Enter the Quantum (Becoming, Part 2)

I ended 2008 casting skeptical eye on Rationalism, and its ideology of a fundamental, mathematically harmonious universe. Plato's ideal of the mathematician as purveyor of "divine" language just didn't sit well with me. So I was forced to look elsewhere, to perhaps provide a more satisfying explanation for my day-to-day experience of harmony while walking through the city.

I pushed away thoughts of anything "divine" and purely speculative philosophy, and instead focused on modern science, and its studies of time and space. Admittedly I was inspired by the new season of the tv show Lost, and their new plot trajectory, which featured certain members of the cast jumping back and forth through time. The show over the last several seasons had persistent references to Stephen Hawking and his book A Brief History of Time, so I felt it was a good time investigate him further.

It wasn't long after reading bits and pieces of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, as well as watching/listening to several interviews with Brian Greene (author of The Elegant Universe), that I encountered String Theory full-force. String Theory attempts to bridge the gap between Quantum Mechanics and Albert Einstein's Theories of Special and General Relativity, which in turn fulfills the ultimate dream of Einstein himself: to formulate a theory that explains all matter that exists in the universe. This is commonly referred to as the Theory of Everything (TOE). The TOE remains the veritable holy grail of the physics community.

String Theory hypothesizes that the fundamental building blocks of matter are tiny vibrating strings of energy, which could explain the strange behaviors behind quantum particles. Fresh off of my Music Listening course, my interest was sparked by string theory's concept that perhaps the universe could be understood through what is essentially "music", created by these theoretical strings vibrating at different frequencies.

But before I could understand string theory fully, and staying loyal to my normal disposition to make things as difficult as possible on myself, I needed to know more about both Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, the aforementioned two disciplines within physics that string theory attempts to combine. Luckily the Teaching Company once again had just what I needed: a twenty-four lecture audio course on just those two subjects.

After about a month of Relativity/Quantum Mechanics lectures, I was already sufficiently fried by Einstein's extreme and historic break away from classical physics as defined by Issac Newton (and all prior assumptions about gravity and the nature of space and time), when the quantum world had swooped in immediately thereafter and pulverized any remaining semblance of the universe as a harmonious or rational/logical place.

Quantum Mechanics attempts to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. The types of subatomic particles that make up the quantum landscape are so numerous, some refer to it as the quantum particle "zoo".

I'm sure you've heard the terms protons, neutrons, and electrons from your basic science classes in junior high school. You may have even heard of Quarks before (a name derived from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Quarks are particles that combine with each other to make up protons and neutrons, the two types of particles that in turn make up the nucleus of the atom. There are not one, but SIX different kinds of Quarks, that are named based on their propensity to behave in certain ways. They are (get ready): Up and Down, Top and Bottom, Charmed and Strange Quarks. Weird names, right? Others you may not have heard about (but do most certainly exist) are Mesons, Leptons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Tau-Neutrinos, Muons, Electron-Neutrinos and on and on.

The erratic behaviors of this "zoo" of subatomic particles, over the last hundred years or so have been proven by scientists to define most of what are considered to be the fundamental forces in the universe. These include electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force, and gravity. Gravity is the least understood of the forces on a subatomic level, hence the problem of resolving Einstein's theory of General Relativity with Quantum Theory. If Gravity could be defined by a Quantum particle, it would be called a Graviton, but as of yet, no Gravitons have been discovered. The Higgs-Boson, the so-called "master" or "God Particle" (the search for which is one of the key endeavors of CERN, the multi billion physics facility in Switzerland), is supposedly responsible for determining the masses of all other particles, per what is called the Standard Model of particle physics.

Beyond the comical and sometimes confusing naming conventions of quantum particles, there are certain behaviors that each of these particles perform, that are not only odd, but are so outlandish, even to the point of being paradoxical, and defy our very sense of logical reality. Quantum behavior is so unpredictable it can never be measured with any level of precision.

Normally if you want to measure something's position and velocity, you use a classical Newtonian view of the human-level physical world. The particles in this sense are like billiard balls, bouncing off of each other as well the walls of a billiard table. Their position and velocity are predictable, because the initial energy put into them (say a person hitting the cue ball with a cue) stays constant.

However at the quantum level, these "classical" rules break down. The movement of quantum particles is only probabilistic, meaning their position and velocity are not simultaneously measurable. The more you focused on measuring its position, the less the accurate your measurement would be for its velocity.

