Are Physicists losing their grip on reality?

I'm sure that physicists are gradually loosing their grip on reality. What's really loosened the grip is this dimension thing. In the past I could go along with the idea that there may be many additional dimensions that we just can't see because they bend in upon themselves in a space somewhere around the Plank length (smaller than very, very small).  Various numbers of these diminutive dimensions have been bandied about. People like Lisa Randall, apparently a leading US physicist in the dimension game talk of various numbers of these , from a dozen or so to "many".

Giving grudging acceptance to these enigmatic dimensions was easy, however, when no one was ever likely to prove or disprove them, and if they did, it wouldn't have an impact on my Saturday afternoon beer, or anything else for that matter.

Now, however they're going too far. Now they're saying that the early universe actually had FEWER dimensions, and that at higher energy levels  (like maybe in the heart of the Large Hadron Collider) there also may be fewer, ( there really are only 3 aren't there?, 4 if you count time). This characterizes a universe in which the most fundamental characteristic (including my most fundamental characteristic) may be a bit footloose. Evanescent, if you prefer. How, in a 2 dimensional universe, could you ever get beer into a can? Or, assuming the beer was already in there, how would you get it out?  And furthermore, if time were to be the unfortunate dimension to be booted into the void, what would keep everything from happening all at once? Or having happened all at once? ("Once" and "happened" being  rather nebulous concepts in that event).

Nevertheless, if you want the physicists' spin on it, check out this article:   http://focus.aps.org/story/v27/st10

 

The isolation of white phosphorus

Here's a little story that may appeal to those with a more twisted sense of humour.

Back in the summer of 1669 an alchemist named Henning Brandt, tried to make gold by heating a concoction of sixty buckets of human urine mixed with charcoal (do you know how long it takes to save up sixty buckets of piss?, I bet his wife could have told you).

Needless to say, the gold didn't materialize, but he did succeed in producing an entirely new material; white phosphorus. In fact this was one of the first elements to be isolated by chemical means.

Now white phosphorus reacts quite readily with oxygen and for that reason it is normally stored in water. As soon as it is removed from water, it begins to glow. If you remove enough from the water it bursts into flame. You can actually put some on your fingers and write with it.... it will glow for quite awhile. However, just increase the quantity slightly and you have fire. To quote Mr Brandt “'twill burn the place most dreadfully”.

Now Brandt was keen to find a use for this remarkable new material, and it's glow suggested medial applications to him, (I guess medications were different in those days) and it occurred to him that it just might be a handy cure for some sexually transmitted diseases. Whether he was so afflicted we don't know, but we do know that he tested his theory, and to quote him (and this is the punch line) : “If the privy parts be therewith rubb'd, they will be inflamed and burn for a good while after”.

That may well have been the forerunner of dispassionate understatement in scientific reportage.

Neanderthals

What do Christians think of Neanderthals? Do they not consider them human? 
I wonder if the religious contradictions explain why many anthropologists are so adamant that Neanderthals were not capable of symbolic thought, and therefore not human. Whatever the reason, some anthropologists have vigorously opposed any suggestion that Neanderthals wore any kind of jewelry or created any kind of decoration or images, and thus were not human.

Up until now they have been able to cast doubt on any finds that link Neanderthals with such artifacts.... up until now. Just recently a chap named Joao Zilhao (try saying that quickly 10 times) dug up unequivocal evidence, in a site in Spain, of Neanderthal symbolism (ie body paint and jewelry), 50,000 years ago.

The conclusions resulting from this are of the "career-altering" kind for anthropologists.

For example.

• If Neanderthals could think symbolically, then they were mentally on par with "behaviorally-modern humans".

• Given that fact, you have to ask how and when did they acquire that level of mental ability.

• They either developed it independently 50,000 ya, or it was present in the common ancestor of both humans and Neanderthals many years before that.

Both possibilities have significant consequences.

• The independent scenario would mean that humans probably acquired the use of jewelry etc., by imitating the Neanderthals since humans did not exhibit these characteristics 50,000 ya, before leaving Africa, but the Neanderthals did.

• The common ancestor theory, is equally troubling because it pushes back the emergence of "behaviorally-modern" humans to earlier than 200,000 ya... (many careers have been built upon that occurrence being only 50,000 ya)

 It is amazing what two little holes in a sea shell and a bit of pigment can do to bring down years of well fortified theory.

