Reality Check

Summary

To drive a motorised land vehicle in public you need to have passed a test of some sort.  To take to the air in control of airborne transport you first need a private pilot’s licence, for which the tests are even more demanding. To launch out into the seaways of the world you need no qualifications whatsoever; anyone who can get hold of a boat is free to plough straight into busy harbours, estuaries, even the major marine traffic lanes, without any training or certification to their name.

So what’s the situation ‘out there’, in the deep dark reaches of interstellar space?  Is there any form of regulation that requires a would-be Buck Rogers or Captain Kirk to achieve some specific level of proficiency before they can ‘boldly go’?  Does the Final Frontier have frontier guards who can pull you in and check your credentials as you negotiate that hyperspace bypass or cruise down Galactic Route 66?

At first sight it would seem not.  It appears that anyone – at least, any major government or corporate body with the necessary financial clout – can blast off into space for any distant twinkling destination, without a by-your-leave or authorisation of any sort.

But maybe that’s an illusion – we don’t seem to be out there, do we? And with all our techno-wizardry we don’t seem to have any plans to be out there any time soon. Of course we can offer all sorts of reasons why that’s so; perhaps those reasons are themselves the test that we have yet to pass …
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Ground Rules

This post explores the possibility that, just like Stephen Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture (see previous post), the universe has some form of Cosmic Aptitude Test built into it that ensures that any species blazing the space-trails first understands certain basic principles. That’s not so unlikely as it might sound – very plausible, in fact. And we can see the necessary aptitude training going on around us right now.

 Let’s sneak a look in on Lecture Hall B …

“Today, class, we’re going to revisit Young’s two-slit experiment. You’ll recall that this is where individual photons of light pass through two slits simultaneously as waves distributed in space, then land on a screen as localised particles. You’ll also recall that the late great Nobel physicist Richard Feynman told us that everything we need to know about quantum mechanics can be learned from the two-slit experiment.”

“So Professor, does the two-slit experiment tell us how a widely-distributed wave becomes a localised particle?”

“Son, wave-particle duality is just one of life’s great mysteries that you have to learn to live with. We get along just fine if we think of light either as a wave or as a particle, but never as both at once.”

“But Professor, if Feynman was right, surely that duality is telling us something really important …”

And in Lecture Hall C …

“Ok class, now remember that if two electrons are ‘entangled’, this means that they can be many miles apart but if we tweak one then the other one will respond immediately – faster than the speed of light. This tells us that there are connections between particles of matter that we don’t understand at all – and those connections aren’t subject to the usual rules of time and space.”

And in Lecture Hall D …

“Einstein taught us that gravity isn’t a force of attraction between two objects. Rather, it’s one massive object – say, the earth – causing a distortion, a dent, in spacetime and another object – say, the moon – following the curves of that distorted spacetime. That’s what keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth, like a marble rolling round inside a bowl.”

“Professor, what does it mean that ‘spacetime is curved’? What is spacetime made of, that it can be shaped? And what is it about the makeup of matter, like the particles in our planet, that causes it to shape spacetime? What is matter made of, that makes it do that? How can an atom in my sweatshirt be contributing to curvature of space that attracts another galaxy from billions of light years away?”

“So many questions, Lucy. ‘Spacetime is curved’ means exactly what it says: it has dents in it, so that objects like the moon roll round like a marble in a bowl. That’s all we need to know. And there’s nothing special about your sweatshirt – every atom in our galaxy is adding to that curvature.”

“Exactly – but how? How can we claim to understand gravity if we don’t even know what causes it? And how could we ever find better ways of crossing space if we’ve not got the least idea what it actually is?”

“So many questions, Lucy …”

Graduate School

So what are the take-home lessons from this module on ‘New Science’ (i.e. ideas that have been around for the past 100 years)? What do we, as a species, need to take on board to qualify as fully-fledged (think about that term) travellers on the galactic superhighway?

First, we need to recognise the interconnectedness of objects spatially far apart, in a way that transcends space and time. In fact, we need to recognise that everything is interconnected, both by gravitation and by more subtle bonds.

It’s a short step from that to ‘Everything is a single undivided whole’ – a view strongly endorsed by visionary Nobel physics nominee David Bohm.

