..The Most Important and Stunning Quantum Experiments of 2019.
1. A team of physicists designed an experiment which shows how two scientists, doing the same quantum experiment, can experience different realities.
In the world of atoms and particles, two different observers "are entitled to their own facts."
Quantum Experiments
Jesus healed a blind man. "This happened so that the divine might be displayed in him," said Jesus.
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2. For the first time, physicists made a photograph of the phenomenon in which two particles remain physically linked despite being separated across distances.
You start thinking of your great aunt in faraway Australia. Almost immediately she phones you.
...
3. Quantum superposition enables a single object to be in two (or more) places at once, a consequence of matter existing as both particles and waves.
A wave involves invisible energy.
I knew a woman who, while asleep, would 'travel to a distant island, to chat to her relatives who lived there there'.
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4. In a 2019 experiment, physicists took advantage of the fact that at the quantum scale, vacuums are full of tiny, random fluctuations that pop into and out of existence.
At a small enough scale, the researchers found, heat can cross a vacuum by jumping from one fluctuation to the next across the apparently empty space.
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5. Researchers working with quantum gravity showed that under certain circumstances an event might cause an effect that occurred earlier in time.
Put a very heavy object (like a big planet) in a state of quantum superposition, the researchers wrote, and you can design scenarios where cause and effect take place in the 'wrong' order.
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6. Physicists have long known about "quantum tunneling," in which particles seem to pass through seemingly impassable barriers.
This is because quantum physics says that particles are also waves, and waves can pass through barriers.
Read more about the amazing quantum tunneling effect.
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7. Time's supposed to move in only one direction.
But scientists think they can return every ripple of a wave to the particle that created it.
Read more about reversing time's arrow.
2. For the first time, physicists made a photograph of the phenomenon in which two particles remain physically linked despite being separated across distances.
You start thinking of your great aunt in faraway Australia. Almost immediately she phones you.
...
3. Quantum superposition enables a single object to be in two (or more) places at once, a consequence of matter existing as both particles and waves.
A wave involves invisible energy.
I knew a woman who, while asleep, would 'travel to a distant island, to chat to her relatives who lived there there'.
...
4. In a 2019 experiment, physicists took advantage of the fact that at the quantum scale, vacuums are full of tiny, random fluctuations that pop into and out of existence.
At a small enough scale, the researchers found, heat can cross a vacuum by jumping from one fluctuation to the next across the apparently empty space.
...
5. Researchers working with quantum gravity showed that under certain circumstances an event might cause an effect that occurred earlier in time.
Put a very heavy object (like a big planet) in a state of quantum superposition, the researchers wrote, and you can design scenarios where cause and effect take place in the 'wrong' order.
...
6. Physicists have long known about "quantum tunneling," in which particles seem to pass through seemingly impassable barriers.
This is because quantum physics says that particles are also waves, and waves can pass through barriers.
Read more about the amazing quantum tunneling effect.
....
7. Time's supposed to move in only one direction.
But scientists think they can return every ripple of a wave to the particle that created it.
Read more about reversing time's arrow.
You are out of touch.
ReplyDeleteThe End of Quantum Reality
https://philos-sophia.org/about-the-film/
There may well be developments in this field but this documentary trailer doesn't offer much evidence.
DeleteIn my experience Aang's site is one of the Net's most relevant and in-touch places so less criticism would be appreciated es you have proved nothing yet yourself.
Ref above “5 True stories”
ReplyDeleteThe first story tells the weird disappearance of an unidentified stranger from a well guarded hotel room in Tokyo, back in 1954.
Japan seems to be a place where quantum superposition does happen once in a while.
These days, we hear from the magic departure, of the type “gone with the wind”, of Carlos Ghosn (Cohen??) from his well guarded residency in Japan. Carlos seems to have been teleported to Turkey and travelled from there by conventional means to Lebanon. Ghosn was awaiting trial for fraudulent financial machinations.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/01/national/carlos-ghosn-nissan-japan/
Caveman
Hi Aangirfan,
ReplyDeleteCaveat lector: I am not a physicist. YMMV.
You seem to be conflating quantum phenomena at the micro scale with phenomena at the macro scale:
You start thinking of your great aunt in faraway Australia...
A typical physicist would be skeptical that this is a quantum phenomenon --- except maybe Roger Penrose. No matter. Never mind.
To me, it's more like something intentional. Why it happens, who knows. But it clearly suggests something about the nature of conscious reality, if not quantum reality.
That said, surprisingly quantum phenomena have very measurable and large effects on the macro scale. Including in biological systems.
The canonical example is magnetic direction-finding (magnetoreception) in the eye of the European robin. This relies on quantum entanglement of electrons in molecules of cryptochromes, flavoproteins that act as photoreceptors for blue light.
There are plenty of other examples in quantum biology, a field where we've barely scratched the first scratch on the surface.
And of course the current Big Question in physics is the unification of small-scale quantum mechanics and big-scale gravity into some neat little Theory of Everything.
But of course that wouldn't be a theory of everything, would it?
We still have metaphysically fundamental questions about the nature of your consciousness and its relation to physical reality:
Mind and Matter.
Is Matter dreamt up by Mind? Is Mind emergent from Matter?
Are they different manifestations of some unitary Monistic Reality.
In Islam, you could conceive of it as the Mind of God, the Supreme Consciousness.
In Vedantic Hinduism, it would be Brahman.
Konrad Zuse might conceive of it as Rechnende Raum.
There are also questions concerning the relationship between consciousness and physical determinism.
And the elucidation of some strange interpretations of quantum reality, such as the Many Worlds and Many Minds interpretations.
Even the probabilistic nature of quantum reality is still not a given: Bohmian mechanics is nonlocal but deterministic.
There is also the question of the most primitive concepts that comprise physical reality.
For example, space and time, spacetime itself, can be viewed as an emergent property derived from more primal quantum entanglement.
Are entangled particles simply different views of a single unitary particle sitting atop two different points in the fabric of spacetime?
Or two interlocked particles bound via a wormhole?
What about hypothetical alternative laws of physics? Simulable internally-consistent axiomatic systems with their own consequent universes.
Like, wha?
This is mind-bending stuff that no-one really understands intuitively yet. We are still hopelessly dependent on mathematical formalism, of incredible precision. It's possible it cannot be understood intuitively in terms of everyday experience, it's so alien; you need to simply accept it for what it is.
But one thing is certain:
For each of us, our material universe exists only as an imperfect projection in our own minds:
There's a universe in all of us.
---
Where's that blue box with our universe in it?
Oh, you'd like to get back to your evil universe, wouldn't you.
And destroy your box with our universe inside it.
Nonsense! I would never do such a thing, unless you were already having been going to do that.
Oo, wha?
Many thanks for this learned comment!
ReplyDelete- Aangirfan.