Polarized light wierdness

The book I'm currently reading describes an interesting experiment with polarized light.  I'd like to try it but it requires three polarizers and I don't have that many.

It goes like this:
Photons are polarized;  either vertical, horizontal, or something in between (actually, according to quantum theory they are not polarized until you measure them).  However, if you pass light through a verticaly polarized filter, you will see light coming through that is only vertically polarized. All photons with different polarizations will be blocked (well, almost all).  If you then place a horizontally polarized filter after the vertical one, virtually all of the light will be blocked.  Makes perfect sense.

However..... if you then place a filter polarized at 45 degrees between the other two, light will come through all three filters. The book I'm reading says that all of the light will come through but that is not quite right, it is actually only 1/2 ,(i.e cos 45 squared). But light does come through. Remove the center filter and the light stops.  If you want an interesting  discussion of (not an explanation of) this phenomenon, there is a reasonable one at:     http://www.mtnmath.com/whatrh/node78.html


Another interesting experiment involving polarized light is to send photons polarized at +45 degrees through a calcite crystal. The crystal will split into the light into two streams, one horizontally polarized, the other vertically polarized.   If you then intercept these two streams of light with a second calcite crystal, they will be combined to produce a single light stream again polarized at +45 degrees. All good so far.
If, however, you send the photons through the two crystals only one at a time, you will still get a +45 degree photon out of the second crystal.
There is an interesting discussion of this one at:
http://quantumweird.wordpress.com/quantum-weirdness-a-matter-of-relativity-part-3/

Albert and the speed of light

The history of the speed of light involves, among others, Galileo, two chaps named Michelson and Morley, a FirzGerald, a guy named Lorentz, and, of course, Albert.

You might think that the speed of light was a relative thing. That it would go faster coming from car headlights than a lamp post. But you’d be wrong. You might also think that relativity was Albert’s original idea, and you’d be wrong there too, it was Galileo that first came up with a theory of relativity. He apparently said : The laws of mechanics valid in one frame of reference are valid in all frames of reference that move uniformly in relation to it.

Of course Albert took that idea and really put it to work. He expanded Galieo's relativity to include all the laws of physics. In particular, he included the laws governing electromagnetic radiation (which includes light).

But before Albert, there was Michelson & Morley, who measured the speed of light. Actually they weren’t as interested in its actual speed as they were in proving the existence of a medium for it to travel through. The thought of the day was that as a wave, light had to propagate through something. They called the something, the ether. 

Of course if the ether existed, the earth had to move through it (it was assumed that the ether was motionless). Therefore a light wave moving in the direction of the earth’s motion should travel at a different speed than one traveling perpendicular to it. Unfortunately when Michelson and Morley did their experiment, both light beams traveled at the same speed. The conclusion:  either the earth was not moving through the ether, or the ether did not exist. Neither alternative was very attractive to scientists of the day.

The next guy to throw his hat in the ring was George Francis FitzGerald. He reasoned that the ether may just compress matter traveling through it, including the “yardstick” used to measure the light speed.  He suggested that this compression might just be enough to render measurement of the two light beams the same.   

Then, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz independently worked the same idea out mathematically and laid it out in now famous theorem called the Lorentz Transformations. Albert put Galileo’s principle of relativity together with Lorentz’s transformation mathematics and came up with the Special Theory of Relativity, which says that:

1)     The velocity of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers (i.e. in all frames of reference) moving uniformly in relation to each other, and

2)     All laws of nature are the same in all frames of reference moving uniformly relative to each other.

The speed of light being constant in all situations is the fly in the ointment. It just couldn’t be right according to classical physics, but if it is right, if light speed is constant, then something else has to change, and Albert figured out that the something that changes is space-time. 

 

(Even though the Michelson-Morley experiment had been published 18 years prior to Albert’s 1905 special relativity paper, and had led to the Lorentz Transformations, Albert claimed that it was not part of his reasoning process that led to his special theory.)

The perplexing part about measuring the speed of light is that since Albert threw out the idea of a fixed, unmoving, reference point, it is impossible to determine which is moving, the source or the observer. Maybe they both are.  Therefore you can only talk about their motion relative to each other and only take measurements from one or the other point of view (or frame of reference). 