Second, we need to see beyond the paradox of wave-particle duality to what that paradox is actually saying – that at a deeper level there are no particles, that everything is distributed, non-local (or more properly, alocal: i.e.the concept of here/there is something we’ve dreamed up to keep the perceptual books in order). There are clues all around us, if we could just take the blinkers off.

Third, we need to see that everything that we refer to as ‘matter’ is in fact spun out of waveform electromagnetic energy – swirls of energy, just like the ghostly forms that are conjured up by the mist on a late autumn day.

This then immediately raises the question: “How, and by whom or what, are those energy patterns created?” The issue of consciousness, evident in different ways in numerous quantum mechanics experiments and attested to by at least one Nobel laureate, has to be taken into consideration.

Certificate of Spaceworthiness

These aren’t airy-fairy New Agey concepts, they’re serious science – 21st Century science. And it’s a fair bet that key issues of interstellar travel won’t be cracked until we – at least, a critical mass of our species – have got our heads round these concepts as practical considerations, not just philosophical discussion points. In other words, we don’t get to leave home before we’re reasonably street-wise.

This looks very much to yours truly like some sort of aptitude test, a guarantee that no species is let loose on the galactic community without at least a working knowledge of the ground rules. Those rules don’t guarantee responsible behaviour, of course – but they do ensure an awareness of the true nature of things.

Enlightened self-interest applied to such concepts as: ‘everything is interconnected’ and ‘all material form – including us – is spun from energy flows directed by consciousness’ doesn’t necessarily ensure universal peace and harmony. But no-one can then claim “I didn’t know that what goes around comes around”. Individual/group responsibility steps up a notch when we go galactic, and the failsafe of higher physics ensures that we’re well aware of that.

To Sum Up ..

To introduce a radically new form of computer communications not covered by the TCP/IP protocol, we have to go to the layer below that. To introduce a radically new form of travel and communications – FTL (Faster Than Light) – we have to get to grips with the layer of reality that underlies our space-time model of how things work. In doing that we’re brought face to face with deeper truths regarding the nature of the universe.

How we respond to that is up to us, individually and as a species – but we can’t say we didn’t know. We qualify as galactic travellers by truly recognising and implicitly accepting that higher understanding. That’s part and parcel of the process that we refer to as ‘evolution’.

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For further information on this subject, see this website.
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Credits for space photos:
Earth and Moon: NASA & NSSDC
Dust Cloud by Merope (Pleiades): NASA
Spiral Galaxy NGC4414: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)
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“Oh my god … It’s full of stars!”
Dr David Bowman, in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Arthur C. Clarke)
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Summary

Many millions of years ago environmental pressures drove our very earliest ‘ancestors’ to break through the surface tension (both physical and metaphorical) of the oceans and set up home on land. It was a seminal moment for life on this planet.

Now, again, we are at just such a moment. Resources are getting scarcer, environmental pressures are reaching extreme levels, tensions both between and within nations are reaching breaking point. A number of public figures have said that there are way too many of us, that the earth’s population needs to be drastically reduced.

There’s only one option that’s in any way thinkable. Evolution doesn’t pull any punches.

At the same time a leading scientist is saying that we shouldn’t be keeping all our eggs in one basket – earth. A major global disaster, man-made or natural, could signal the end of the human race: one strike (e.g. by a rogue asteroid) and we’re out.

Time to check out those spaceways …

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Where do we go from here?

Up until a couple of centuries ago those who found living conditions cramped, or uncomfortable in other ways, could get on a boat and head off for pastures new. In almost every direction there were wide open spaces for the hardy and adventurous to find new living-space for themselves (without them actually having to oppress those who already lived there, that was an unnecessary side-effect).

Not any more. Every bit of land on this planet now has ‘No Vacancies’ signs and conditions in far too many places are more reminiscent of an overcrowded rats’ cage than the Garden of Eden. Or, looking at it another way, the world is like a seed-pod about to burst – but with nowhere for the seeds to go.

Or is there?

We now have it on good authority that there are almost certainly billions of planets in our galaxy with gravity and temperature not dissimilar to the one we now live on. Even if only one in a million has a breathable atmosphere, that still gives us thousands to choose from.

One or two of the nearest of those could maybe even be reached in a few decades of travel, by tolerable acceleration up to a decent fraction of the speed of light then deceleration at the same rate for the other half of the trip.

