Read Online Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by ;Bob Berman MD Robert Lanza - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: ;Bob Berman MD Robert Lanza
Ads: Link
accept a life-created reality at face value, it all becomes simple and straightforward to understand. The key question is “waves of what?” Back in 1926, German physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability , not waves of material, as his colleague Schrödinger had theorized . They are statistical predictions. Thus, a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome . In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there! It’s intangible. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
Note that we are talking about discrete objects like photons or electrons, rather than collections of myriad objects, such as, say, a train. Obviously, we can get a schedule and arrive to pick up a friend at a station and be fairly confident that his train actually existed during our absence, even if we did not personally observe it. (One reason for this is that as the considered object gets bigger, its wavelength gets smaller. Once we get into the macroscopic realm, the waves are too close together to be noticed or measured. They are still there, however.)
With small discrete particles, however, if they are not being observed, they cannot be thought of as having any real existence—either duration or a position in space. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of an object in place, until it actually lays down the threads (somewhere in the haze of probabilities that represent the object’s range of possible values), it cannot be thought of as being either here or there. Thus, quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can occupy. When a scientist observes a particle, it will be found within the statistical probability for that event to occur. That’s what the wave defines. A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon , it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring. Nothing happens until the event is actually observed.
In our double-slit experiment, it is easy to insist that each photon or electron—because both these objects are indivisible—must
go through one slit or the other and ask, which way does a particular photon really go? Many brilliant physicists have devised experiments that proposed to measure the “which-way” information of a particle’s path on its route to contributing to an interference pattern. They all arrived at the astonishing conclusion, however, that it is not possible to observe both which-way information and the interference pattern. One can set up a measurement to watch which slit a photon goes through, and find that the photon goes through one slit and not the other. However, once this is kind of measurement is set up, the photons instead strike the screen in one spot, and totally lack the ripple-interference design; in short, they will demonstrate themselves to be particles, not waves. The entire double-slit experiment and all its true amazing weirdness will be laid out with illustrations in the next chapter.
Apparently, watching it go through the barrier makes the wave-function collapse then and there, and the particle loses its freedom to probabilistically take both choices available to it instead of having to choose one or the other.
And it still gets screwier. Once we accept that it is not possible to gain both the which-way information and the interference pattern, we might take it even further. Let’s say we now work with sets of photons that are entangled. They can travel far from each other, but their behavior will never lose their correlation.
So now we let the two photons, call them y and z , go off in two different directions, and we’ll set up the double-slit experiment again. We already know that photon y will mysteriously pass through both slits and create an interference pattern if we measure nothing about it before it reaches the detection screen. Except, in our new setup, we’ve created an apparatus that lets us measure
Note that we are talking about discrete objects like photons or electrons, rather than collections of myriad objects, such as, say, a train. Obviously, we can get a schedule and arrive to pick up a friend at a station and be fairly confident that his train actually existed during our absence, even if we did not personally observe it. (One reason for this is that as the considered object gets bigger, its wavelength gets smaller. Once we get into the macroscopic realm, the waves are too close together to be noticed or measured. They are still there, however.)
With small discrete particles, however, if they are not being observed, they cannot be thought of as having any real existence—either duration or a position in space. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of an object in place, until it actually lays down the threads (somewhere in the haze of probabilities that represent the object’s range of possible values), it cannot be thought of as being either here or there. Thus, quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can occupy. When a scientist observes a particle, it will be found within the statistical probability for that event to occur. That’s what the wave defines. A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon , it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring. Nothing happens until the event is actually observed.
In our double-slit experiment, it is easy to insist that each photon or electron—because both these objects are indivisible—must
go through one slit or the other and ask, which way does a particular photon really go? Many brilliant physicists have devised experiments that proposed to measure the “which-way” information of a particle’s path on its route to contributing to an interference pattern. They all arrived at the astonishing conclusion, however, that it is not possible to observe both which-way information and the interference pattern. One can set up a measurement to watch which slit a photon goes through, and find that the photon goes through one slit and not the other. However, once this is kind of measurement is set up, the photons instead strike the screen in one spot, and totally lack the ripple-interference design; in short, they will demonstrate themselves to be particles, not waves. The entire double-slit experiment and all its true amazing weirdness will be laid out with illustrations in the next chapter.
Apparently, watching it go through the barrier makes the wave-function collapse then and there, and the particle loses its freedom to probabilistically take both choices available to it instead of having to choose one or the other.
And it still gets screwier. Once we accept that it is not possible to gain both the which-way information and the interference pattern, we might take it even further. Let’s say we now work with sets of photons that are entangled. They can travel far from each other, but their behavior will never lose their correlation.
So now we let the two photons, call them y and z , go off in two different directions, and we’ll set up the double-slit experiment again. We already know that photon y will mysteriously pass through both slits and create an interference pattern if we measure nothing about it before it reaches the detection screen. Except, in our new setup, we’ve created an apparatus that lets us measure
Similar Books