If you are in the source frame of reference, the light leaving you will always be leaving at the speed of light, regardless of your motion relative to anything else in the universe. Consider the idea that light from a car’s headlights travels faster than light from a lamp post.  Now, why would you expect such a thing? Does  the sound from a car’s horn travel faster when the car is moving than when it is stopped?  Of course not. Sound travels at a speed determined by the medium it travels through, i.e., the atmosphere, or you neighbours wall.  Since light is a wave it propagates at a specific velocity too, regardless of the motion of the source, just as sound waves do. 

However, if you are measuring from the observers frame of reference the situation is a little different (or the same, depending on how you look at it). The fact is that mass is compressed when it is in motion, just like FitzGerald said it would be (but because of a change in space-time rather than compression by the ether).  The result is that the measuring tools (rulers and clocks), moving along with the observer, change just enough so that the speed of the light wave will still measure 186,000 miles/second. But that’s not all; the frequency will also measure the same as if it were measured at the moving source.  The confusion comes in when you try to talk about stationary and moving observers. The fact is that you can only state your motion relative to the source of the light. 

 Therefore, as an observer, if you are  stationary relative to the source you will measure the speed at 186,000 m/s.  If, on the other hand you are moving toward the source at some incredible velocity, your measuring tools will shrink and you will still measure the speed at 186,000 m/s.  No matter what the relative speeds are, or who is moving and who is stationary, the light speed will always be the same.

The classic example of a train whistle changing pitch as the it passes by is the same for light, hence the red-shift for stars moving away from us and blue-shift for those approaching us.  In both cases, the velocity stays the same but the frequency changes.

Light leaving a moving star will still travel at 186,000 m/s, but the frequency will have to shift. If we were to suddenly begin to move away from that star, thus adding to the speed we are moving away from each other at, we would still see the same light speed and frequency because both our yardstick and our clock would change resulting the same measurement we got when we were "still" and the star moving away from us.

There are several other interesting points:

First; it appears that the classical physicists may have been right about a propagating medium. That medium may have been resurrected by Quantum field theory, which states that particles (including photons) are excited states of the featureless ground state of the  all-pervading quantum field. (It seems to me that this field would be the fixed reference point 19^th century scientists were seeking??)

Second: If light does not propagate through some medium, if it just whizzes unimpeded through empty space, then why does it settle on a specific speed?  What makes 186,000 miles/second the speed limit? Well, if there is a propagating medium, i.e. the quantum field, then it make a little more sense that energy would propagate through it at a specific speed, just as sound through air. It is also in keeping with the fact that light travels slower when it encounters matter, such as glass, or the fibre used in fibre optics.

Of course, you have to wonder what also makes that particular speed an ultimate one that nothing can exceed. Is mass and energy that closely entangled that the same rules have to be obeyed regardless of which form it is in?

And finally, just to warp your mind, consider one of Albert’s thought experiments:

Imagine yourself in a moving room. The room moves with a uniform velocity close to the speed of light. Exactly in the centre of the room is a light bulb that flashes on and off periodically. The room is made of glass so that an outside observer can see what goes on inside.  At the precise moment that we pass an observer the light flashes on. 

Now you might think that you in the room and the observer will see the same thing, but you’d be wrong.  Inside the room we would see the light travel out in all directions at the same speed and hit all four glass walls at the same time.

The outside observer also sees the light travel out in all directions at the same speed. However, he also sees that the room is moving, and therefore the light travelling backward hits the rear wall before the forward moving light can catch up to the forward wall.

And Albert’s conclusion? Events that are simultaneous for one observer may occur at different times for another observer, depending on their relative motion.  The terms “sooner”, “later”, and “simultaneous” * are local terms and have no meaning unless they are tied down to a specific frame of reference. 

 

*(this is apparently true only for “space-like separated events”. “Time-like separated events” can never appear simultaneous in any frame of reference travelling at less than the speed of light)

Just when you think you have some of it all figured out, Albert will throw something like that at you.