But, as always, there’s a catch (quite apart from the power source – we’ll assume that can be dealt with). The able-bodied colonists will, of course, not be those that left earth as adults, they’ll be their offspring a couple of generations down the line. That’s ok – if there’s a workable planet at the other end.

If not, you don’t get a second shot. To start the process again – and again, and again – with leaders more and more generations removed from the mother planet raises a host of problems that don’t bear thinking about.

We can only infer even the existence of planets around other stars by variations we can see in the emissions from those stars. We certainly can’t tell whether those planets – if they exist – will be suitable for colonisation. A high level of wastage may be ok for dandelion seeds or coconuts, but not for ships full of pioneering humans. And even a status message home, at light speed, could take a decade or more. Not ideal for planning further trips.

Warp Factor 5, Mr Sulu …??

So chugging around the galaxy at sub-luminal speeds looking for a new home isn’t really a goer.

Because that could bring the wrath of the gods down on our heads, playing havoc with the universal principle of causality, or cause and effect, and plunging the whole cosmos into chaos.

Relativity theory says that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. In view of recent scientific findings that makes perfect sense. But that same theory says that if we could find some way of getting round that and moving from A to B faster than light can (such as some form of hyper-dimensional travel or wormholes in space) we’d then be able to travel backwards in time.

So we could change the course of history by stopping Archduke Ferdinand or JFK from being shot, or even accidentally kill our own grandmother – so setting up an ‘I exist – no I don’t – yes I do – no I don’t’ paradox that would rattle on forever without ever being resolved.

You can probably think of some far better examples. But the long and short of it is that nothing in the whole of creation could ever be relied upon, not even your own existence, if we started scooting around the galaxy faster than the speed of light – no matter how we achieved it.

Quite a few scientists have written about this, and about the associated idea of ‘closed timelike curves’ (closed loops in time) which are a possibility according to General Relativity. The noted physicist Stephen Hawking published a scientific paper some time ago on his Chronology Protection Conjecture which proposes that something would intervene to prevent such mayhem.

The word ‘conjecture’ gives you an idea of how certain (or not) he is about that. There’s a distinct impression that scientists are holding back a bit with regard to things superluminal, for fear of nudging open this Pandora’s Box.

And of course there’s the question of “How could it be done, anyway?”

An alternative perspective

What if there wasn’t this risk of cosmic chaos? What if there was a ‘wormhole’ through Relativity Theory that explained all of the effects without bringing in a threat of dire consequences from superluminal travel? And what if that same ‘wormhole’ gave some real insights into the nature of space and time that opened up research possibilities for making that superluminal travel a reality? With a changed mindset on the hazards, and the impossibility, of faster-than-light-ness, who knows what might be possible?

Fast rewind now, nearly a century, to the first physics doctoral thesis that won its author a Nobel prize. In that thesis Count Louis de Broglie put forward the idea of matter having wavelike properties. That concept went on to become Quantum Mechanics, the most firmly established scientific model of reality ever. The conventional interpretation of that wavelike quality says it’s just a statistical description – but both de Broglie and Einstein were convinced it was more than that.

Practical experiments and theoretical research are both increasingly giving weight to the idea that particles of matter are formed from photons – light and non-visible higher frequencies. This idea in turn leads naturally to all the tried and tested principles of Special Relativity without the risk of causality being upset by faster-than-light travel, as described here.

It also gives a completely new perspective on the nature of time and space, a perspective offering possibilities that don’t even exist in the conventional model of reality. [As an aside, the Alcubierre drive, as adopted by Star Trek, depends on warping space locally. Nice idea (in the most unlikely event that it’s possible) - but before you could warp space you’d have to know what space is.]

Stephen Hawking is certainly right that we shouldn’t be entrusting all our eggs to one basket. It seems he could also be right with his Chronology Protection Conjecture – though that protection may come in a form that he hadn’t quite expected.

Next stop, Alpha Centauri?

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The Illusory Nature of Time: II

“And there we were, all in one place
- a generation lost in space,
with no time left to start again.”
Don McLean, ‘American Pie’.
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Summary

For thousands of years sages and mystics have been telling us that time is an illusion.

