OMG, what a crazy week. All of my kids started school this week too, and it is now utter mayhem in my house. Everyone is scrambling to get themselves organized and into the school mode again, there's never enough food in the house for some reason and my cats have lost their minds and all think they're capable of launching themselves through the air like flying squirrels!
The auto accident gods have taken it upon themselves this week to make everyone in our 9 state region completely forget that they must actually be awake with their eyes open while operating a motor vehicle so my claim load has skyrocketed at work, and I was shouted at for 30 minutes at the end of the day today by a person who insisted it was my fault he couldn't find a body shop to fix his car before September!
On a positive note, my class has started and so far is quite interesting and I can already tell I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. We are discussing Salome at the moment, a character I never had any particular interest in before and I am discovering that her legend had a lot of depth. The actual person she was based on, well, who knows if she even existed beyond metaphor.
I have also been thinking more about quantum mechanics. Maybe you have heard of the double-slit test, in which particles of matter are hurled through two slits in a wall. When you shoot large pieces of matter through you get two lines on the surface beyond the slits. When you force waves through, you get multiple points where the the top of one wave meets the bottom of another wave and you get an interference pattern, stripes where matter hits and darkness where it didn't. But on the quantum level, if you shoot electrons through, which are extremely tiny matter particles, they act like waves and form an interference pattern even if you shoot only one piece through at a time, instead of like matter forming only two lines. The theory is that the electrons, when shot one at a time, somehow split, and go through both slits interfering with itself and forming that unique wave pattern. Tricky little buggers. But they also go through neither slit. And they also go through only one of the slits. And they also go through only the other slit. The clever mathemeticians have formulas for this. I don't understand them, I just understand that this is what the experiments have proved.
BUT - and here's the kicker, when you try to observe the phenomenon using a recording device to see which slit the matter actually goes through, it goes back to behaving like larger matter particles and only goes through one side or the other, forming only two lines, not an interference pattern as it did when it was unobserved. The very act of observing changed it's behavior. Now, what the heck!?!? What does it all MEAN?!?!?!? How can an electron know when it is being watched? Huh huh HUH??? HOW???
Spiritual people have speculated this proves the existence of a higher being. Ok. Sure, why not. But why would a higher being care whether electrons form an interference pattern or not? I don't buy it. Any higher being that would take an interest in that clearly has too much time on its hands and needs to find a day job. Of all the issues in the world to concern itself with, that, to me, would not be in the top 10.
Maybe we're missing the big picture (so to speak). Maybe we're too focused on the most visible issues of the day. Maybe instead of trying to solve world hunger and stop all abuse and end the wars we need to be focusing on the smaller things, like electron interfence patterns. Maybe by studying the little things and gaining an understanding of the miniscule, we will be able to then apply our knowledge to the big things and achieve world peace and individual enlightenment.
Ok, enough rambling! I do, in fact have homework to do. Heigh ho!!
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2 comments:
I'm glad you posted this. When I read your entanglement post I was thinking of the double slit experiment but I couldn't remember the details. I was just remembering the idea, at least as I remember it being presented to me in physics classes, that a particle moves from point A to point B along an infinite number of paths. Doesn't that mean that all particles are in all places at the same time? I was a science geek in high school so maybe my lack of understanding explains why I majored in art and English in college.
YES!! It does actually mean that particles are in all positions at all times, and it is only when a particle is OBSERVED that it becomes recognizable as being in a fixed space. There are particle experiments that prove this. It has been shown, and there are images in which you can see a single object in two places at the same time. The term "Post-detection" describes a single object, once it has been detected, is in just one position. Pre-detection is the condition an object is in prior to being observed. A pre-detection particle can be in multiple positions, and yet still be just one particle. You cannot pick up just one of these pre-detection particles, because it's not multiple. It's a single particle in multiple positions. The particle, while being in multiple positions, cannot be weighed seperately from itself, it is not seperable. This is mind blowing stuff here.
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