Quantum Physics - Time Reversal Symmetry & Super Positioning

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• published: 12 Jul 2011
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An excerpt from "What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? - Down the Rabbit Hole" (2004) featuring Marlee Matlin and a bunch of smart people. Nifty Tim Leary vibe at the end. Also, you can make the equations on the blackboard morph if you are paying attention. For those who like to look-up the big words... A particle, which we think of as a solid thing... really exists in a so-called "superposition", a spread-out wave of possible locations... and it's in all of those at once. The instance you check on it... it snaps intojust one of those possible positions. [It's easy to generate situation where the equations of motion will predict let's say, the wave function, the psi, of a particular object a basketball is uniformly distributed all over the basketball court we don't have any idea what a state like that would look like, according to the law of quantum mechanics that supposed to be a state in which it fails to make any sense even to ask the question where is the basketball that is, according to the law of quantum mechanics, asking the quetion where is a basketball whose psi is uniformly distributed over the whole basketball court is the logical equivilant of asking the marital status of the number 5 ok? It's not that you don't know the answer, you don't happen to know whether the number five is married or a bachelor, it's that the question is somehow radically innappropriate in the first plac. The number five doesn't have a marital status, there's nothig there to ask about, and similiarly a basketball whose wave function was uniformly distrubted over the entire basketball court, would not have a postion that could even be coherently asked about. NOW, the crux of the measurment problem is precisely that, although the {noclue} equation predicts under certain circumstances, circumstances which we basically know how to reproduce in the labratory, that basketballs should go into states like that, states which where there fails to be any intelligable fact, any sensible question even about where they are, and yet when we go look at the basketball court in situations like that we invariably see either a basketball over here or a basketball over there or a basketball over there. The fact that we see the basketball in some specific location, as opposed to seeing it in some science-fiction state that we can't even imagine what it looks like , where there fails to be a question about what it's location is, the fact that we always see it in some defiinite location, is in explicit violation of these equations of motion, and it's exactly there where the measurment problem comes up.] The observed, things happen, when you don't, they don't. Superheroes use superposition... with the world being potential strips of reality until we choose. Heroes choose what they want-- being in many places at once, experiencing many possibilities all at once... and then collapsing on the one. The question is, how far down the rabbit hole do you wanna go? Nice shot. (insert Tim Leary voice) How can a system or an object be in two or more states at the same time? How can a system or an object be in two or more states at the same time? It's very easy-- Instead of thinking of things as things. We all have a habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing... existing without my input, without my choice. You have to banish that kind of thinking. Instead,you really have to recognize... that even the material world around us-- the chairs, the tables, the rooms, the carpet-- camera included-- all of these are nothing but possible movements of consciousness. And I'm choosing moment to moment out of those movements...to bring my actual experience into manifestation. This is the only radical thinking that you need to do. But it is so radical-- It's so difficult... because our tendency is that the world is already out there... independent of my experience. It is not. Quantum physics has been so clear about it. Heisenberg himself, codiscoverer of quantum physics... said atoms are not things, they're only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things... you have to think of possibilities. They're all possibilities of consciousness. You now can see in numerous labs around the United States... objects that are large enough to be seen by the naked eye... and they are in two places simultaneously. "Quantum superposition implies that... a particle can be in two or more places or states simultaneously. And this is a very bizarre concept, and one of the hallmarks of the quantum world."