Part One: Double-slit and the elephant in the room

 Firstly let me introduce myself.  My name's Andy and I have a keen interest in science, reality, sociology, biology and putting them all together in new and ionteresting ways.  I don't have any degree or particular professional credentials for writing this blog, but I am self-taught and have a highly developed bullshit detector, so now that I've separated the wheat from the chaff I want to share it with you.

This blog is not a science blog, however the scientific method has been the single biggest driving force in our civilisation in the last few hundred years.  The system works, and it drives out charlatans quicker than you can point out to a homeopath that any given water molecule is likely to have been worked its way through innumerable peoples' bowels, and what is to stop it taking on any of those attributes?

I intend to use humour where possible to help make this an enjoyable read, and I hope to open your mind to the beauty and depth and sheer mechanical perfection of this existence we have.

I was going to resist mentioning this in case it acts as a "don't listen, walk away from the nutcase" alarm before I've had a chance to do the preamble.  But on balance rather than making you read a pretty dry description of some science (albeit beautifully written and elegantly illustrated), I thought I'd dangle some carrots of intrigue in the hope that your donkey of curiosity comes trotting along for the ride with me.

Coming Up In Later Editions:

1. Occult symbolism all around us.  Why is it there?  What does it do?
2. Famous music artists selling something rather different to what you'd first think
3. Turtles all the way down
4. Charlie "The Legend" Sheen, why he's probably right and why Mr Sheen shines umpteen things clean, especially if those things are surfaces previously covered in cocaine, and the insides of prostitutes.
5. We'll also look at how pentacene proves that reality only looks like it does because that's what we want to see, and the only thing that maintains the status quo is consensus reality.  If everybody in your house genuinely believed that the food in the fridge was all bright blue, then it would be

Anyway, on with the show.  Apologies for how much science there is here, but it is necessary to put in a foundation which I can then build on.

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This post is pretty science-heavy, but it's important to the whole reason behind this blog, so please do stick with it and if I haven't explained anything properly, let me know and I can rectify it.  Later posts will build on these ideas in very interesting ways.

There is a very famous scientific experiment that dates back to 1801, known as the double-slit experiment.  This experiment was devised to try to work out if light is made of particles or waves, and it involves a light emitter, a solid wall with two slits in it and a second wall behind the first.  This diagram refers to electrons, but the principle is the same.

In modern versions of this experiment, a laser is used that emits one single flash of light at a time, so you can picture it as a kind of gun firing one shot at a time towards the two walls. 

Each light flash hits the second wall like a bullet hitting the targets on a shooting range, and you end up with a series of impact points as in this picture:

As you can see, the first couple of images look like a random starfield, the light flashes have simply gone through one or other of the slits and hit the back wall.  By the third picture something different is starting to happen, and by the fifth it is clear that there is a very definite pattern.

So what is this pattern?  Surely by flashing the light once each time, something analogous to a bullet (a particle), is being released and is hitting the back wall?  The first two pictures would certainly support this idea, picture C is a bit less easy to explain, and pictures D and E clearly show a tendency for the "particles" to form regular bands.

This pattern is in fact identical to a wave interference pattern.  This image shows a top-down view of what would happen if two water waves passed through two slits at the same time:



On the above picture, points C, D, E and F are the same as the bands formed in D and E in the picture above.

So how is this caused?  A single light particle (photon) creates a single spot on the back wall, yet multiple photons create an interference pattern as if they were moving as waves.  So from this it can be inferred that light is behaving simultaneously as a particle *and* a wave.  Even more interestingly, in this experiment each photon is released separately; there is a discrete amount of time between each particle, so the light waves somehow interfere with waves that have occurred at different moments in time.

In 1900 Max Planck made the first description of quantum mechanics, for which he won the Nobel Prize 18 years later.  One of the key elements of quantum mechanics is the probability field.  In the above experiment we see that the particles do not always hit the second wall in the same place.  There is a probability that these particles will go through either one of the slits and land at a certain height, and the particle distribution suggests that this is a pretty random occurrence.  I like to visualise the probability field as a circle, and that each point near the centre of the circle has a relatively higher probability than the points towards the outside of the circle.

From everything above we can infer the following:

*  Light behaves both as a wave and as a particle

*  Time is not a relevant consideration when deciding if light waves will interfere with each other

I would then go further and say that despite our senses giving us the impression that time is linear, constant and one-directional, this experiment shows that it is not, due to the wave interference pattern caused when light waves interact with other waves that have already passed.