Recently scientists discovered that at levels below Planck Time, even the concept of time drops off the scientific agenda.

Here, in very simple terms, is an explanation for why that is. As an objective cosmic reality, time literally does not exist.

Confused? You won’t be – read on …
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Taking a Step Backwards

Picture the scene: broken glass littered all over the floor, small orange thing flapping around on soaking wet carpet. Suddenly glass, water, orange thing lift off the ground and leap towards the table, assembling themselves as a goldfish swimming in a bowl – just as a cat leaping in backwards through the window brushes past the goldfish bowl, off the table and out through the door in reverse gear.

Couldn’t happen? Course it couldn’t, the universe isn’t built that way.

That one’s actually quite simple.  Imagine a bag full of grasshoppers: open the bag, and in no time the little critters are everywhere, heading in every direction.  Reversing the process, getting them back into the bag, would be nigh on impossible.  It certainly wouldn’t happen by chance.

The material universe is made up of energy, every bit of which is a good deal livelier than those grasshoppers. Some of that energy is tied up as bundles that we refer to as ‘particles’ – the particles that make up you and me and everything else. The rest is flying about as light, radio waves, microwaves and the like. All of the effects of time are driven by that energy escaping – just like those grasshoppers.

Every physical or chemical reaction, including those in biological processes, involves energy transfers in which some of that energy gets away.  The nuclear reactions in stars are driven by the release of energy, the energy that comes to us as heat and light from the sun.  Scientists call this increasing entropy, also The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

That lost energy scatters in every direction, making the reverse process about as likely as all those grasshoppers obligingly stepping back into that bag.  [Reversing one of those reactions requires more energy, so there’s always a net energy loss.]  The one-way street of time is the route taken by those grasshoppers and that energy alike: out, never back in; scattering, never regrouping.

… And One More Time Around …

Numerous studies point to particles of matter being light wrapped round in closed loops.  The book Tapestry of Light shows how this precisely fits a whole spread of proven scientific facts.  Here, too, some of that steadily circulating energy can be released ‘into the wild’ by one-way reactions – such as two atoms joining to form a molecule, releasing some of the electron energy from each of those atoms.

So there we have the flow of time.  It’s actually those energy flows, scattering randomly from events that thus can’t run in reverse (since they’d need a random focused input of energy – a contradiction) or circulating round to form material particles.  The rate of those energy flows – the speed of light – defines the rate of time.

Or does it?  Let’s take a closer look.

Anything You Can Do …

If the rate of those energy flows doubled, then energy would get from A to B twice as fast, it would disperse from chemical reactions and nuclear fusion events twice as fast. But it would also circulate around particles, atoms and molecules, twice as fast …

And that’s what gives us our measure of time, whether it’s an atomic clock or marks on a burning candle – or even the synapses in your brain or mine, giving us an estimate of time.  The faster rate of external events would be precisely balanced by the faster rate of every measure of time that you can imagine, including our own perception.  If something happens twice as fast, and your clock runs twice as fast, you won’t notice the difference.

Those energy flows* could speed up by a hundred, a thousand, a million times – or, conversely, slow down by any of those factors – and it would make no detectable difference whatever to the universe.  Our experience, and the way of being of everything around us, would be absolutely unchanged.
[* Yes, we’re talking about the speed of light here.]

This is because what we refer to as ‘timing’ a process or event is actually a comparison of two distances travelled by energy flows: around the process/event and around the ‘timing’ device, whatever that may be.  That comparison doesn’t change, whatever the speed of those energy flows.

In short: any externally imposed ‘rate of time’ would be 100% irrelevant to the workings of the material universe.  So inclusion of that concept in our world view is a red herring, it simply gets in the way of an objective analysis of material reality.  Time, in that sense, does not exist.

[This reasoning, of course, applies equally to the ‘proper time’ of objects in different frames of reference, for those concerned with relativity theory.]

How the – ?  What the – ?  Who the – ?

But … but … but there is time. We experience it every day, every minute, every second.

Transience Clouds, bluebells, Houndtor Rocks [Dartmoor, UK] Each reinforcing our perception of the steady progress of time – whether it be minutes, days, or thousands of years.

