Orange Contemplating Reality

[Dawid Dahl]

Here's another video recommendation from BBC I found interesting. It's also in beautiful HD and not chopped up in parts.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Z8CqAiYI8

 

"There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses. The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories.

It starts with Jacobo Konisberg talking about the discovery of the Top quark at Fermilab. Frank Wilceck then featured to explain some particle physics theory at his country shack using bits of fruit. Anton Zeilinger showed us the double slit experiment and then Seth Lloyd showed us the worlds most powerful quantum computer, which has some problems. Lloyd has some interesting ideas about the universe being like a quantum computer.

Lenny Susskind then made an appearance to tell us about how he had discovered the holographic principle after passing an interesting hologram in the corridor. The holgraphic principle was illustated by projecting an image of Lenny onto himself. Max Tegmark then draws some of his favourite equations onto a window and tell us that reality is maths before he himself dissolved into equations.

The most interesting part of the program was a feature about an experiment to construct a holometer at Fermilab described by one of the project leaders Craig Hogan. The holometer is a laser inteferometer inspired by the noise produced at the gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO. It is hoped that if the holographic principle is correct this experiment will detect its effects. 

Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos. It may be that that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe. Or that we exist in an infinity of parallel worlds. Your reality may never look quite the same again."

[Balder]

Thanks, Dawid; this was another interesting video (which I watched in the evening instead of doing some work I needed to do. You're gonna get me in trouble!  ;)  ).

[Dawid Dahl]

I apologize! I promise to stop ... maybe. :P

 

Bruce, what are your views on the double-slit experiment? The first part, where the particle doesn't behave like a particle but like a wave, is fairly straightforward to me: there really are no independent particles, only waves, 'cause waves are "compatible" with non-duality, whereas particles are imaginary products of the dualistic mind. But the curious thing is when the scientists decide to "peek" at the two slits, to see which one of them the particle is really going through -- the very act of doing that (observing) makes the photons behave like particles, and not like waves! Why is this you think?

 

Any ideas?

[James Barrow]

Hi Dawid

 

"the very act of doing that (observing) makes the photons behave like particles"

 

Is this interpretation the only one? It seems there is some disagreement regarding the apparent consensus of the Copenhagen Interpretation. I don't know! Maybe Roger Penrose does? (check out the first 2 minutes here)

 

And in the spirit of wonderful BBC documentaries keeping us all up late,.. and the idea of waves cf particles, check this one out. The end section about death is very good.

[Balder]

Hi, Dawid,

 

That's a really fascinating experiment, isn't it?  I've heard it said that nearly the whole of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from reflecting on that experiment alone.  I actually met and spoke with a quantum physicist (George Weissmann) about this topic, since he is also a practitioner of Buddhism and TSK and I wanted to know what his thoughts on this were.  How to interpret the results of this experiment is still a matter of debate, of course.  There's the Copenhagen interpretation, the sum-over-paths interpretation, and the relational interpretation, among others.  In Dr. Weissmann's opinion, he believes consciousness/observation does play a role in the collapse of the wave function (the manifestation of particularity), but he doesn't restrict consciousness to human beings.

 

Here's a transcript of some of his comments:

 

"According to the quantum paradigm, to super-simplify, the world and me and us and everything can be regarded as a process.  From Buddhism and TSK we know that the process comes out of a space.  Science does not look at that space, though it looks at physical space, which is already a result of patterning or process.  So physics looks at process and the dynamics of process.  Things within the quantum paradigm don’t exist.  What occurs is a process consisting of events, and these events are ‘timing out’.  Take an electron moving along.  If you look from a distance you see a trajectory.  If you look more closely, you see a series of dots.  Then you may think that the dots show up because the electron has interacted with the cloud chamber at those points, but there’s a thing which is causing this, and it’s actually moving through in a continuous way.  But in Feynman lectures, Vol. 1, quantum theory, double slit experiment, says you cannot assume there is a thing going through.  That assumption is necessarily wrong.  Not a wave nor a particle, nothing.  So you get this discontinuous series of events.  First they’re called observation events, but more generally they’re called moments of experience.  This jump from observation events to moments of experience was already pointed out by von Neumann, Wigner, Heisenberg.  There is no natural boundary that would say . . . . The possibilities represented by the wave functions condense into a specific outcome whereas before that outcome there were many possibilities.  To put the event out there in the world will not work.  The only place something can happen is experience, when you actually observe it.  The observation is where the event occurs.  You cannot project it into some outer world.  When von Neumann, Wigner first said this, people thought they meant that only when human beings are around could there be a process going on.  But when we relax the presupposition that it has to be conventional human knowing, then we just have a process which is occurring in terms of events, and events have an essential element of knowingness. 

 

And when they’re organized in certain complex ways, it ends up as a subject and an object, etc., which is what we call our body, brain, etc., that patterning.  Not only do you have these events, but any event history will lead to a certain tendency for other events to occur.  The tendency is expressed by the wave function. Given a certain event pattern, with the quantum theory you can calculate the probability of any other possible event pattern.  So that’s the mathematization of this tendency idea. 

