The weird implications of modern physics - reality itself may just be an illusion

For those working and studying modern science (especially in modern physics) will know just how very weird its implications have become. For instance, good old objects, things we can touch, smell and feel exist as a state of energy, while waves of probability spread throughout the universe. Existence itself may only be the vibrations on microscopic, trans-dimensional strings.

Attempts to solve problems in quantum physics often run into the problem of consciousness. Though most physicists try to sidestep the issue, it seems that there is a link between the conscious choice of experiment and the outcome of the experiment. In fact, reality itself may just be an illusion.

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate the weird implications of some interpretations (Copenhagen) of quantum mechanics when applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. In this scenario a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death becomes depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. Accordingly, the cat remains both alive and dead until the box is opened and observed by a conscious being.

In my book, The Illusion of Reality: A Public Servant’s Secret Essays, I discuss the interplay of light with elementary particles; the idea of emergence as the arrow of time and the role the conscience mind plays in integrating, and creating reality. Much of the book is based on theoretical and mathematical conjectures – however, recent news may change all that. A team of UC Berkeley researchers published a study recently detailing a miniature invisibility cloak that can conceal objects using the principles of quantum mechanical - remember Harry Potter’s cloak?

Under the lead of Xiang Zhang, director of materials sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor in the campus’s department of mechanical engineering, the team created the first model of the cloak six years ago. The previous design, however, presented limitations because it was made of a bulkier material and needed to have a fixed shape.

Based on a completely different design principle, the more recent experiment has been capable of concealing a particle that is microscopic in size, researchers said it may be able to cloak larger objects as soon as five years from now. 

According to Zhang, there are many potential future applications of the technology. It could eliminate blind spots by making metal frames of cars transparent. Alternatively, the military may be able to use the technology to hide planes or tanks. Wrinkles and blemishes could be concealed with a design that would mold to the wearer’s features.

Doing away with the is word

Now I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading and writing about the quantum. More and more I’ve been searching for  connections that seem to bind elements of the quantum with  consciousness and our perceptions of reality. At the same time, I am a huge fan of Albert Ellis and his work in rational emotive behavior therapy. Of course we shouldn’t expect to be loved just because we love.

Albert Ellis also advocated the use of E-Prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that distresses psychotherapy patients. According to Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime."

E-prime you ask?

Alfred Korzybski, in 1933 proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. And, in 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. went further and proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be.” An English without "isness" now known as E-Prime, or English-Prime.

By and large, however, E-Prime has not yet caught on either in learned circles or in popular speech.

Oddly, most physicists write in E-Prime a large part of the time, due to the influence of Operationalism -- the philosophy that tells us to define things by operations performed -- but few have any awareness of E-prime as a discipline and most of them lapse into "isness" statements all too frequently

1. The photon is a wave can be re-written to read - The photon behaves as a   wave when constrained by certain instruments

2. The photon is a particle can be written such as:  The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

3. John is unhappy and grouchy can be re-written to read John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.

Sure, the first example becomes an operational formulation when rewritten in English Prime and may appear of interest to philosophers and scientists of an operationalist bias, but consider what happens when we move to the second example.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.

3.         To be or not to be,

            That is the question. Hamlet

Become

To live or to die,

I ask myself this.

While teaching at the University of Florida, Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about … demonstrating the application of general semantics to psychotherapy.

Verschränkung and Schrödinger's cat

Google's latest doodle marks the birthday of Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist whose eponymous equation lies at the heart of quantum mechanics.

He repeatedly criticised conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics by using the paradox of what would become known as Schrödinger's cat. This thought experiment was designed to illustrate what he saw as the problems surrounding application of the conventional, so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics to everyday objects.

Schrödinger proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened and the function collapses.

For those who haven’t read Schrödinger or are not familiar with the man’s character - Schrödinger was a debonair, passionate, poetic philosopher and a romantic baronessck. He wrote books about the ancient Greeks, on philosophy and religion. He was influenced by Hinduism, flamboyant, cool, suave, sophisticated, dapper dresser and a big hit with the ladies.

It is said that Schrödinger’s promiscuity was legendary, having a string of girlfriends throughout his married life – some of them much younger than him. In 1925, the 38-year-old Schrödinger stayed at the Alpine resort of Arosa Switzerland for a secret liaison with an old girlfriend. It’s said that their passion proved to be the catalyst for Schrödinger’s creative genius.