Yes.  We experience sequencing of events – but we also experience sequencing of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and the sequencing of notes on the piano.  Neither of them involves time.  We also have the sensation of duration: we can even check that sensation against a clock – but that’s just comparing the distance travelled by energy flows around the circuits in our brain with distance around energy-flow circuits in our clock.  Two distances again.

So – dammit, what is the thing we experience as time?

It’s the mind rationalising a rather greater (though actually very simple) cosmic principle – just as the mind rationalises some electromagnetic frequencies as colours.  That’ll have to wait for another time – but you could try reading this paper in the meantime (especially the final paragraph). [You'll need to register, free, here first.]

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The Illusory Nature of Time: I
Condensed from an article by Dr Grahame Blackwell published on The Institute of Noetic Sciences website, Nov. 2009.

“To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”
(William Blake)
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Summary

Science tells us that the universe kicked off around 13.7 billion years ago, give or take half a billion.

So what was going on before then?

We’re told that in the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at an exponential rate – doubling in size every instant, from the size of the tiniest sub-atomic particle to billions of miles across. This is the explanation offered for how it’s reached the size and form that it has. [See Inflationary Period.]

But all the evidence suggests that it wasn’t space, but time itself that was going through those dramatic changes in pace in those earliest moments. That fits the facts perfectly.

It also fits another very significant issue that doesn’t seem to have been factored in to the standard explanation. Relativity theory tells us that time slows down near a large mass such as star or a black hole – and the whole universe packed into a space much smaller than a pinhead was certainly a pretty large and compact mass. Time would have had trouble even getting started in those conditions.

Fortunately there was another factor at play, quite independent of relativity, that eased things up for time to get moving – once the universe had expanded to a sensible size. That leads us down a very interesting rabbit hole, one that may turn out to have no ending … and no beginning.

How far down that particular rabbit hole are you prepared to go?
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A long backward glance …

Ok, so let’s take a trip backwards down the corridor of time and watch the universe shrink as we head back towards the Big Bang (and beyond??), where the cosmos began as a point singularity (science-speak for “??*?!!”).

The usual measure of time these days is given by a caesium atomic clock, but that’ll be affected by gravitational forces as the universe reduces in size (see summary above) so we’ll sidestep conventional time measurement and go by the reducing size of the universe instead. We know that was a lot faster, measured against atomic processes, when the universe was very small (the Inflationary Period – backwards), maybe in this way we’ll see why.

[Technical note: The expansion of the universe isn’t time-based in the conventional sense. All other cosmic processes depend on electromagnetic energy flows, but universal expansion, as first discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, isn’t driven by those flows. (We know that because it actually stretches electromagnetic waves). That’s why we can use it as an objective measure of the rate of cosmic processes – the rate of time.]

[Technical note 2: We’ll be counting distance in light years; one light year is about six trillion miles.]

Winding back the light years

Ok, we’re down to a universe 50 billion light years across now, we’ll start watching that caesium clock running backwards as the cosmos shrinks further. 49, 48, 47, 46 … the clock is sticking with us pretty steadily so far. Down to 30, 29, 28, the stars and galaxies are getting a bit closer together now – and is it my imagination or is that clock beginning to run a tad slower?

20, 19, 18 billion light years, stars definitely crowding in now – and yes, that clock is slowing down noticeably. Each billion light years is notching up distinctly less time on the clock, progressively as the universe is shrinking. Not surprising really, the combined gravitational field of all those stars in all those galaxies is getting stronger by the second (if we can still refer to seconds …), slowing that clock down.

Ten billion light years now, and now five … and that clock is positively crawling along, the gravitational time dilation effect is so strong. For every second that ticks by, the universe shrinks by ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times as much as it did in the same time a few seconds ago. We’re heading towards Big Bang Ground Zero at an ever-increasing pace, an exponentially increasing pace – according to our clock.

[For those who missed it, this is the Inflationary Period in reverse – that Inflationary Period can be fully explained by the gravitational slowing-down of time.] 

The universe is just a few thousand miles across now, the energy and mass of millions of galaxies, billions of stars, packed into a volume smaller than the earth. Not surprisingly, with such an absolutely astronomical (!!) gravitational field, our poor clock has pretty well ground to a standstill. We see no change in its reading at all as the universe pops back to that point singularity, then back to who-knows-where-or-what before that.

