Superposition and the marital status of the number five
For a golf aficionado, super position is a 10 foot, straight-up-the-hill putt. But when you're struggling with the quantum kind of superposition, things are far from that straightforward.
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If you've seen What the BLEEP Do We Know?! then you probably remember the scene where Amanda is on the basketball court with Reggie. She watches as he bounces the ball on the court. But when she turns her back, instead of one ball there are lots of them bouncing in different places. This is a good representation of the discovery that in the quantum world, particles don't have a position, they each have many positions simultaneously. It's not until the particle is measured, or observed, that it settles down into one discernable location.
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According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the reason for this is that observation collapses the wave function of the particle, landing it, as it were, in a particular spot in its particle form. Another theory is that every superposition branches off and forms a new universe - th e multiple worlds hypothesis. Two more theories have been posited. One proposes that at some level of interaction, the superposition wave potential interacts with the environment and triggers decoherence. The fourth possibility is that superpositions keep on expanding until they hit some sort of built-in “enough is enough” point and the superpositions revert to the classical state of “here I am” in one place.
Getting even further out there (how far can we go?!), Stuart Hameroff refers to Roger Penrose's definition of superposition as “a separation in fundamental reality at the most basic level ,” and says that “like the multiple worlds view, the universe separates and … the separations are bubbles, if you will, in reality at the most basic level (and) are unstable and after a while will collapse to one or the other.” According to Hameroff “this type of collapse, this type of objective reduction that occurs due to the instability of the separation of the universe is consciousness, and it can only happen in very special circumstances.” |
Finally, just to clarify things further, Dr. David Albert maintains that superposition is even stranger than all of the above postulations can even hint at; that all these theories are coming from our current mind-set in an attempt to make sense out of something that cannot be made sensible. “It's rather that the particle is in situation in which questions about it's position can't even be raised,” says Albert, “in which questions about it's position don't even make sense, in which asking about the particle's position has the same logical status as asking about the political affiliations of a tuna sandwich like I said, or the marital status of the number five.”
So in quantum superposition, it seems possible that “position” is completely meaningless. It all rather begs for a quantum shift in human consciousness in order to be able to ask the right questions to begin with doesn't it?!
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