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.

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. 

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

​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...

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:
"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 

"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  

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.

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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Here 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. 

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."

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.

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.