Evolution in the lab

If anyone tells you that there is no real-life proof of evolution, you can tell them this little story about evolution in the lab. It goes something like this:
 
Biologists were trying to figure out what first caused one-celled creatures to group together and become multi-celled creatures, or, creatures with bodies. One theory was that the molecules that glue cells together first evolved as a way for cells to latch onto other cells in order to consume them and that at some point it became prudent to be bigger so cells just used this glue to bunch up.

So, a chap with the unfortunate name of Martin Borass took an alga that is normally single-celled and let it live in a tank for 1000 generations. It continued to be single-celled. Then, he introduced a predator, a single-celled creature with a flagellum that engulfs other microbes to ingest them. Within 200 generations, the alga responded by becoming a clump of hundreds of cells.

Over time the number of cells dropped to 8 in each clump. Eight turned out to be the optimum number because they were big enough not to be eaten and small enough so that each cell could pick up light to survive. (This all took several years).

Perhaps the most interesting thing was that when the predator was removed from the environment, the alga continued to reproduce and form individuals with 8 cells. Another interesting point is that, since it was so easy to go from one cell to multiple cells in the lab, why didn’t it happen earlier in nature? Well, it turns out that compounds like collagen (the glue) takes a lot of energy to produce, energy derived largely from oxygen. It wasn’t until about a billion years ago that oxygen levels started to rise significantly, and that’s when bodies (muti-celled creatures) began to show up.

A Brief history of Shrodinger's Unfortunate Cat

It all begins back in 1905 when a chap called Max Planck found a simple formula that predicted the actual energy loss curve of charged particles rather than what Newton said it should be. However, Max's formula required a fudge factor, thereafter known as Planck's constant (h), which caused the energy to reduce in little jumps,

In 1905 to say Newton was wrong was scientific blasphemy so no one paid the least attention to Max's little jumps.

Except Einstein, who, in the same year, used Max's little jumps to explain the photoelectric effect, calling the emitted energy; photons. No one took them seriously either, not for another 18 years anyhow, and then they apparently got it all wrong.

Soon after that Ernest Rutherford fired some alpha particles through gold foil and found that the atom is mostly empty space with a small, hard, positive core, orbited by electrons.

Nobody liked his atom either: too unstable.

It remained unstable until 1913 when Neils Bohr used Plank's neglected constant to stabilize the atom, thus enormously expanding the realm of the little quantum jumps. This explained a lot of things about light.

Nevertheless, no one took this seriously either, except Einstein. They called it “number juggling”.

Things began to change, however, in 1923 when an obscure American physicist named Arthur Compton, found that light changed frequency when he bounced it off an electron. Not the sort of behaviour anyone expected from a wave, ergo, the photon must be real and light must be a wave and a particle. (this was called the Compton Effect, by the way).

Everyone perked up and said “holy shit” or words to that effect. And thus began the era of quantum double-think.

Louis de Broglie, a French physicist, then applied the Compton Effect to the atom and came up with the wave behaviour of the electron, thus providing it too with a dual nature.

Still not everyone was happy. Like Einstein, for example, who was quoted in 1923 as saying “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks they know what the photon is, but they're wrong”. (he always seemed to be on a different path than everyone else). Also not happy was a guy named Erwin Shrodinger, who wrote to Bohr “...the whole idea of quantum jumps must simply be nonsense.”

So in 1925 while on a mountain vacation with his girlfriend (his wife stayed home), he embarked on a gallant effort to rid the world of the little jumps. He used de Broglie's “matter waves” to prove that energy moves smoothly from one state to another, not in little jumps. The result, instead, was that he laid down the basis for modern quantum mechanics, where things do, in fact, move in little jumps.

Everyone cheered, even Einstein for once in agreement, calling it genius, Planck called it epoch making. Shrodinger himself was delighted to think that he had gotten rid of the quantum jumping thing. Reality would never be the same.

Later, when what now passed for reality dawned on him, Shrodinger was heard to say: “If we are still going to have to put up with these damn quantum jumps, I'm sorry that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory”. If ever there was a reluctant hero, it was Shrodinger. Apparently he never accepted it.

Reality had to be put in its place. So in 1927, physicists met in Brussels, Belgium to do so. There they worked out a way for scientists to apply Quantum Mechanics to the physical world while ignoring the consciousness implications. It became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, and is still the major interpretation in use today. It gets its name from the fact that Neils Bohr, along with Werner Heisenberg, from Bohr's institute in Copenhagen were its major designers. 