So sure, our universe may have existed for around 13.7 billion years by that caesium clock or a similar device. But that actually tells us nothing about the real age of the cosmos, since that clock would hardly have got moving until the universe was at least several million miles across. And whilst it was brewing in that point singularity – an infinite gravitational field – the clock wouldn’t have registered anything at all. So how long was that going on for??

This simple analysis offers a clear explanation for the so-called Inflationary Period. It wasn’t the universe expanding incredibly fast, it was time moving incredibly slowly – making it look as if everything was happening at lightning speed (or rather faster than that, in fact).

It also offers us much, much more. For that we need to think briefly about Geometric Series.

Infinity in a Blank Sheet of Paper

You know all about geometric series. You could make one now – all you need is a sheet of paper and a pair of scissors (or just a good imagination). Take your sheet of paper and cut it in half. Put one half to one side, cut the other piece in half again. Put one half of that with your original half-sheet and cut the other piece in half again. Keep doing that …

You should end up with a pile of bits of paper: ½-sheet, ¼-sheet, 1/8th, 1/16th, etc, etc. In theory you could go on for ever and end up with an infinite number of pieces – but you’d never have more paper than you had in that original sheet.

Just as we piled up a never-ending heap of bits of paper from a total of  just one sheet, so we can notch up a never-ending succession of cosmic intervals – each embodying major cosmic development - from 13.7 billion years of clock time. Those intervals show up as smaller, and smaller, and smaller on our clock as it runs ever more slowly backwards towards, but never actually reaches, the beginning of it all.

That point of origin that we think we can put a figure on might prove elusively forever just beyond our reach if we boarded our hypothetical time machine and confidently headed back towards Time Zero. Not because we’re getting slower, but because each successive ‘nearly there’ clock-tick stretches out to a century, a million years, a billion years and far, far beyond, of cosmic evolution in real terms. There was no Time Zero.

So Question: has the universe been around an infinite length of time or hasn’t it? Answer: You’re asking the wrong question. To treat time as if it’s an objective reality is to totally miss the point.

What this actually shows is that time is a construct of consciousness, a tool to help us steer our way through a realm that would seem truly weird if we could see it as it really is. This blog post is just an intro to that weirdness, time gets even weirder than that – see the next post. Similar sorts of observations can be made about distance. But that’s another story.

See two published papers [1] , [2] related to this subject.

“So are we privileged to navigate, with instruments of time and space, the measureless tracts of eternity.”
Quotation from Breath of the Cosmos.

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Photos by NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

The place of Tibetan singing bowls in 21st century physics.

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Summary

We all know what a Quantum Leap is.  It’s a major step, a big burst of energy – isn’t it?
No, actually, it’s not.  A quantum leap spans virtually the smallest distance imaginable, using the smallest possible measure of energy.

The remarkable thing about a quantum leap is that it involves a particle transferring from one place to another without ever being at any point in between – or so it’s generally believed.

A slightly different light is shed on this, though, by two practical demonstrations. One is a simple experiment first conducted over 100 years ago and repeated countless times since then. The other is a ‘technology’ that’s been around for thousands of years.

It’s clear from these two closely-linked case studies that the transition is continuous, not the step change that’s described in science texts.

It’s also clear that, far from being made of solid durable ‘particles’, every material object in the universe is formed from constantly-moving ever-changing energy flows.  The very nature of material particles is as ephemeral as clouds in the sky.

Conclusion from the post below:
“Until we can shift that fixed mindset and see things as they really are, a whole lot of scientific doors won’t be closed to us – they’ll be wide open, but we won’t even see them.  One could be the door to a very different future from what we see facing us now.”

To learn more about the reality of the quantum leap, and to find out where Tibetan singing bowls come into it, read on …
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‘Quantum Leap’ must be the most common scientific phrase  in popular use today. The term is synonymous with a massive stride, a great burst of energy.

In fact a true quantum leap is neither of those things.  It’s the movement of an electron from one atomic orbit to another – just a fraction of the width of that atom.  In making that move the electron will absorb or release a single photon, or ‘packet’ of energy, typically in the form of light – and there’s no smaller amount of energy than a single photon.

The simple act of viewing a flower or a butterfly (or anything else) involves countless quantum leaps in your eye!

