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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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How does Bell's Theorem relate...?

7/25/2020

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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. 

What does Bell's Theorem mean?

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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..

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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."

What can Bell's Theorem do for me?

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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.

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Time and The Constant

4/14/2020

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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.

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There's a problem with the Universe. We can see (thanks to Hubble and his remarkable telescope) way back into the dim, distant history of the Universe because the objects that were around then are still relaying their signature of light which is travelling through space for us to find. And they tell us that the Universe is, well, a bit of a paradox. Here, Ethan has a go at it.

Hubble wanted a constant, and got one; Hubble Constant = rate of universal expansion. Only, what if the expansion rate is not constant at all? What if it's greater than can possibly be imagined, because we'd have a hard time keeping up? What if we see 'visible light' because we exist at the same resonant frequency as visible light? What if that resonance is the fabric of our very reality, the material on which the laws of physics rests, the only thing we know to relate to? Electrons can, in certain circumstances, travel faster than light, and when they do, they 'live' longer than their counterparts. Speed and time have a strange mode of interloping.



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The Big Bang is supposed to have happened 13.8 billion years ago, but Hubble's telescope sees stars across the Universe 92 billion light years away; yes, the Universe is expanding.... we haven't seen the half of it yet.

Light speed = a Constant defended with affidavits if necessary. To buck the trend, let's suppose for a moment that we're all moving at the speed of light, along with everything else we can see, and that relativity - general or otherwise - needs to take account of this in order to be able to do something practical with the infinities that keep popping up all over the maths.

You don't need to go anywhere, or even to move from one place to another to exist at light-speed, for if all points in time are simultaneously Here, Now, then relativity can swing all the bats it likes - you and I are still existing in the Constant, which would be how we get to navigate our way around the world we live on. Take the Block Universe theory, and try dallying with Eternalism for a while just to see where it leads. Could be the start of a new kind of journey....

SUMMER UPDATE 2020
Live videos are streaming from Quantumology's Facebook group every Monday.
Join via the link to contact me during live streams and take part in the discussions.  

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Goldilocks

12/26/2019

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One day, there's going to be a revelation. A big announcement to tell us that the Solar System has been expanding, along with the rest of the Universe, all these billions of years and that Mars was here before us. There was life on Mars, they'll say with all the conviction of the deeply shocked, when Mars was here in the Goldilocks Zone, which of course it isn't now, and never can be again, its time here in Fairytale Land past and gone, dust to red dust.

We're going to learn that Venus is next in the procession of precessions and will arrive in the Goldilocks Zone we now inhabit in roughly six billion year's time, with luck before the Sun loses its capacity to sustain life and in good time to make the most of all that methane churning around. Venus is literally a fire of storms, a methane melting pot of global proportions - that's why it flashes different colours in the night sky.

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Of course, such an announcement would put deep dents in certain belief systems and rock boats in powerful waters, so no need to hold our breath - it might never happen, not in our lifetime. For planets to pass through Goldilocks Zones and enjoy a few millennia of life-bearing idyll would mean most (if not all) solar systems spawn life at some point, so there'd be nothing unique about us at all, except perhaps our quaint take on the laws of physics - adhesion to the Standard Model plus Planck constraints and light-speed busily limiting potential for advances of mind.

A vacation in the Goldilocks Zone may be relatively short-lived, and if we don't use our time well, well, we've wasted it.

This place where dreams are made of, 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, is a bit of an enigma. You won't find NASA being pinned down to a distance definition. On Quora, the fuller answers are a bit baffling but there's a general consensus that it stretches between Venus and Mars. Wikipedia is a bit more helpful. Whatever the case, we don't need to worry about it. Porridge will still be porridge. The question of when the porridge arrives given the options of a 5D continuum is much more relevant than whether it's real or not. Knowing how to live life in the Multiverse must surely be a valuable tool to have, and let's face it, we're all trying to free ourselves of something.
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Coincidentally, the Moon is exactly the right size to afford a total eclipse. Exactly the right size. Given a 92,466,000 mile gap between Moon and Sun, that's a pretty neat trick of relativity. All the possible options in the Universe - we get landed with that one. Hail Griffin, he showed us all the way, and did we listen?
Are we not listening still?
Perhaps we never will.