While there apparently is no “official” Copenhagen Interpretation, every version of it does state that: an observation produces the property observed. But, Bohr safely confined this action to microscopic particles only, and to a large extent it has remained there for the last 84 years, despite the fact that quantum theory applies to all matter, not just the microscopic. But it allows physicists to ignore the embarrassing entanglement of physics and consciousness and get on with their calculations.

It rests on three principles:

1. The probability Interpretation of the wavefunction:

Quantum theory does not specify a particle existence in addition to the wavefunction. The particle is the wavefunction; until you observe it, whereupon it latches on to reality. It's actual position in reality is where probability comes in.

Note that particle (or cat) states can be referred to in various ways:

Quantum state: The cat exists as a wavefunction or in superposition
Wavefunction: The cat is spread out as an energy wave.

Superposition: In quantum state but occupying two states or locations at once.

i.e. the cat is both dead and alive.

Normal state: The cat is either dead or alive, but in either case, it is “real”.
Newtonian matter: Ditto
Decoherence: The act of the wavefunction collapsing into “normal” matter.

2. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Really this is just a mechanical limitation: any observation of atomic particles disturbs them enough to prevent the disproof of quantum theory. Really, that’s an actual definition. (sounds like something invented by the Harper government).

3. Complementarity.

A difficult one. It apparently means that you don't have to observe the atom to know where it is, or rather to cause it to be somewhere. Your acquisition of knowledge (information) of where it is, is sufficient to collapse the wavefunction. It was Bohr's way of allowing physicists to ignore the consciousness connection to the “measurement problem” and get down to work. (More and more I think that Bohr would have been very comfortable in Harper's government.) It apparently means that if you put a stethoscope to the box and hear the cat breathing, you will have collapsed its wavefunction. (Bear with me here. I guarantee that this will not make any more sense later, in fact you could, by hearing the cat breathing now, cause it to have died sometime previously).

Its worth noting that some physicists consider the wavefunction simply as information, whatever that is. This idea seems to pop up quite often, especially amongst those trying to build quantum computers.

Actually the Copenhagen Interpretation also admits that observation creates a present reality and provides it with a past appropriate to that reality. In effect, our later choice of observation creates an earlier history (of the particle or cat) – we produce something backward in time. (hence smelling a dead cat in the box will have caused to have died sometime earlier.)

In 1987 several physicists decided that they would disprove the backward in time thing and thus disprove Quantum theory. Unfortunately for them, quantum theory's prediction that the later choice of experiment determined what the photon did earlier was indeed confirmed. John Wheeler, who had initially proposed the experiment said later that “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to happen”.

Which finally brings us to Shrodinger's unfortunate pussycat. Back in 1932, a chap called John von Newmann thought up a test using Geiger counters and pairs of boxes (a test called the “Von Newmann chain”) that would prove that you can never, ever, actually see a particle in superposition.

An atom, in quantum mode, is fired through a partially reflecting mirror thus sending ½ of it's waviness into each box. The atom is therefore in quantum superposition state, that is, existing in two places at once, until you open one of the boxes to observe it, whereupon the wavefunction collapses (decoheres) and the atom materializes in one of the boxes.

Instead of looking into one of the boxes, you could, instead, open a hole at the end of each box to let the particle in its quantum mode out of both boxes to create an interference pattern on a screen. The particle would be either in one box only or would have been in both, depending on which way you choose to “observe” it.

Shrodinger was still unhappy, so a couple of years later he inserted a cat into the experiment to show how ridiculous quantum theory was. Which brings to mind other science concepts that were popularized by ridicule, such as the Big Bang.

The experiment involved Von Newman’s two boxes. The cat, of course, is placed in one box, isolated from the world, along with a Geiger counter which, when it detects an atom pulls the cork out of a bottle of cyanide, killing the cat.

When you open either of the boxes to observe the cat, the electron wavefunction will collapse into a particle in one of the boxes. If in the cat box, the cat will be killed, if in the other, the cat will survive. Until you looked, however, the cat was in superposition, i.e. both dead and alive.