In order for the light to behave like a wave, it has to be passing through both slits simultaneously, but simple logic tells you that a single particle can't go through two slits at the same time.  So let's say you decide to find out which slit the particle is really passing through, by placing a detector at the point where the particles pass through the slits.

It now gets really strange, because instead of the interference pattern observed above, the pattern on the second wall looks like this:



Instead of a row of bands, you see two definite single bands in a direct line from the light emitter.  The act of observation has meant that the photon no longer travels through both slits with equal probability, but instead is forced to "decide" to travel through one slit or another, hence no interference.

The act of observation causes the quantum probability field to collapse from what's known as a "superposition" where all probabilities might happen, into one definite outcome.  Scale this up and the following can be inferred:

* The outcome of an event is based on random probability

* By observing the event, its outcome is forced to become definite and concrete

A mechanical photon detector is only a machine, it has no preference where the photon lands and hence no preference which outcome happens.  Human beings have wants and desires and a preferred outcome.  Is it unreasonable to assume that the act of intending a certain outcome can influence which of the infinite probabilities actually becomes reality?

If the observer is needed to collapse the superposition into a definite reality, then by definition the observer is controlling it, and it logically follows that the observer has influence over the outcome in the same way that anything under a person’s control is subject to their influence.

To put this into everyday terms, I'd argue that every moment of every day your attitude subtly affects the outcome of the world around you.  Think about how "lucky" you are on days when you feel really good, and think about how shit days just seem to compound themselves.

Quantum physicists are aware that everything is in a state of flux until it is observed, and only then does it coalesce into reality.  Erwin Schrödinger famously described a thought experiment where a cat is shut in a box, and the box has a poison tap attached to a device which is controlled by the decay of a particle.  The decay of the particle is assumed to have a 50/50 probability for these purposes.  Before the particle is measured (observed) it has neither decayed nor not decayed, so in Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously.

Many people miss the point with Schrödinger's Cat.  Schrödinger knew it was a ridiculous (and ultimately untrue) thing to propose, but it was really a sort of joke that was intended to highlight how very different the quantum world is from the macro world.  Nonetheless, it demonstrates that quantum mechanics is aware of and accounts for something being in many states at one time.

So we can now demonstrate that reality is created by observation, and science knows this.

So what's the elephant in the room?  Well, the scientific method precludes making predictions that are untestable.  It is unscientific to say that gravity is caused by God for example, and rightly so.  Regardless of that and whichever way you look at it, reality is created by the observer, and therefore we have an influence over our existence which science cannot measure, and would therefore dismiss as magic.  It would be impossible to create a scientific experiment that proved a person's willpower was responsible for a particular outcome, because for an experiment to be valid it has to be repeatable, and as we are unable to go back in time we can never check if the outcome would have happened anyway.

Also very important is the fact that the light waves interact with each other *through time*.  We are three-dimensional beings living in an apparently four-dimensional world.  The fourth dimension is time and although we are aware of it and can experience it, unlike the other three dimensions we have no control over our movement through it.  This suggests to me that there is no real reason that time travels in one direction, other than so that we can make some semblance of sense of our existence.

Cutting-edge physics like string theory actually requires there to be ten dimensions for the figures to add up, and if that's the case then as well as the three dimensions we can move in and the one we can't control, there are another six that we aren't even aware of.

This is obviously very hard to visualise, in fact I'd say that as three-dimensional beings it's impossible.  There have been attempts to create visual representations of multiple dimensional objects, as below:

These are called hypercubes, and those animations actually show them rotating, believe it or not.  The hypercube isn't that relevant to what I'm saying, but I've included it because it's just plain awesome and it leads nicely into my next point:

We are probably intellectually incapable of understanding how all these things work.  Look at a dog; with the very best will in the world it's never going to be able to read a newspaper, in fact it probably could not even grasp the concept of a newspaper (other than it being a splendid thing to chew on, obviously).  In the exact same way, if we are intellectually incapable of grasping the deeper concepts, we wouldn't be able to even know we couldn't grasp them. UPDATE 8 May 2011: Latest New Scientist has a cover article going into detail about this very subject

It's not all doom and gloom though, we may not ever be able to properly explain the world around us, but we can manipulate it to our advantage and have a huge amount of fun along the way.  Stay tuned and the next posts will explain how.

Editions coming soon include:

Berlusconi and the significance of sigils


Practical applications - theta healing, CBT, NLP, cosmic ordering, chaos magic etc

Charlie Sheen is a nutcase

Tri-winning





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