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Zen Physics
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
-- Richard Feynman
p129 A century ago, science might still have claimed confidently that, as far as the universe as a whole is concerned, consciousness appears to have no special relevance. But not any longer. By peering into the workings of nature at the very smallest of scales -- at or below the dimensions of the atom -- physicists have uncovered what appears to be an intimate connection between the mind of conscious observers and the bringing into being of what is real.
I'm skipping the account of the decline of Newtonian physics and the rise of quantum mechanics.
p131 It was no longer meaningful to think of an electron, for instance, as always being definitely somewhere and “somewhen” in between the times when it was being observed. Unless an attempt was made to detect it, the sum total of what was and could be known about the whereabouts of a particle was contained in its wave function [That link includes a very interesting animation] -- a purely statistical description.
It could not be claimed, in the new quantum picture of the world, that particles even truly exist outside of our observations of them. [See Feynman’s lectures on light: THIS is the original one from 1964 -- around the time he won his Nobel Prize; and THIS is the first of an even better lecture series from 1979 when he was a much more practiced public speaker (if you watch the second video, be sure to stay for the questions at the end, that's the best part. And this also includes a taste of Feynman Diagrams).] They have no independent, enduring reality in the familiar classical sense of being like tiny beads of matter with a definite (if not necessarily known) location in space and time. The distinguished American physicist John Wheeler has expressed the central quantum mystery in these terms:
Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there...’ To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.
p132 ... In quantum parlance, an observation results in the ‘collapse’ of the wave function -- the instantaneous telescoping-down of the probability spread to a localized point, a real particle. But what counts as a valid observation in this respect? ...the most widely accepted viewpoint... is that the sudden change in character or collapse of the wave function is brought about, ultimately, by conscious observership -- the registering of an event, such as the reading of an instrument, in a mind.
This is a staggering conclusion. And it appears the more so when one remembers that all of the material universe is comprised of subatomic particles. [Since we don't know what Dark Matter is, this probably should say that the material universe we can study is comprised of subatomic particles.] Not one of these particles, according to modern physics, can be ‘actualized,’ or made properly real, without an observation... Almost unbelievably, our most fundamental branch of science implies that what had previously been assumed to be a concrete, objective world cannot even be said to exist outside of the subjective act of observation....”
Various quantum experiments described next including the double-slit. These descriptions are too brief to make sense unless you already are familiar with the material.
p136 Incredibly, modern physics, which is the most advanced product of our dualistic way of thinking, has shown that dualism is no longer tenable. Consciousness is an inextricable and essential property of the real world. Subject and object cannot be treated apart; there is no gap, no delay, no difference in the real world between being and experiencing. There is no existence without the conscious act.
p137 ... Einstein showed that rest and motion are relative concepts, while energy and mass, and time and space, are interchangeable. Quantum physicists have discovered that, at its most fundamental level, the world cannot be accurately viewed as a complex of distinct things. What we took to be sharply bounded objects -- particles of matter -- have turned out to be interwoven, overlapping aspects of each other. Every thing and every event in the universe seems to be attached to an all-embracing, quivering web that interconnects it with every other thing and event. Nothing stands apart. The cosmos as now portrayed by relativity and quantum mechanics is less like a loose collection of jiggling billiard balls and more reminiscent of a single, giant universal field -- an unbreakable unity which Alfred North Whitehead dubbed “the seamless coat of the universe.”
Dr. Waku’s lectures, HERE, are excellent for elaborating this point. And String theory aside, it has become harder and harder to even think of the “void” of space as all of the universe seems to be permeated by, for example, the Higgs field which is what gives mass to Murray Gell-Mann’s QCD quarks and gluons. (After writing this I had a YouTube window open so I went over there and immediately ran into THIS video about fields... and some other things.)
Here’s a bad (but useful) analogy: the relationship between atoms and the Higgs field is like that between cell phones and the cellular network that connects and activates them (as communication devices). Somehow, atoms “work” everywhere in the universe. Wherever you send one, there will be a Higgs signal for it to use. Take the (seemingly) emptiest corner of the universe and it is actually filled with fields much as you might imagine the atmosphere above a contemporary city filled with overlapping radio, TV, cellular, radar, and other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
There’s an area in Upstate New York that is free of this kind of electromagnetic signals, and those rare individuals who are highly sensitive to such things can go there and find a respite. But if you were allergic to the Higgs field, there would be nowhere you could go for relief.
Pride
I take great pride in a video about Murray Gell-Mann showing up in my YouTube recommended list. I’m not a big fan of Gell-Mann, I mostly know of him because he was at Caltech with Richard Feynman, and, as important as the discovery of quarks is, it doesn’t interest me that much. QCD doesn’t have the same appeal for me of QED for some reason. Though I do sympathise with Gell-Mann about Feynman, I’m sure way too many people have asked him about his more famous colleague.
The reason his video is here today is because I watched another video by James Gates Jr. last night. Something I think I’ve remarked on before is that physicists in general, seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time telling Richard Feynman stories when addressing the general public, and Gates does this as well. Hell, I’d do the same thing in their place. What Gates didn’t do was mention Michio Kaku. This is a problem because Gates was talking about his work that provides a graphical expression to the mathematics of physics -- not at all unlike Feynman Diagrams, though he never mentioned that either. At the very end of his talk he connected -- in a strangely informal way -- this math and these graphics to music, in particular to the twelve tone music of Schoenberg. Now this ties in with Adrian’s music in Doctor Faustus; but more importantly for physics -- though not for this blog -- it connects with Kaku’s more musical interpretation of String Theory.
Perhaps he was simply out of time, but I expected Gates to delve into the traditional connection between math, music, and philosophy dating back to the Hellenic period ( Pythagoras, for example) and he dropped the ball. Kaku would have been all over that.
I did watch that lecture (HERE) by Gell-Mann and it was interesting, though I got the sense it still rankles with him that he is still the other Nobel prize winner who isn’t Richard Feynman. And he has to wonder, at moments of self-doubt, if he would have done all he did without Feynman acting as goad and inspiration. (I also watched a couple other interviews with him so I'm not sure where exactly I got this idea of his relationship with Feynman.)
Gell-Mann is the master of mass -- energy caught in a Higgs Field, if I have that right. Feynman was the master of light -- the magical bits of the universe whose nature it is to move at C, the speed of everything that isn’t matter.
And HERE's a bonus article on a new theory of consciousness that takes into account quantum mechanics.
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