Another physicist said of Schrödinger’s week of sexually inspired physics  - he had two tasks that week, satisfy a women and solve the riddle of the atom. Fortunately he was up to both. Schrödinger argued, crucially, that the electron was the wave of energy, vibrating so fast it looked like a cloud around the atom and went on to develop what is now known as the Schrödinger equation.  This describes the wave [completely] and hence the atom in terms of traditional physics. 

The conundrum of time

There wouldn’t be too many people who haven’t at one point or another wondered if there was ever a time before time. And it really doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian, of the catholic persuasion, a Zen Buddhist or a non-believer – it’s a conundrum that’s occupied the minds of the greatest philosophers and perplexed scientists as far back as Newton and contemporaries. I know I asked my father when I was about ten years old “Who created God if God created everything…” for I was told at Sunday school God created a mature universe and mature life from nothing in less than 7 days, less than 10,000 years ago.

So was there a time before time? Did time begin for example as a by-product of a very early universe? Of course one can ask, without a prime mover what ever happened before the birth of the universe.

The difficulty is of course because we don’t have the mental architecture to hook our thinking about it. It’s a bit like the edge of the world question. Back in the day when we thought the world was flat, we wondered if the sea poured over the edge. Discovering that the world is a sphere gave us; a model of the world that explained neatly that there is no edge.

One would have to think that with the appropriate mental scaffolding we might be able to answer the question – was there a time before time. The answer may well be in the depth of the Big Bang, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. 

General relativity unified time and space giving us a space-time continuum while Quantum Mechanics describes the unbelievably small dense universe. We think that in the first moment of the big bang, all the matter and energy that are in the universe today, existed at a single point, impossibly dense, inconceivably hot, and dark. Space began to expand at a speed faster than the speed of light.

At a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a ten millionth of a second after the big bang the universe was small enough to be described by both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics effectively supporting 4 dimensions of space and none of time. So as we backtrack to the earliest of time – there may well have been no time and instead 4 dimensional Space. Substituting time with a direction of space is somewhat similar to the problem of the edge of the world. It is only [later] that we humans begun to realize that time and space are one and the same.

A jaw dropping idea

I’ve had a lot of lonely and soulful nights lately giving me the chance to think about how precarious life really is.  In those quiet times of contemplation one has the chance to ask what is this all about. What is nothing and does the world require things so that “nothing” can be understood.

What is nothing?. I know this sounds like a frivolous question. After all, we think we all have an intuitive sense of nothingness. But when we actually try to answer this question – it is an extremely, extremely question to answer. Everywhere we look, there is something there.

If we were to remove everything out of a box - the dust, the dirt, the air, every last single atom., what then exists in the box. Is it really nothing? Why this maters is because emptiness makes up almost the entire universe.  More so, it’s possible that understanding emptiness might help explain the origin of the universe, everything, and perhaps even why we exist at all.

Ever since the early 20^th century when the strange structure of the atom was revealed each additional insight has fed into a radical new picture of how nature works at its smallest and fundamental level. A quantum mechanical description in which, against all common sense it seems to make it impossible to ever truly have nothing.

At the most fundamental level Nature is itself based on uncertainty. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is usually expressed in terms of momentum and position. That is the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. However, this Uncertainty Principle can also be expressed in terms of energy and time.

And this is the rub. In theory, if we were to examine a very small section of an empty space we could in principle determine how much energy is in that space very very precisely. However, if we slow down time - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us something very bizarre. It suggests that at these levels the uncertainty is so great that there is enough energy to create particles literally out of nothing at all.

So in truly tiny intervals of time and space something could be created from nothing. The truly bizarre implication is that quantum fluctuations may create and destroy matter. Some say that energy is borrowed from the future, particles are created, destroyed and the debt repaid quickly.

From this, the most jaw dropping idea of all is that matter we think of in the every day world - everything we see and feel might be nothing but the left over froth of particle creation and destruction.

One of the most profound and beautiful ideas in science and philosophy therefore is that quantum reality has shaped the universe we see today. Our universe may be nothing more than a quantum world inflated many many times out of quantum fluctuations.

The illusion of reality

The solidity of the world seems totally indisputable. As a fixed thing that you can see and touch, your body is also reassuring the solid.  But beginning with Einstein, modern physics have assured us that this solidity is a mirage. Quantum physics tells us that reality is far beyond human perception and intuition. In other words, our rational mind and common sense are just not capable of understanding the true nature of reality. And, therefore why particles can experience the full weirdness of quantum mechanics, whereas we evidently cannot. "In short, how does the well-behaved, everyday classical world emerge from the schizophrenic quantum realm.

