Quantum jumps, quantum luck and the atomic will

For my brother, Marek

This is ground-breaking stuff. This Yale University experiment has the potential to change everything we've learn over the past 95 years or so about how quantum mechanics actually work in practice.

Here's the crucial paragraph: "With their high-speed monitoring system, the researchers could spot when a quantum jump was about to appear, 'catch' it halfway through, and reverse it, sending the system back to the state in which it started. In this way, what seemed to the quantum pioneers to be unavoidable randomness in the physical world is now shown to be amenable to control. We can take charge of the quantum."

Wow. "We can take charge of the quantum."

But how? By willing it so? By the simple act of observation? But we know that as soon as you open the box, the cat that's both dead and alive becomes one or the other. So to avoid the collapse of the wave function caused by conscious observation, the Yale team led by Michel Devoret used something (that I can't understand) called a 'second excited state' which reacts to decay (or not) within the first. Let's assume the whole thing works and is real and the results are as ground-breaking as claimed...

Until now, quantum events were considered to be entirely random, upsetting the Newtonian apple-cart. Newton's laws, which shaped human thinking about the physical universe for around a quarter of a millennium, stated that there must be cause and effect. Without an action, there is no reaction.

Quantum physics, however, suggested that atomic decomposition is an entirely random phenomenon. You might know the half-life of an isotope, but you cannot predict when decay will happen. This lack of predictability bugged Einstein, who couldn't bear (at first) this entirely novel notion of randomness at work in the universe. "God doesn't play dice," he said about this. Now, the Yale experiment seems to side with Einstein and Newton, rather than with Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the bringers of Uncertainty. The change in quantum states is neither random nor instantaneous, it seems. It is, they say, deterministic.  Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that a subatomic particle's position and momentum can not be measured simultaneously. Here we have some guys claiming we can.

If so, we need to rethink cosmology!

For me, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics provides the key to the magic of the universe. The key to consciousness, the key to chance. And the key question - can you alter the outcome of a quantum event by thinking it one way or another?

I believe you can - not in a lab, repeating experiments aimed at measuring telepathy or extra-sensory perception, but practical ways. Above all, forestalling personal mishaps by consciously precluding the possibility of them happening - my definition of 'quantum luck'. Whether this new discovery about the nature of quantum events - in particular the possibility of reversing them - has any bearing on how my personal 'quantum luck' works for me, remains to be seen!

This time last year:
Under the sodium

This time two years ago:
"Further progress? Hell yes!"

This time 11 years ago:
The 1970s and the 2000s