If you take the cat test a bit further and don't look in the box until several days after you put the cat in the box and fire in the atom, you will find either a very hungry (and angry) cat or a very dead smelly cat because upon looking in the box you not only collapsed the wavefunction, but also created a past appropriate to the random result of either a dead or living cat.

This is, of course completely ridiculous. For several reasons:

1. The cat (and everything else in the box) would have to be in superposition state until you looked into the box. This is not possible since you cannot sufficiently isolate the contents of the box from the real world. Every macroscopic object not in quantum mode (the box itself for example) “observes” the cat. Even the cat's “entanglement” via gravity with objects outside the box would apparently be enough to collapse it's wavefunction.

2. The atom's wavefunction, upon entering the “box” containing the cat and Geiger counter becomes “entangled” with the enormously complex wavefunction of the Geiger counter (not to mention the cat) and is thus “observed” (entanglement is equivalent to observation because of the information exchange that takes place).

3. Thirdly; just do the experiment. You will always get either a dead or a living cat, which proves..... what? (not recommended if the cat means a lot to you or someone important to you)

It's very interesting that while Physicists will apparently nearly always admit to the measurement enigma, most are not usually curious about it. Some seem hardly aware of it even though they use quantum theory daily. Some get violent at the mention of it (Hawking , for example, although in his case the physical violence is limited). Even those that write about the enigma will often admit that they have gone for decades in their careers before becoming interested in it.

The main reason seems to be that quantum mechanics is enormously successful. No aspect of it has ever been proved wrong, it’s predictions are always correct. It works, and is used daily. Fully 1/3 of our economy depends upon it. Its not just an interesting theory, its the foundation of all physics. Thus the “shut up and calculate” approach.

In fact, careers have been destroyed when too much concern over the “measurement problem” is expressed. Only those wearing the armour of great success have been able to ask questions and survive, like Einstein, or Murray Gell-Mann who said when accepting the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics, that Neils Bohr had brainwashed generations of physicists into believing the problem had been solved.

Einstein and Bohr never saw eye to eye on quantum mechanics. Bohr was a staunch defender and Einstein never wavered in his belief that there was more to say than quantum theory told. Nevertheless they remained very close friends to the end.

In 1935 Einstein published a paper along with two young colleagues (Boris Podolsky & Nathan Rosen) which became famous as the “EPR test” paper (after the first letters of their last names). The paper didn't so much claim that quantum theory was wrong, only that it was incomplete. It tried to show that you could in fact know the property of an object without observing it and that therefore that property was not observer-created.

Bohr, however, shot him down, but Einstein never accepted the rebuttal. At one point he apparently proclaimed "God is subtle but he is not malicious". Toward the end of his life, however, he said to a colleague in a letter: “I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious”.

That’s the way things stood for a long time. Then, in 1964 John Stewart Bell, a brilliant Irish Physicist, took a sabbatical to contemplate the quantum enigma more closely and the momentous result was “Bell's theorem” which most people ignored. It laid out a way to test reality and separability, i.e., to test whether things are real without being observed and whether objects could be “entangled” in such a way that effects on one can show up instantaneously on another far away.

John Clauser at Columbia U. was intrigued, and figured out a way to actually do the test. His experiments proved that the properties of objects in our world do have an observation-created reality and that there exists a universal connectedness, Quantum theory had survived its most serious challenge. Unfortunately John Clauser didn't. Apparently you can blaspheme in the physics world. His career was derailed because he had the temerity to question quantum theory.

However, a decade later, (in an apparently more receptive time) another physicist, Alain Aspect, in Paris, duplicated the experiments with more sensitive equipment and was able to produce an even more convincing result. Had Bell not died soon after, it is thought that he, Clauser and Aspect would probably have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

But it hasn't ended there. Physicists will almost universally admit that every interpretation of quantum mechanics involves consciousness, but they don't like it one bit. Apparently its one thing for physics to encounter consciousness, it's quite another to have to have a relationship with it.

And so the “interpretations” continue.

First came Neils Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation:

Which enabled physicists to confine observer-created reality to the microscopic, and ignore the fate of the cat.

