13,120. RUDIMENTS, pt. 1166
('Quantum?' Lead me thus forward?)
I so often tried. Let me repeat that,
ok? I so often tried making sense
of ordinary things - but I was never
able to. Everything seemed moving
and in some flux I could never get.
Using a peculiar and recent example,
the death of my late, beloved dog, it
confirmed for me all I had been
thinking of, and exposed to, all those
years. I would focus on the dog, and
see at the same time that the focus
was on 'Life' itself, which the dog
provided me : the ample view, the
wide and friendly opening ajar to
other realms and stations. Yet, all
the while and at the same time, I
knew that time was fleeting and
the presence of the dog personified
that to me. I sensed 'Time' running
out; constantly. For the dog, it runs
out much quicker than it does for
we mortal bi-peds. Another of
Life's grevious errors.
-
Way back, in September 1927,
the physical world changed. Until
then we lived in a homogeneous,
continuous, Newtonian world in
which all objects moved seamlessly
from the past into the future, governed
by universal mathematical laws. But in
that fateful year, everything changed.
By it, the world today, as we know
By it, the world today, as we know
it, is different and has varied paths.
Objects now follow different rules
depending on their size, and we can
never be sure where they are or what
they are doing. In fact, we can't say
'what' they are because that depends
on how we observe them. Our Reality
then became one of 'Unpredictable'
gaps, inconsistently warped and
bubbled' - to use the words of John
Updike. We still struggle to find
our way in this unfamiliar, but
mostly glossed over, world. Fact is,
and using my own life experience
as an example, most people - and
that's a big 'most' - don't have a
grasp of the indelible characteristics
of the world about them, the main
one of which is the impermanence
and unreality of any physical
representation of it. People will
react in a hundred ways, formulating
their responses and concluded
assumptions of it, all the while IT
itself is not existent, nor even
'present.' (Hey! Huh? What did
he just say?')...
-
The 'harmony' of the Newtonian
universe began to fray in 1900,
when Max Planck discovered that
to correctly describe 'black box'
radiation, he had to make a radical
and unwarranted assumption: that
light radiation was not continuous
but came, rather, in 'discrete,' and
and irreducible packets of a fixed
size, or 'quantum.'
-
It was a fraught sensation. Down
on the streets of NYC, deep in the
bowels of the Village, was a place
called The Northern Dispensary.
Way back when, it served the needy
and the infirm - freely. It had been
a walk-in, open-source, clinic on
the old early-city and post-colonial
streets. Edgar Allen Poe had famously
been treated there for his pleurisy
or ague, or, more probably, his more
prevalent tuberculin-alcoholic haze.
In my first NYC days, August's start,
1967, I spent a few nights sleeping
there, outside, along the walls of old
brick. I do forget if there, then, was
a piece of grass to sit on, or not, but
whatever is still there today is of
concrete and now rather un-welcomingly
fenced. It's a curiously-situated, triangular
lot, between other streets, and with
the words, carved in stone, above, the
old doorway, reading 'Heal The Sick.'
I doubt that you could do any of that
now without being beheaded.
-
One of the issues there was exactly
that 'quantum' thing. I was stuck in
a flat world, trying to live within it,
yet it was, all around me, and constantly
underway with change and transformation.
Leaving me, where? My own flux was
in play, and I had lost my 'Newton.'
Continuous quantum? The world and
all its time and presence was running
through me like water through an
animal, and at all times. Where could
I grab? Where would I situate myself?
These 'mysterious energy packets,' the
scientists had since been finding, instead
of fading away, remained active and
showed up in myriads of other places.
(I am tickled now when 'politicians'
do their obescience to what they do not
know, by saying 'I follow the Science.'
If they truly did that they'd be strangely
lost within 'existential' crises which
far surpassed their diseased minds;
minds pathetic enough to stoop to using
their own children and families as
props).
-
Einstein had a phenomenon that he
labeled 'Brownian Motion.' Some years
later, Neils Bohr came up with a model
of the atom in which 'electrons moved
between specified 'orbits' when they
absorbed or emitted energy quanta.
That new interloper was here to stay.
Reality had become fluid; a movement,
not a thing. (What this, in its long
essence, means to you and me is that
nothing exists; all is on its way to
'having been,' which is a weird concept
indeed, in that all we can ever do is
build a past?). For Newtonian physics,
much worse was yet to come. From
1925 to 1927, quantum mechanics
moved from challenging the contents
of classical physics to undermining
its deepest foundations. Werner
Heisenberg proposed his 'uncertainty'
principle - which posited that the
location and momentum of particles
could not be both known with any
certainty at the same time. (How can
you be in two places at once when
you're really nowhere at all?)...While,
almost simultaneously - weird word
to use in this context, yes - Erwin
Schrodinger proposed his 'psi function',
which describes the probability that
a particle will be found in a given
location in terms of a wave, which,
in turn, then led Bohr to formulate
his complementarity principle. 'An
object can be a wave or a particle
depending on how it is measured.'
The location and momentum of an
object, and even whether it is a
wave or a particle, was no longer
a free-standing fact of nature. It
depended on the act of observation.
-
So thus we witness Life; we interact
while it passes, and while we ourselves
create its content within that passing.
('Schrodinger's Cat' is a long-standing
and somewhat paradoxical notion of
a 'cat' in a box, which can be both
dead, or alive, as is. Sort of depending
on the viewer). What does one make
of a world where particles and
evidences move seemingly as they
please; where a particle can also be
a wave; where measurement can
affect location, momentum, and
even 'what' it is? How does that
change how we see the world?
This was and is a puzzling factor to
be grasped; by any/most humans,
who seem to simply avoid it and
go on instead with their parking
lots, large stores, home goods,
joys and entertainments. All at
the expense of the rather more
'real' and resonant reality we
each walk amidst. Like things
most often, we 'change' them
without really 'changing' a thing.
It's all but motion.
-------
(end of Part One)...
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