There will be scientists visiting (thank you for coming ^) putting all this down as Woo, incurable sockpuppetry, charlatanism and all kinds of other isms in fear and trepidation of answering difficult questions. Maths doesn't cut it all the time, it's great in a Pi but put maths into quantum porridge and it's going to be lumpy, as you've all proven beyond doubt to everyone including yourselves. Some scientists might feel a bit sick at having some non-scientist sticking their nose into dimensions that don't concern them, but that's only because they're afraid of having to visibly think hard, dump the sums and not know the answer immediately. No self-respecting scientist betrays the mathematical grail in front of others.

Our place in the Multiverse is of humongous importance, and proportionally the greatest riddle we may ever have to solve. How we improve relations with our planetary cohabitants and what comes of understanding how to handle our reality better is anybody's guess, but for sure, only physics can lead the way. Even if it is only our physics, unlike anyone else's - out there where we don't dare go yet there may be all kinds of other physics waiting to get heads around. However many heads you might have. Handy to have three if you want to save time tasting things. 


UPDATE 2020

Quantumology's Facebook group now hosts Live Videos - join now to take part in the discussions!
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Uncertainty - would you rather not be?

11/10/2019

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Scientists say the Uncertainty Principle is simply a case of not being able to take two measurements at the same time. Brian Cox called anyone who thought differently a "purveyor of tripe" and many other orthodox positivists would say the same.

If you really think the fact that we are all unique, every grain of sand and snowflake is unique but it can't have anything to do with Uncertainty, I'd venture to say you were wrong, and Heisenberg might even agree. 

Image credit: 
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-multiverses-measure-problem-20141103/

​Electrons are fuzzy things, not pinpointable because they don't really live like that - they zing their way round and through several dimensions at once and somehow land up here long enough to fend off the pesky Positrons. So not being able to pin down an electron, which is where this whole uncertainty-principle thing first started, is one thing. Not being able to pin down anything at all is more like it.

​

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We've got one life as we know it, Jim - the rest is all conjecture but for the Here and Now, it's good to know about Uncertainty. Because if my guess is right, Uncertainty and Free Will are one and the same, so where would we be without the U.P.? Here's a microtubule in the brain, as best we can picture it, and this is the one place in the body you'll find coherent water.... the incredible properties of which you can learn about behind those busy things working out which way to go on the Underground. Unless you're really, secretly scientifically bent, in which case you're going to love this...

Look at the bigger picture - the Multiverse. Almost everyone agrees with Everett now that quantum mechanics has proved so many dimensions and variables to exist. That's a lot of Universes, mind, and a lot of options, probably stretching to Infinity if we could bring ourselves to face it, but Renormalisation is easier so..... back to the comfort zone. What for? Who doesn't want to know how to get the best out of what they've got? Money doesn't come into it - there are as many tragic, desperate and depressed stars as there are happy-go-lucky ones, just as everywhere else in society. But we do share something that's a bit different to our predecessors, and that's a grounding in how it feels to be waking up.

Time - there's another thing on our side, with the Past and Future waves of Advance and Retard crashing into the Present at the same time and hey, suddenly it makes sense that we're crazy and stupid and clever and thoughtful all at the same time, because we are waking up to the Now and what we can do with it, which is somewhere our species hasn't really been before. At least not in our living memory. Behind this beautiful bubble formation you'll find Quanta Magazine saying much the same thing as I am here, so nothing new under the sun, but at least we're talking, and walking at the same time sometimes too....

What if we, like the electron, are buzzing in and out of Multiversal states all the time, without realising it? How can every thing be unique if there are not infinite proportions to choose from? And that, extrapolated into our neural framework, means that we are freer to choose or not to choose than we were before, because knowing that both are necessary for our movement through Time allows us the pleasure of appreciation, the feeling of what it is to be happy with yourself, instead of beating ourselves up and crashing back into the pan of Past/Future Anxiety where everything loses its own plot. ​
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The simplest things are binary, a 1 and a 0 making a code that replicates itself and can do so in infinite combinations any way anything wants it to, from computer programming to barcodes in our simple versions of the way we do things. Binary is there to suffice all requirements of simple data, and a lot of things in Nature tend to follow it, so I'm thinking it's a safe bet that the fuzzy improbabilities of the electron and the probability that this table will still be here in the morning have some kind of relationship. They either are, or they are not.