No, the thing that makes a quantum leap so special is the idea that that electron disappears from one orbit and reappears in the other without having apparently been anywhere in between in the meantime: now I’m here, now I’m there.

Ok, so the distance is pretty small.  But it’s still a neat trick, to be here one instant and somewhere else the next without having to travel across the gap.  So how’s it done – and more to the point, is it done?

Light Waves and Brighton Pier

First a brief intro to a simple scientific experiment.  Don’t go away, it’s pretty easy to follow and the conclusion is quite astounding.

Light from a single source passes through two slits in a card to land on a screen on the other side of the card.  The resulting pattern of light and dark bars on the screen tells us that every photon of light passes through both slits at the same time.

This effect is down to the wave-like nature of light.  Just as a wave in the sea can go both sides of the posts supporting Brighton (or Cleethorpes) Pier, a light wave can go both sides of the strip of card between those two slits.

Both parts of the wave spread out once they’re through the slits. Like waves on the sea, at some places where they meet again we get an extra high peak and at other places they cancel each other out. This gives alternate bright and dark stripes on the screen.

Oh, Those Two-Timing Photons !

So what does this tell us about the quantum leap? Basically it tells us it’s a process, not a step.

In the lab a photon ‘hit’ is registered by an electron shifting orbit in a detector on the screen. If the waves cancel each other at some point on that screen, it’s because one’s a peak and one’s a trough – they’ve travelled slightly different distances. So they’ll get there at two slightly different times.

The second wave to arrive clearly interrupts an orbital-shift process that’s already underway with the first wave and cancels that process. Has to be that way – otherwise what’s that first wave doing in the meantime?? If there’s no second wave, or if that wave’s in sync, the process completes, no problem.

So how does that work … ?

The Tibetan Connection

A useful clue comes from, of all places, the Tibetan singing bowl.

To get a note from a singing bowl you run a wooden baton around the rim of the bowl until it starts sounding its lowest tone. Continue with the baton, and after a time a new note of higher pitch will be heard in the background.  Gradually that new note will get stronger and the first note will fade, until eventually only that higher-pitch note can be heard, clear and resonant.

Now back to the quantum leap (noting on the way that what we don’t get from a singing bowl is a sudden leap from one spherical harmonic to another).

Crossing the Great Divide

So where is that electron between the times that each of the two waves hit that screen?  To grasp the answer to this, we have to let go of the idea of an electron being a particle and see it instead as an energy pattern wrapping around the atom.  The lower orbit is one closed energy loop, the higher orbit is another.

To change orbit the electron energy flow must give up its closed-loop ‘particle’ status temporarily and follow an open  spiral path from one orbit to the other, boosted by that first wave.  [Just like the singing bowl moving up from one frequency to another - the baton is the 'wave'.]

In this ‘limbo’ state its situation is unstable; if the wave  helping it along this spiral is cancelled by an out-of-sync second wave, it’ll fall back to its former lower-energy orbit.  But if the follow-up wave is in sync it’ll reinforce that upward spiral, making that orbit-shift even more certain.

Future Science

The take-home message from this scenario is both simple and world-changing.  The only realistic option is that electrons can exist in a state that isn’t a particle – and are doing so all the time, since the quantum leap is by far the most frequent event in the whole universe.  Our world of solid objects gives way to one of constantly-flowing energies that come together from time to time to give an illusion of material structures.

Visionary physicist David Bohm, Nobel nominee and originator of the Holographic Universe concept, observed that our object-based language limits our ability even to think in terms of flowing dynamic processes.  But the universe is a flowing dynamic process.  Until we can shift that fixed mindset and see things as they really are, a whole lot of scientific doors won’t be closed to us – they’ll be wide open, but we won’t even see them.  One could be the door to a very different future from what we see facing us now.

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Some thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider

For those not familiar with it, ‘Duck Soup’ was a film made in 1933 starring the Marx brothers.
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Summary

The Large Hadron Collider, operated by CERN on the Swiss-French border, was built to investigate fundamental properties of matter. It does this by smashing together the nuclei (cores) of atoms at speeds close to the speed of light.

One subject of particular interest is quark soup, the stuff that was believed to be around just after the Big Bang, that congealed into atoms. Separating atoms back out into the quarks that they’re made of could tell us quite a bit about the nature of the matter that we and everything around us are formed from.