Then came a host of others (and they still come):

Extreme Copenhagen:

Proposed by Aage Bohr (son of Neils Bohr and also a Nobel laureate) who took his father's interpretation further by claiming that atomic-scale objects do not even exist, so that no particles enter the box and the clicking of the Geiger counter, if indeed it does click, is simply fortuitous. (I kid you not). In this interpretation the cat starves to death, but we wouldn't see it anyway because photons don't really exist.

Decoherence interpretation:

Which somehow states that it all happens too fast for there to ever have been a measurement problem, and so they don't know whether the cat is dead or alive.

Consistent Histories (or decoherence histories):

Developed by Gell-Mann and Hartle, this one applies the decoherence interpretation to the whole universe, where, until recently, there were no observers to cause the cat's demise/continuance.

Many Worlds interpretation:

Originated by Hugh Everett in 1957, it maintains that when you look into the box, reality splits and the cat continues to live in one reality but dies in the other. This one is apparently favoured by many physicists. If you put the cat in the box, you should hope that your consciousness continues to travel along with the live cat to avoid the unpleasant encounter with its owner taking place in the other reality.

The Transactional interpretation:

Allows the wavefunction to collapse backward in time, meaning that the cat was probably dead when you put it in the box.

The Bohm interpretation:

Proposed in 1952, this one by David Bohm, apparently a bit of a maverick, simply assumes that particles do what Shrodinger's equations say they will and generates a “quantum potential” (whatever that is) to make them do that. The result is that the cat does actually die, and also continues to live on somewhere else and will eventually return to haunt you.

The Ithica interpretation;

Developed in Ithica New York by David Mermin at Cornell U. who claimed that it is a matter of separating subjective and objective probabilities. He is not sure whether the cat is dead or alive, but as soon as someone builds a quantum computer he'll be able to calculate the probabilities. It's worth noting here that probability is a measure of ignorance.

Quantum Information:

Liked by those trying to build quantum computers, this one states that the quantum state is not an objective physical reality, it is only knowledge (information). Apparently its sort of a twist on the Ithica interpretation. They'll also know the fate of the cat as soon as they get the computer built.

Quantum Logic:

States that instead of attempting to predict the fate of the cat, just open the box then set the rules of logic to fit the observed facts. It may be the most logical interpretation but not the most popular one.

GRW

by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber. These guys just modify the Shrodinger equations to make all wavefunctions collapse randomly every so often. For atoms this would be every hundred million years or so. Since there are a very many atoms in the cat, one of them is bound to collapse just as you open the box, triggering the collapse of the entire cat randomly to the living or dead state, which doesn't really resolve the fate of the cat but could alleviate a lot Physicist's anxiety.

The Roger Penrose interpretation:

Penrose and Stuart Hameroff (an anesthesiologist) came up with a function of the brain called “objective deduction” whereby the “AND” function that allows the cat to be both alive and dead is turned into an OR function. This is apparently accomplished by, what other physicists have called, “pixie dust in the synapses”. And the cat? Well, it exists just as you might find it, either dead or alive, but in either case, it's definitely your fault.

And finally, the Henry Stapp interpretation:

Henry, bless his twisted little brain, invokes something he calls the “quantum zeno effect” (named for a Zeno-like claim: a watched pot never boils). And that's about where my understanding of it ends. I have no idea what happens to the cat.

Believe it or not, all of the above have been published in respected journals by respected Physicists. Some of them even speculate that our brains themselves might be in a constant superposition state. At the end of the day, however, apparently every interpretation of quantum mechanics involves consciousness. And the big questions are still with us:

1. What is consciousness?

2. And how does it affect reality?

A third important question is: why does collapsing the wavefunction produce a random result? (i.e. is it truly random or does it really depend one you where you catch the “probability wave” ?)

As Bruce Rosenblum (prof of Physics at U of California) puts it:

“Consciousness and the quantum enigma are not just two mysteries, they are THE two mysteries: the first, the physical demonstration of the quantum enigma, faces us with a fundamental mystery of the objective world “out there;” the second, conscious awareness, faces us with the fundamental mystery of the subjective, mental world “in here.” Quantum mechanics appears to connect the two”

I have my own theories. They are as follows (I'll spare you the mathematics):

1. Testing for consciousness:

Determining what consciousness is and what creatures may have it is apparently a big problem. I have a simple solution: if you can kill a cat by opening a box and looking into it, you have achieved consciousness. One has to be careful, however, in the (not so unlikely) chance that the cat's consciousness is of greater magnitude than your own, it may not be the cat who dies.