If we can be in so many places at once then why shouldn't identical snowflakes fall where no-one is watching them, and identical grains of sand appear in remote corners of the world where they can't be found? The commonality is the thing, in the rarity of symmetry, because nowadays Nature is not fond of symmetry and scientists have long hated that. ​Back to Charnia, maybe, where the lions and witches had us wondering about our wardrobes..... if you want Wiki's take it's right there behind the picture, where Life first began to take Form....

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Fibonacci and Phi

9/11/2019

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There's talk about ever-decreasing circles when things get worse on repetition; they made a TV show about it in the Eighties. Does that mean our discourse follows ever-increasing circles when things get better? I've had a few scenarios shadow me through life that I'm clearly supposed to learn from, and right now I'm studying geometry in the context of application to such things as sunflowers.
The Fibonacci sequence, being what you'd call 'irrational', is there in nature at every turn, from shells to pine cones, with the ratio between the numbers of the sequence being known as the Golden Ratio, being represented by the Greek letter Phi, and being everywhere we look. 

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On the trail of evidence for natural geometry, it came to my attention on looking for examples of irrational numbers that (coincidentally or otherwise) Schroedinger's Wave Equation is also represented by the Greek letter Phi; in Comments to the link attached, you'll find Jonathan noting that It is commonly believed that waves make up the sub-atomic particles which may be the reason why Schroedinger (or someone) chose it to apply to quantum field theory. However, as evidenced by the Wiki entry here on what's called the 'Schroedinger functional', anything that doesn't readily lend itself to renormalisation is still finding it hard to be fashionable.

Schroedinger devoted himself largely to causality and chance (or lack of it) in natural law, and a comprehensive precis of his thought process can be read here. His dwelling on such matters led him to create a wave equation which smoothly evolves through time, just as the Fibonacci sequence smoothly evolves the growth and development of natural things like thistles, roses, and spiral galaxies. The unpopularity of Schroedinger's wave equation in preference to something that can be algebraically calculated in avoidance of those pesky infinities (noting that in Wiki's Fock space definition the author doesn't even mention Schroedinger) says a lot about the mind set still prevalent in quantum mechanical fields, and not a lot about the logic of applying schemes universally adopted by Nature to the quantum paradoxes pondered upon by Man. Men, then. Usually, anyway.
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What does this mean for us? That depends on your intuitive relationship with coincidence, or any leaning you have towards synchronicity being circumstantial evidence for powers greater than our own. Fibonacci, Schroedinger and other minds of historical note have been pondering and surmising on the underlying laws of nature for a long time now, and with quantum mechanics at the front of our potentials for New Physics, there's no time like the present for linking the facts as they stand with the fortunes inherent in our own world-line. Time is in reality a far cry from the lineage of onward-marching arrows we mistook for something other than entropy - the wave form we ride may well perpetuate in resonance to the Fibonacci sequence and be dancing merrily to Schroedinger's tune. Would this make sense of life's events coming back to haunt us from time to time? Could it be that what we are given (to experience) and what we learn as a result are in keeping with a pattern at the baseline of creation? For it seems to me that every time we dovetail a piece of life's puzzle with a quantum mechanical principle, we come up with freedoms of infinite probability and an allowance in the small print to accept things as they are, no need to struggle against What Is. Life is hard enough without taking the full weight of its variables on our own shoulders. Some things, they say, are meant to be. Why stop at Some, when the irrationality of All is so evidently preferred by Nature?

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Logical Bias

8/18/2019

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Bias being a tendency to shift current in a certain direction electronically, or for fabric to lie in a certain way haberdasherally, in terms of human relations it's described by the online dictionary as, "inclination or prejudice for or against one person or group, especially in a way considered to be unfair." An overview of bias and how it becomes embedded lies behind the picture looking suspiciously like a Fibonnaci spiral.
When it comes to science, and quantum physics in particular, we have a situation wherein one group of people (those who write and understand equations, let's call them the EQ) are biased against another group of people (those who neither write nor understand equations, the Non-EQ) resulting in a seemingly unfair tendency for the EQ to dismiss the thought processes and ideas of the Non-EQ based on inability to do maths. As someone who only knows their native language might find themselves dismissed by someone who doesn't speak it. Bias can produce dark dangers of its own.