Trouble is, it could tell us things in quite a loud sort of way – the Big Bang was quite loud (or would have been, if there’d been anyone there to hear it). And once it starts telling us things it may be quite difficult to get it to stop,

Some people have worried that the LHC might create a black hole that would swallow us all up. That seems rather unlikely. Less unlikely is that we might get quite a dramatic demonstration of Einstein’s famous E = mc².   Pretty hot soup!

If you’re ready for the main course, read on …
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It’s an easy step from Marx to Quarks, and there’s a strange resemblance between the wild-eyed wild-haired look of the Marx brothers and the mental image many of us have of groundbreaking scientists such as Albert Einstein.

[I have to declare an interest here: another of the Marx brothers’ best-known films, ‘A Night at the Opera’, is based on Verdi’s ‘Il Trovatore’, an opera that overlapped with his 'La Traviata' which I’m currently taking part in.  Also it seems to me that researchers at the LHC may be looking for things that could in some cases turn out to be the scientific equivalent of ‘Horse Feathers’ – the title of yet another well-loved Marx brothers film.]

So what’s the plan, Chico?

One of the objectives of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is to create quark plasma – also referred to as ‘quark soup’.  The protons and neutrons at the centre of every atom are each made up of three quarks, said to be held together by ‘gluons’.

It’s believed that immediately after the Big Bang at the beginning of everything, quarks were seething around together in an intensely high-energy state – quark plasma – before they got together in threesomes to form those components that make up each atomic nucleus. LHC scientists are looking to re-create that state – in a small way, of course.

Now let’s first dispense with what almost certainly won’t happen in the LHC.  Some people have been concerned, even to the extent of trying to get a court injunction, that smashing particles together at near-light-speed could create mini black holes that might suck in everything around them.  This would be first the LHC, then maybe the Alps, followed by the whole world and possibly more.

A black hole is an intense localised concentration of mass – imagine the weight of the whole earth in a pinhead.  Now the amount of stuff being pushed round the inside of the LHC is a lot nearer that of an ordinary pinhead than one the weight of the earth, it’s difficult to see how a black hole is even going to get started.

But all this hoo-ha about black holes has taken the focus off another possibility, one that’s highlighted by probably the most famous equation in the world: Einstein’s E = mc².

What’s the grouch, Groucho?

We don’t actually know what’s holding those quarks together in threes, it’s all speculation.  They’ve been that way since just after the Big Bang, when conditions were very, very different from how they are now.  What we do know is that matter and energy are just different versions of basically the same stuff – in fact, more and more evidence is emerging that particles of matter are just photons of light wrapped up in a ball.    If that’s the case, it’s the electromagnetic fields in those photons that are holding the particles together.

So, question: if the LHC does manage to whup those particles hard enough and fast enough to split those quarks apart – what happens next?  We’ve actually no way of knowing, except to know that the early universe was a seething mass of energy – and of course that equation of Einstein’s.

It could be that those happy threesomes are all that’s holding that quark energy in stable particle form, that if we crack them apart then each won’t have the electromagnetic effects it needs from the other two to keep it in shape.  Imagine, for example, three mutually interlinked rubber bands – a good analogy for the way quarks behave.  The only way to separate them is to break them – and then they’re not rubber bands any more, they’re just bits of rubber.

As a simple guideline, the total energy in five kilograms of anything is enough to keep a car moving for a million years.

Time to play your harp, Harpo?

So ok, we’re not talking five kilos, we’re talking maybe a pinhead.  Maybe just the equivalent of one year’s-worth of automobile fuel, in a tiny space, all at one go.  That energy could maybe smash particles into the walls of the LHC vessel itself, causing a similar reaction – a chain reaction, as atoms of that vessel disintegrate end release their energy, and so it goes on …

Nah, couldn’t happen.  They know what they’re doing.

Do they?  Then what is the LHC for, if not to find out the basic principles of what matter is made of?  We know a great deal more about the structure of undersea geological formations than we do about the structure of sub-atomic particles – care to go for a scuba dive in the Gulf of Mexico?  That couldn’t happen, either…

The LHC is in fact a calculated risk, a gamble.

If that gamble doesn’t pay off, it could land us all in the soup …

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