 

So you have a world process, events, each of which has an element of knowingness, and a tendency which is expressed in causal lines, and those causal lines have arrows in them, and we call them particles, and we think of them traditionally as things, but they’re actually not things.  They’re elements of tendencies, so matter turns out to be an expression of tendency for patterning.  So if you have a macroscopic object, you ask how can it be a tendency.  If you look at it more closely, you can see it’s a very rapid series of events, far too rapid to observe.  If you have a TV, there seem to be objects moving around.  When you look more closely, it’s a series of lines, and when you look even more closely, it’s a series of dots which are the impacts of the electrons.  Our conditioning leads us to form objects, situations, identifications, and emotions, and before you know it you’re involved in a soap opera, when what’s actually happening is a series of fast events. 

 

A tennis ball is a series of rapid events.  So the manifestation of a tennis ball is not material at all, it’s a series of events.  The thing that’s material about it is the tendency for structuring which leads the things to have an overwhelming probability of presenting in that particular way. 

 

As a theoretical structure the quantum paradigm heals the mind-body problem right away, because they are coequal and actually call for one another:  one is the appearance and the other is the patterning.  When moving your arm, there are probabilities, but these are just ways of calculating how many ways can I get from here to there.  What actually occurs is determined by the process as a whole.  Bell’s theorem shows us that that cannot be a local process, it’s a global process of ‘timing out’.  If you have a random number generator and a red or green light . . . . , what determines the red or green light is a global process.  However, it’s a process that has a knowingness in it, so if you have a person there who has a predilection towards red or green, you’d expect the quantum paradigm to take this into account."

[e]

Electrons are a particle
Electrons are a wave
Electrons are both wave and particle like
Electrons are neither a wave nor a particle

The double slit goes back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The fact that you look changes what you see. (Heisenberg thought he was looking at particles and concluded he was looking at a probability wave.) Now this looking is not you looking at the experiment or apparatus but a measuring device inserted into the experiment. That measuring apparatus is a new condition of the experiment and alters what is seen. The reason this flips peoples wigs is they live asunder a world view that assumes either #1 or #2 above and the fact that they think they can purely and objectively investigate the world (naive realism) and don't or can't consider #3 and #4. In the end #4 is closer to the truth as we really have little idea as to what is really going on (but who wants to admit their ignorance). So scientists guess...umm...create hypotheses to explain what they see.

 

[Dawid Dahl]

"Not Available in Your Area"

 

:(

James Barrow said:

Hi Dawid

 

"the very act of doing that (observing) makes the photons behave like particles"

 

Is this interpretation the only one? It seems there is some disagreement regarding the apparent consensus of the Copenhagen Interpretation. I don't know! Maybe Roger Penrose does? (check out the first 2 minutes here)

 

And in the spirit of wonderful BBC documentaries keeping us all up late,.. and the idea of waves cf particles, check this one out. The end section about death is very good.

[Dawid Dahl]

"But when we relax the presupposition that it has to be conventional human knowing, then we just have a process which is occurring in terms of events, and events have an essential element of knowingness."

 

Do you know what kind of knowing is he talking about here, if not the every-day knowing of individual human beings? I presume he ain't talking about some knowing mind of God à la Berkeley?

 

I said: "the very act of doing that (observing) makes the photons behave like particles"

 

James: "Is this interpretation the only one? It seems there is some disagreement regarding the apparent consensus of the Copenhagen Interpretation."

  

As far as I'm aware, the two-slit experiment is the basis on which the interpretations grow out of. The actual findings of the experiment are there, and the debate over interpretations starts from the experiment. (So the "quantum schools" all agree on the findings.) And the finding is that when you peek at the two slits to see which one them particle is "actually" going through, the detection pattern changes from an interference-pattern (indicating photon wave-ness) to a two-band-pattern (indicating photon particle-ness). 

 

So it seems - to our every-day common knowledge - that the mere act of looking (left hand quadrant) at the two slits magically morphs a wave-pattern of open possibilities into one discrete particle (right hand quadrant). Which is very strange. (Or "unnewtonian".) No surprise the new age community are jumping all over this.

[e]

It is not the UL observation that is "causing" this. Perhaps it is better to use the word measure instead of observe. When a measuring device is put at the slits to determine which slit the electron passes thru the wave pattern turns into a particle pattern. Again this is what Heisenberg discovered, the fact that he measured the position of the electron changed the position itself i.e. changed what he observed. A similar occurrence is happening with the double slit.

 

Here is a video showing a similar conundrum...matter acting like a solid and a liquid on a macro level.

 

[Dawid Dahl]

"It is not the UL observation that is "causing" this. Perhaps it is better to use the word measure instead of observe. When a measuring device is put at the slits to determine which slit the electron passes thru the wave pattern turns into a particle pattern."

 

Ah, I see. You mean "measuring" is strictly a physical process dealing only with UR devices, and it really has nothing to do with, say, our UL intentionality?

[e]

Someone has to intend to put the measuring device at the slits but it is the measurement by the device that changes the pattern.

[Dawid Dahl]

Right.