Bruce Rosenblum tells of explaining to a physics class the Alan Turin test for computer consciousness, whereby, “if you can carry on a conversation with it via a keyboard for as long as you wish and not be sure whether you are talking to a computer or a person, then the computer is conscious”. (Or, it may be that you are not - my observation). Anyway, after he told this, a young woman in the class objected to the principle, explaining that “I've dated guys who couldn't pass a Turin test”.

2. The “consciousness particle:”

I find it very surprising that physicists haven't yet fallen back on their old standby: when the going gets tough, create a new particle.

Physicists almost universally accept that observation produces the property observed, yet, to believe that this can be brought about by a purely mechanical brain unable to reach in any way beyond its own borders is ludicrous. A “consciousness particle” emitted by the brain would solve the problem, and just think of all the other problems that it might explain. Believe me, this is no wilder than some of those listed above. And the potential....well, I leave it to your imagination.

3. Maybe our perceptions are too limited:

There may also be something to the observation that we can only perceive our world in two ways: position and time. All of our senses can be attributed to these two. Speed is just a combination of the two. Sight is a function of photons coming in contact with our retina, smells, just molecules touching our smell receptors, etc. Perhaps there are those “out there” who are actually able to perceive superposition quantum states and to whom there is no “measurement problem”. Maybe they even have cats.

And finally:

If indeed consciousness can collapse wavefunctions, and if, indeed this collapse can spread so easily to other matter around it instantaneously, then, forget about the cat, just consider what we may have done to the universe the moment we achieved consciousness.

In fact, Roger Penrose and others have gone even further. It goes something like this: If the original conditions of the universe were chosen randomly, there would be only one chance in 10¹²³ that the universe would allow life (that’s far far less than the chance of picking a particular atom out of all the atoms in the universe). So we can tentatively say that it wasn't random. There would then seem to be very few possibilities left:

1. God: (An answer that leaves too many unanswered questions)
2. Multi-verse: i.e. there are many parallel universes, only a very few of which can support life, (There must be on hell of a lot of dead universes out there)
3. The strong Anthropic Principle: Which goes something like this: we set the parameters of the universe ourselves by reaching backward in time with our consciousness. (Don’t dwell on it too long, it will make your head hurt)

I didn't think these three up, believe me, and faced with a choice of the three I can understand why some would be tempted to pick # 1, although I think I'll keep looking for other alternatives.

Very prominent physicists have pointed out that quantum theory doesn't just apply to the small, but applies in principle to everything, and they go on to suggest that we may have in fact created our own “reality”. Even Hawking has said that finding the elusive Theory of Everything won't answer all the questions. He said: “ the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

I personally find it ironic that in the end, the only tool that physicists can use to understand reality is the one thing that they really don't want contaminating their equations; the human brain.

Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived)

Lee Paulson

On the origin of life

On the origin of Life:  
An interesting news item popped up this morning. A Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, who first propounded the theory of panspermia with Sir Fred Hoyle, claims absolute proof that the first microbes were deposited on Earth 3,800m years ago.  

He's not the only one to hold this belief. The venerable Francis Crick also held the idea that life was seeded from "out there". You can check it out at: 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_east/8491398.stm  
 
The idea is not so far out actually. Astronomers have confirmed that gas clouds out there do contain organic molecules, and biologists keep finding extremophiles here on earth all the time.  I find it very curious that virtually ALL life on earth is based on the one blueprint... DNA. You'd think that more than one mechanism would have evolved, but not so, on this world so full of diverse life, DNA is all there is. Of course, pushing the problem out into outer space doesn't really solve it. If the first DNA molecules came drifting down from some interstellar gas cloud, why wouldn't some other kind of "life molecules" drift down as well? or is there only one kind out there too? or is it such a rare event that it only happened once in our 4 billion year history? 

Since it did apparently happen 3.8 billion years ago, rather early in the earth's history, one would rather expect it to have happened again, or is it just coincidence that it happened early in our history? The Drake Equation would indicate that such an event is very rare (although it refers to intelligent life only, and is, at best, just a guess).


The Drake equation states that:

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R^* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_ℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

f_i = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.