The EQ argument goes that an argument must be logical, empirical, and mathematically sound before it can even be a point worth making. Logic is mathematical, logic circuitry methodical, as in semiconductors. Now that quantum computers have flown into orbit, classical logic gates now have quantum counterparts, only a quantum logic gate is not restricted to 1 or 0, but has free rein in superposition, and a quantum computer can even produce entangled states. Reading a popular entry on their measurement, the author says that, "This type of value-assignment in theory occurs instantaneously over any distance and this has as of 2018 been experimentally verified for distances of up to 1200 kilometers.[8][9] That the phenomena appears to violate the speed of light is called the EPR paradox and it is an open question in physics how to resolve this. Originally it was solved by giving up the assumption of local realism, but other interpretations have also emerged." 
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Other interpretations? Follow the link and you will find it most elucidating, citing as it does seven challenges to scientific interpretation of quantum mechanics, boiling down to the fact that you can't really measure the immeasurable. Oxford Physics lab is making a fair feast of efforts in researching new technologies, though, as linked behind their picture. But we still find that, fundamentally, mathematics doesn't cut it when it comes to quanta, for the world as seen from a quantum perspective doesn't conform to classical physics, and never has, which is why it's always been a problem that can never go away.

Seasons don't go away either. As we get older, we see more patterns in the changing year, we know when a season comes early or late, we sense the shift from summer to autumn, winter to spring. We observe environmental alterations, such as loss of wildlife and climactic warming. We don't need to apply these things to mathematical formulas to know and accept that they are there. So why is the bedrock of our existence so apparently dependent on calculus for its definition?


"There's nothing logical about magic," someone recently said to me. Yet the odds against our lives existing at all are somewhat other-worldly, and not just in the probability of being resident in a Goldilocks Zone. The chance of a universe setting up its construct to support life as we know it in the first place is apparently unfathomably unlikely. Logically we could argue that it's illogical that we are here. But the earthbound mind that cannot bring down an ethereal argument into an empirical formula collapses its packet into What Is, to question it not, or at least no further than necessary in order to make the maths work. Infinity will always be a problem underpinning quantum processes, which is why an EQ has to resort to renormalisation as frowned at by Feynman, who called it "dippy", even though his diagrams are all over it, and if you want to know about renormalisation this insight from Physics Forums as probably as good as it gets.

With issues like infinity, non-local entanglement (which laughs at the 'constant' of light speed), uncertainty (preventing true measurements of anything on the move), and superposition (the two [or more, depending on how finite things are] states that anything is in at any given time) struggling with duality (you're made of particles right now, but aren't you a wave form when you're not looking?)... well, the constraints on which maths so fervently relies don't look very solid from where I'm standing. I don't have the answers, I just think about this stuff, a lot... as you can tell, it's been a few years now and the bias against free thought is still rigorously maintained, its only defence seemingly being as someone commented at me, "there's no language other than math," not that such an argument sounds very logical, but then, am I missing something?
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Quantum Entanglement's Tantrums

8/3/2019

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Entanglement is no new kid on the block but it hasn't said much yet, other than through Einstein. LiveScience gives the run-down behind the spooky image here.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that it doesn't have a relationship with time. Entanglement is an instantaneous, simultaneous response to stimuli shared between two particles (or two bodies of material, for it's being shown to occur in larger things than first thought) irrespective of distance. And that causes a few headaches with the equations.

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Last month the first-ever photograph of an entangled photon pair was promoted as a herald to new types of technology. You can read the review from Science Alert behind the picture of said pair.
​The big question is, how does anything get entangled in the first place? Is there a definitive point at which things are entangled, or is it a case, being devoid of any conditional time measurement, that entanglement occurs in advance of its physical evidence? Are these photons (and all other entangled things) destined to be cleaved together and subsequently find each other so paired? Could entanglement, per se, be a real-life physics love story? This is not such a stupid question. For people get entangled just as particles do. Love can lead us a merry dance for a lifetime, and when it does, there's nothing you can do about it.

