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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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    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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