Worse, the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics can be paradoxically defined in two different ways, as either a discrete stream of particles or as a wave. Rigorous experiments have proven that our observation of quantum particle behavior, in itself defines whether the behavior is particle-like or a wave-like. Left unobserved, the resulting quantum behavior is wave-like, and observed, it is particle-like, as if somehow it knows we are watching it. Like I said before- rational explanations must be completely thrown out to understand the quantum world.

Below is an excerpt from the film What the Bleep do We Know? However cheese-ball the film's execution might have been, it's a great explanation of the famous two-slit experiment and the resultant mysterious quantum particle/wave conundrum.



If you'd like a better illustration of the quantum paradox on a somewhat more human level, one needs to look no further than the amusing thought experiment known as Schröedinger's Cat, originally devised by Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1933.



As you can see, quantum mechanics doesn't make sense in the face of a logical, causal world we believe ourselves to be in. On the quantum level, all logic breaks down. It is erratic, non-deterministic, and just downright strange.

Just a few years prior to the mainstream study of quantum mechanics, Einstein had defined his theories of Relativity and was already an established legend within the scientific community. He had an extremely difficult time believing the results of quantum experiments, and stated several times that there must be an error in the form of measurement that scientists were using, to produce such absurd and seemingly counter-intuitive results.

Another fascinating quantum behavior is called Quantum Entanglement. With Entanglement, two particles in completely different places, react in the same exact way to modification. So if a scientist were to affect some kind of change on one particle, another "entangled" particle would react as if it were directly influenced, even though it was never technically "touched". Here's another clip from What the Bleep that can further explain this.



Einstein was extremely put off by the experimental data that revealed Quantum Entanglement behavior. He referred to Entanglement as "Spooky action at at distance". To him there was no way that two particles could ever interact with each other without a visible transfer of energy between the two. The explanation would have to be supernatural, if not mystical. Therefore Einstein considered it to be scientifically invalid.

Despite Einstein's gripes, the results stood. Entanglement and other quantum behaviors are some of the most rigorously tested in all of the history of science. Einstein admitted at one point that was had spent approximately 600 times longer trying to resolve quantum theory than time he spent formulating Relativity.

After digesting these lectures (and repeating several of them) I shared Einstein's skepticism. When learning about Relativity Theory, there's a learning curve to be sure, but it was still based on LOGIC. The quantum world as a whole just didn't make any sense in comparison. No matter how many times it was explained to me, I continued to wonder how reality could on a subatomic level be so illogical? It was in complete opposition to everything I'd ever known about science.

In the interest of retaining the momentum of my studies, I decided to brush myself off and push ahead towards string theory, as I had planned before I was assaulted by The Quantum. I was extremely disappointed to discover how simplistic string theory now seemed in its relation to the quantum world. I couldn't help but see the parallels between this situation and how the Rational thinkers of antiquity first looked in the face of Chaos.

I felt string theory's attempt to define the behavior of quantum particles with such radical mathematical concepts, using multiple virtual dimensions that rely on undetectable particle partners proved it far too insubstantial to ever be a contender for the Theory of Everything. Useful mathematics to be sure- but incomplete. Too many missing pieces, and too much abstraction. I felt like string theorists had gotten lost in their own equations.

In sum, 2009 began with another swift kick to the gut. Everything I had studied and invested myself in the previous year in an attempt to reinforce the idea that we live in a harmonious or even logical universe, was annihilated in twenty-four, half-hour lectures. I couldn't lie to myself. The game had changed, and needed to be reassessed. But instead of sitting down and writing a thoughtful essay or blog post to more deeply explore these ideas, integrating into the paradigm- I chose to fight against it. There had to be a more meaningful existence than modern science was able to offer us- a complete, logical explanation for the fundamental operations of the universe, as opposed to the random bumping around of oddly-named particles of energy. Or waves. (!)

What I realized is that in the expulsion of metaphysics from my studies and my pursuit of quantum mechanics and string theory at the furthest reaches of modern science, I again found myself in the midst of disciplines that required philosophy to come to terms with them. Not only philosophy, but philosophy completely different than I had yet encountered, with twice as many new questions as the ones I had originally sought to answer, such as:

• Can something really exist in two places at once?
• Can something behave differently, depending purely on the observation of it?
• Does the question "What is the Theory of Everything?" even make sense???
• Is the world presented by quantum physics the most "fundamental", or is there something different, like string theory, that lies yet beneath?

I was getting nowhere, digging into this seemingly infinite regress of reductionist science. If quantum mechanics is defined by the perception and observation of the human mind- then what exactly is the human "mind" that is so powerful as to define reality itself? For that matter, what is consciousness? Where does it come from? Is it just small bits of electricity surging through a hunk of meat in our heads, or is it something more, something truly "divine" as the Rationalists declared? There was only one place to go from here...