The great Richard Feynman once said that all of Quantm physics can be understood through the double-slit experiment. For the last few weeks I have watched and re-watched the 1979 Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures with Feynman discussing photons – Corpuscles of light. 

Trying to make sense of single-photon behaviour in relation to reflection of multi surfaces. A topic, it seems infinitely more subtle then the high-school treatment of Newtonian optics.  So when one starts to think they are coming to terms with the counter-intuitive nature of light, photons behave even more strangely when pushed through a double-slit experiment.

So photons (particles for that matter) do not have a particular location and velocity; they merely have probabilities of location and velocity meaning a particle is all the possible futures it can have Viz-a-viz the Copenhagen interpretation suggesting that quantum mechanics does not yield a description of an objective reality but deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta.

So all but one of these futures collapses when it is observed. Meanwhile, these futures of the same particle can interfere with each other. Quantum probability is not a mere description of where a particle could be found and could be going, a mere mathematical abstraction, it is an actual property.

The photon in the experiment is all the possible paths it can take, some through one slit, some through the other, and it is interfering with itself. For each photon, measuring devices record one possible outcome of this self-interference.

Then comes the quantum eraser, proposed by Scully and Drühl in 1982. Given the basic principle of complementarity (for each degree of freedom, the dynamical variables are a pair of complementary observables) the precise knowledge of one implies complete unpredictability of the other.

For example, precise knowledge of a particle position implies complete unpredictability of its momentum. Because it’s generally assumed that the mechanism responsible for the loss of the interference pattern is the uncertainty principle, the “which-way” information of the particles is found without disturbing their wave-function.

The reason of the interference loss is the quantum information contained in the measuring apparatus, by means of the entanglement correlations between the particles and the path detectors. The experiment shows that if such quantum information is afterwards erased from the system, then the interference reappears (which would be impossible in the case of a perturbation).

God and the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser – he may never be able to see the wave-like nature of reality.

In the last few months pretty much all the available time I have – I’ve been thinking about the implications of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser. All my life I understood the double-slit experiment to need ran observer in order to collapse the wave-like nature of reality. I have, as perhaps others, never grasped the deeper, the more subtle implication – the idea that:-

If we can know the path the entangled photon takes, that in itself is enough to bring about a collapse.

In quantum mechanics, the quantum eraser experiment is a double-slit experiment that demonstrates several fundamental aspects of the quantum theory, including quantum entanglement and complementarity. Brian Greene describes the experiment in his recent book The Fabric of the Universe. Consider

“A simple version of the quantum eraser experiment makes use of the double-slit set up, modified in the following way. A tagging device is placed in front of each slit; it marks any passing photon so that when the photon is examined later, you can tell through which slit it passed…when this double-slit-tagging experiment is run, the photons do not build up an interference pattern.

What if just before the photon hits the detection screen, you eliminate the possibility of determining through which slit it passed by erasing the mark imprinted by the tagging device?

As we know, it turns out, that the interference pattern shows up again. Which, is unexpected, counter initiative and strange to say the least.  But again it gets even stranger with the delayed-choice quantum eraser. Greene describes it thus,

It begins with [the set-up of the quantum eraser], modified by inserting two so-called down-converters, one on each pathway. Down-converters are devices that take one photon as input and produce two photons as output, each with half the energy (“down converted”) of the signal. One of the photons (called the signal photon) is directed along the path that the original would have followed toward the detector screen. The other photon produced by the down-converter (called the idler photon) is sent in a different direction altogether. On each run of the experiment we can determine which oath a signal photon takes to the screen by observing which down-converter spits out the idler photon partner. And once again, the ability to gleen which-path information about the signal photons– even though it is totally indirect, since we are not interacting with any signal photons at all– has the effect of preventing an interference pattern from forming.

So all we know about the signal photon we learn by observing the idler photon. But even so, we get the photons acting like particles. Greene again

What if we manipulate the experiment so as to make it impossible to determine from which down-converter a given idler photon emerged? What if, that is, we erase the which-path information embodied by the idler photon? Well, something amazing happens: even though we’ve done nothing directly to the signal photons, by erasing which-path information carried by their idler partners we can recover an interference pattern from the signal photons.

The implication here is the fact that we can know which slit the photon exits is exactly what causes the interference pattern to collapse. In the double slit experiment it isn’t the detector (the measurement) that collapsing the waveform. It is that fact that we can know that collapses the wave.

Now if a God can always knows which-path information a photon is to pass, he/she can therefore never see the interference pattern, the wave like nature of reality will be hidden from such a God.