Revolution In Quantum Physics
November 06, 2022 coppied
Oct 27
You know the feeling. You see all the clues adding up like weights on your side of Archimedes’ lever, and you know that soon it will, it must tip in your favor; only when it comes to quantum physics, it won’t be the Earth that is moved, but our understanding of the universe itself.
This isn’t like the hunt for endless cheap and clean fusion energy, perpetually thirty years away despite the best efforts of humanity’s best and brightest. No, that search is the province of bleeding-edge engineering. Instead, this is the world of theoretical physics so esoteric that it blurs the boundaries between science and philosophy. Here’s what we know so far:
Wildly different macroscopic objects can be entangled
In 2020, a team of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, were able to entangle two very different objects: a vibrating dielectric membrane and a cloud of atoms. The possibility was obvious from the first time a massless photon was entangled with a much-larger atom, a process that can now be accomplished on demand. This achievement, while notable, shouldn’t be too surprising since matter really is just frozen light, something long theorized but not experimentally proven until last year at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
There seems to be no limit on how many objects can be entangled
In 2015, physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade successfully entangled three thousand atoms using only a single photon. According to Prof. Vladan Vuletic:
“You can make the argument that a single photon cannot possibly change the state of 3,000 atoms, but this one photon does — it builds up correlations that you didn’t have before…. We have basically opened up a new class of entangled states we can make, but there are many more new classes to be explored.”
What’s more, earlier this year physicists at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany produced a chain of fourteen entangled photons, one after the other, using the same atom.
Entanglement can last indefinitely and across time
There appears to be no limit to how long an entangled system may remain in that state, so long as it does not interact with anything else. Even more surprisingly, entanglement has been shown to occur across time, between photons that never coexisted, and — apparently — to even show properties of entanglement after the link itself is broken.
We experience quantum processes and entanglement every day
Quantum biology is a thing, having been identified in photosynthesis, bird navigation, and even our olfactory senses. If one thinks about it, since we already know that entanglement occurs from the quark scale to the barely-visible scale, and between very different materials, how could it not be part and parcel of the biology of every living thing? Even living bacteria have been entangled with quantized light. This also means that quantum entanglement occurs naturally, among living organisms as well as between non-living objects.
Look at any particular star in the sky — photons from that star are striking your eyeballs, and if one of those photons is still entangled with one or more photons inside its parent star, a cell in your eyeball may well become entangled with photons in that star, if only for a moment. “Stargazing” just took on a whole different meaning, didn’t it?
Quantum physics and consciousness
On a more personal note, my wife and I cared for an elderly woman with dementia for several years. Only once in all that time did she become agitated. One morning at about 4 A.M. she became frantic, calling for help. It turns out that her sister had died at that time, about eight miles away. I can’t help but suspect that instead of ascribing the experience to debunked and discredited theories like Extrasensory Perception, quantum biology may provide a viable explanation for the mechanics not only behind her reaction that morning, but even for irrational human behaviors such as “mob psychology”.
In fact, in an experiment conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, researchers found quantum processes significantly correlated with cognitive and conscious brain functions. Correlation of course does not imply causation, but just as smoke may not indicate the location of a fire, it can give one an excellent clue where to start looking. According to lead physicist Dr. Christian Kerskens:
“If entanglement is the only possible explanation here then that would mean that brain processes must have interacted with the nuclear spins, mediating the entanglement between the nuclear spins. As a result, we can deduce that those brain functions must be quantum. Because these brain functions were also correlated to short-term memory performance and conscious awareness, it is likely that those quantum processes are an important part of our cognitive and conscious brain functions.”
Objective reasoning that leads unerringly to absurdity?
Scientists are taught to rely not upon intuition, to not allow their pride or assumptions to hinder their objectivity. To this point, Richard Feynman, one of the giants of the physics community, had this to say:
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does. Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is — absurd.
And so, as has often been the case for secularists throughout human history, we look to philosophy to provide guidance where science (as we know it) cannot go.
Quo Vadim Vadis?
Then where do we go from here? In this retired sailor’s wholly-unqualified opinion — and as I have hoped to show above — we are gradually finding that the effects of quantum mechanics are present everywhere around us and inside of us. This does not mean that — as Feynman implied — we can ever truly understand it any more than we could understand more than three of the nine (or ten) non-temporal dimensions of string theory. But in any case, the totality of research seems (at least to me) to be coalescing around the sheer ubiquity of quantum mechanics.
But I am confident that soon (hopefully while I’m still alive), one or more brilliant physicists will have the same kind of inspirational brainstorm that led Einstein to develop his theory of relativity. One can only hope that when this happens, any subsequent analogue to the Manhattan Project will not be used not for war, but for the benefit of all.
Retired Navy. Inveterate contrarian. If I haven’t done it, I’ve usually done something close.
posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 3:37 PM
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