down flat, those lessons were leaned on in trusting they would help me to get back up again. In doing just that, my scantily-clad knowledge of the quantum field delivered experiences to rapidly consolidate what had been learned into what is now known. Whatever the future may hold, I will never be given to question the intense, personal implications of non-locality on human systems of communication, nor will I be tempted to underestimate the power of uncertainty in the casting of dice Einstein insisted God did not play with.

Wave-particle duality seems to my mind to be the obvious product of the 3D construct we need to perceive as material beings. While we exist in life as we know it, as particle-based organisms, we need an existence to relate to. The 3D plane provides a template for that existence, as love provides a template for the unconditional relationship. In determining that the only moment in which I exist in particle format is the present one, I understand that the wave form of my past can drift and bend according to my perceptions, and that the future wave form I am yet to enter in the particle state may well be affected by those perceptions - if not in the events to be encountered (which are themselves cast according to the throw of unseen dice), rather more in my response to those events, which (should 'free will' be a reality) may well be the only thing of my choosing. If we perceive Time as a linear trajectory, which for this purpose alone (notwithstanding the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a useful concept, it may be seen that shifting our positional perspective in relation to the past will automatically cause a variant in our trajectory towards the future, just as the needle on a compass will turn should we shuffle our feet round to the east or the west.
Thus it becomes clear that no matter the breadth and depth of the scientific arguments or how long they may continue, the simplicity inherent in our own interpretation of quantum mechanics is not only peppered with gems of wisdom, it is also useful in the development of a personal guidance system. For in the deepest recesses of Self we are aware of the perspectives which serve us best, and those in kind tend to serve others as we would wish to be served ourselves. In accepting our small helping of life from the bubbling cauldron of the quantum continuum, we are duty bound to eat it all. There is a school of thought believing that you are what you eat, and in this context, never a truer word was spoken in which to forever hold our peace.