The Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics

Lent 2018: Day 15

Two weeks gone, no meat, no alcohol, lots of exercise (managed nine chin-ups to the bar yesterday morning). I'm also reading Stuart A. Kauffman's Humans in a Creative Universe; I'm almost half-way through. It's an outstanding book for me; here is a scientist telling me that my spiritual search for that middle way between religion and science is essentially correct. The book provides a basis of belief in panpsychism (consciousness distributed across the universe), and questions the reductionist materialism that since Isaac Newton has suggested to us that we have no bearing on how the universe evolves.

This is no New Age wishy-washy touchy-feely twaddle, but the profound contemplations of a scientist and thinker with a solid grounding in the history of science and philosophy, and an understanding of what happens at the subatomic level. The result of his pondering is a theory that we are participating in the creation of new possibilities, which then become actual. And our role in willing those possibilities to become actualities.

Key to this is to understand that which science, as yet, does not understand - the 'known unknowns', as it were. I have touched more than once on this blog the notion of Dark Energy, the mysterious force that makes up over 68% of the universe. (Dark Matter makes up another 27%.) Science has no explanation for either. [Here's an interesting and readable article on Dark Energy and Dark Matter from NASA.] We don't know what it is, how it interacts with visible matter.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are thought to fill the universe, existing within and between galaxies. Telescope stuff (except you can't see or detect them). But at the microscope - electron microscope - level, there's the strange world of quantum mechanics, with its own set of mysteries that science cannot (at present) answer. Kauffman lists the main four.

Not wishing to get too technical, I fear I may lose some scientific accuracy in my description of them. At the heart of quantum mechanics is the measurement of the physical properties of subatomic particles - such as position, momentum, spin, and polarisation.

The first mystery is Nonlocality.

When the spin of two entangled but distant (no, I don't get this) electrons are measured, the outcome is always symmetrical (if one is observed to spin up, the other will always be observed to spin down, or vice versa). How two entangled electrons can be so far is apart is beyond me, but this has been proven to be true over decades of experimentation. Observations can be up to 190km apart (the record to date); this happens simultaneously - that is, faster than the speed of light.  How can that be? Science cannot answer. This is Einstein's "spooky action at a distance".

The second mystery is the instantaneous change in wave function on measurement.

Back to Schrodinger's famous cat. An independent particle is in superposition (you can only work out the probability of where it might be) until such time as you observe it. And then, on measurement, instantly, a single wave function is created (again, I don't get, but please follow). So the cat is alive and dead at the same time until the very instant you open the box - and then you see the result. "If n particles are entangled and one is measured, instantaneously the entangled wave function of the remaining n-1 changes!" This, says Kauffman remains unexplained, despite having been seen to be true since the early 1990s.

The third mystery is 'which-way information'.

Are photons waves or particles? I wrote about this earlier; the double-slit experiment (Thomas Young, 1801) showed that letting light through a single slit gives the scattered points suggesting particles, while letting it in through two slits gives interference patterns suggesting waves. 'Which-way information' says that they cannot be observed as both waves, and as particles, at the same time. The observer sees either one, or the other.

The fourth and final mystery: there is no deductive mechanism for measurement.

There are two or more possibilities as to the position of a particle, but there is no deductive mechanism, no algorithm or robot, that can work out the measurement outcomes - a conscious observer is needed to actually peer into the box. Is the cat alive or dead? A robot won't be able to tell, infers Kauffman. The cat remains in superposition - alive and dead, while the robot opens the box and applies its sensors to check on its health. It is only when a human looks at the data collected by the robot do we learn about the cat's status.

It is incredibly difficult to get one's mind into the atom, to understand beyond the basic notion of the nucleus (formed by neutrons and protons) surrounded by a shell of electrons which are either waves or particles - or indeed both waves and particles, except we can't tell which until we observe them. And then they to strange things, spooky things - affecting one another at great distances, faster than the speed of light, except we don't know that until we observe them.

What's all this got to do with religion? Kauffman is suggesting that we have the power to make the difference between different possibilities and turn one of them into something actual.

This we shall get to in coming chapters... More soon.

This time last year:
Lent starts tomorrow

This time two years ago:
Coincidence and survival

This time five years ago
The Book of Revelations

This time six years ago:
Strong late-winter sunshine

This time seven years ago:
Best pics from February 2011

This time eight years ago:
Kensington

This time ten years ago:
End of the line