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When you've experienced entanglement.... you know when you've been Tangled. A study on the effects of consciousness applied to entanglement is previewed behind this beautiful image of tangled balance. On the understanding that the phenomenon is not confined to subatomics, but applies on the grander scale of Everything, the job at hand would seem to be to get the symmetry of our entanglements right, which is a bit of a tough call when you consider the flotsam our minds have to deal with in everyday living. Photons might not have much to think about in the course of their lives, but they live beyond time, without considering matters of constraint, and they continually give themselves up and pull themselves back to freedom in their eternal dance with electrons. Is that so very different from the relationships we have with those people to whom we would consider ourselves most entangled? Probably not. The matter of life after matter is another topic for hot debate, but  photons can speak for themselves. 

Personally I don't see the Entanglement conundrum going underground any time soon. In fact we could be right on the cusp of New Physics, a revolutionary era mooted by the latest generation of scientific thinkers who are quietly considering the implications of oscillation as we speak. While academics seek holy grails among darknesses in the universal soup, entanglement could come to mean more than the sum of spacetime. It could mean the beginning of the end for the Standard Model. About time too.
2020 UPDATE   Join the Group for live debates on this ad related subjects
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Time - An Update

7/27/2019

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Much is being made of Time at the moment, as the idea of retrocausality takes hold and quantum computers take steps closer to reality. Those now-familiar Advanced and Retarded waves are crashing together in a sea of Presents while we bob along our personal time tunnel blind to the future, tied to the past, doing our best to make life work. Meanwhile, science hears calls to relax its grip on the oars of positivism, the swell of social tide lending weight to the metaphysical in time for religion and politics to reveal certain unpalatable truths.

This era, the likes of which have not been seen in our lifetime, stands to carve the last of our testaments on the planet, for Fermi's Paradox has caught us up. Money has us cornered and there is nowhere to run, save into its clutches or away from civilization, as a hunted animal must face its fate or disappear from its tormentors.  
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Personally I've just had a run-in with Time - read about it here. This experience adds to the stack of events on my world line demonstrating metaphysics first-hand, and I'll not be alone among the myriad of people caught by similar happenstance, some of whom report their encounters on social media while most in probability keep it to themselves. Clarion or sentinel, the feeling grows that we're on the edge, something has to break and we are part of that something, waiting, watching, longing to dance, fearing the fall but knowing we're going anyway, maybe to be the last of our kind.

"Now a new revolution is on the verge of answering that question, based on insights from the other great physics surprise of the last century: quantum mechanics. Today’s revolution offers the potential for yet another rewrite of space-time’s résumé, with the bonus of perhaps explaining why quantum mechanics seems so weird." quantum mechanics seems so Read the full story where the world falls into a black hole.

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When you thought Time couldn't get any weirder beyond the idea of past and future co-existing and imparting equal influence on the present, you now have to consider entangled time, where the presents of aeons long past are meeting those existing now, time after time, if you like, a swathe of light cones promising that, just as suspected, everything under the sun has been done; we relive a turmoil of past and futures no market could ever hope to harvest. 

Behind the man walking the invisible bridge you'll find more elucudation on entangled time. Fair enough, methinks, that spooky actions at a distance should prove as omnipotent as the Uncertainty Principle, waving from the rafters where none have gone before save those who've already crossed the great divide - colonists not remotely concerned with the Kardashev scale who've already made the jump to zero-point would know better than to interfere with the likes of us. We're still busy crossing the sea of Time as we know it, from life as we know it to something else, something more or something less, a classic case of relativity in juxtaposition.

Independence in the Universe is eloquently captured by this Royal Society article whose author has entangled the nature of non-locality with our relative position in spacetime. We're alone in our motion through systems of life, even if the fusion of quantum-mechanical states ensures we're all in this together. We have to work hard to get our own handle on our version of What Is with the tools at our disposal, reliant on science to hand us the subtle knives sharp and ready for use, as essential staff would serve the surgeon while he works, oblivious of the moral implications, on a detail salvaging more than the sum of the parts on which he operates. The collective seeks a positive outcome, as the surgeon seeks to save life, and there is no going back to the innocent oblivion from whence we came, there is only the certainty of entropy to insist we stay true to the forward track. I'll join you there - love you being here, for we are legion if there is only one of us.

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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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