Stuck in the Quantum Fog

or, Big Questions Still Unanswered

Ok, ok, the meaning of the universe and everything isn’t supposed to be easy to understand. I get that. But in investigating it, I was determined to hit some sort of solid ground I could accept as plausible, as not batshit crazy. Is that too high a bar to hope for?

Yes, seems to be the answer. Finding the not batshit crazy has proven to be more difficult that you could imagine.

Here’s the skinny. There’s scores of them, they’ve got PhD’s on top of PhD’s, they calculate their asses off, which takes them into mathematical realms that apparently are quite beautiful and full of revelations showing them incredible stuff about the very basic fabric of life itself.

But there’s a problem. For instance, the phrase, “basic fabric.” Turns out, they haven’t got a clue as to what that is. Seriously. If they say they do, they’re lying, because they don’t. Listen carefully to any YouTube video about quantum physics and at some point it’ll slip out that this is all speculation. Very complex and serious speculation, but speculation still. Speculation means, “I think. I surmise. I can imagine.” You can base speculation on just about anything. Ask the flat earthers. With quantum theorists, the speculation is almost that bad.

For instance, the Many Worlds interpretation. Because of the way particles act in going through the double slit experiment, (…if you don’t know what that is, best click the link. Be forewarned, it also makes no sense) physicists have speculated that every time a particle is measured or hits something, its wave function collapses and it branches off to create an entire other world. Honest. Countless trillions every millisecond. Ask Sean Carroll. That’s how we get the sci-fi idea of other selves identical to us but slightly different. All possible futures. This is somewhat different than the multiverse theory of movies and books. The multiverse is cosmological, millions of other discrete universes. Many Worlds is an infinite branching of this universe. Where the matter and energy comes from to do all this, they don’t exactly say. The universe copies itself, and that sounds like an expansive outlay of energy to me. You’d think that would be a stumbling block to the interpretation. They do tell us, with a rather cavalier insouciance, all the worlds are already present within the wave function. How they got there is anybody’s guess. It just always was, since who knows when. Whole worlds, universes, by the bazillions, being created constantly, truly ad infinitum, decided on to be a true thing because of the way particles go through slits, plus speculation based on certain mathematics.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is the big one, the one that gets taught in universities. Neils Bohr forced it in over Einstein’s disapproval back when they first started sorting this stuff out. It basically says that particles aren’t ever anywhere until they hit something. Before that, they’re all over the place, like that guy on meth you once knew who you knew you shouldn’t be hanging out with. And if you look at one, it stops being a crazy methhead particle and instantaneously, like, faster than light, is a cool, rational, solid particle. Must be tough on the psyche, being a particle. The thing is, that’s what we’re made of. Could account for the human irrationality factor, but they don’t bring that up as part of the interpretation, for some reason.

There’s also Bohmian Mechanics, or the Pilot Wave interpretation. Notice how none of these are called theories? They’re not good enough to be called theories, see. They’re - ok, pause - interpretations. Which is what a pretentious art snob in a museum does, gesturing with his hands while giving you his or her ‘interpretation’ of a painting. The Pilot Wave interpretation says there’s waves we can’t see that the particles ride on, like surfers, and they aren’t jangly like the crazy methhead Copenhagen particles, they’re cooly surfing the cosmic wave. The problem is, they tell me, it doesn’t exactly jibe with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which still holds its own as a theory, yes - they actually call it a theory, because it’s been proven, see.

My favorite to not give any credence to is superdeterminism, which is the Calvinism of quantum physics, and says everything has been pre-determined since the Big Bang. Life plays out on its own course without anything changing that course. It also means you have no free will, just the appearance of it. You were gonna eat that apple anyway, it was determined 14 billion years ago. This theory gets me off the hook for any bad behavior that girls dumped me for.

Quantum Mechanics is called a theory in aggregate, not because any one interpretation is proven, but because, I guess, there’s strength in numbers. Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize Laureate, is one of the few physicists who say that quantum theory is wrong, the whole thing. Or at least it’s so incomplete, as Einstein thought, as to be rendered untenable for the time being, until they fill in the blanks. I’m kind of with Roger, but he doesn’t have any substitute for it yet.

Eric Weinstein has his Geometric Unity proposal, but I’m unable to even try to explain it, as are most people. When they do, it’s PhD’s talking endless equations. And these things called spinors. There’s no picture, no metaphor, not even enough of one to make fun of.

Ok. So, you can see why a person could be flummoxed. These are the brightest, most sophisticated minds we have, and this is what we’ve come up with, after about one hundred years of working it.

I spent a couple of hours asking Grok questions about string theory. It was very interesting. It kept complimenting me on my questions, saying they showed great depth. You getting closer to the heart of it, Grok said. I suppose it does that to everyone. I might test it sometime, by asking stupid questions over and over and see if Grok chides me for my lack of depth. It scrolled out reams of stuff that actually did explain string theory in a way I could pretty much understand. It’s an elegant thing, the idea of vibrating strings at the core of everything, giving these particles the characteristics of spin and mass and energy that make them what they are, photons, electrons, fermions, bosons, and so ons. I can relate. Everything vibrates. It’s the most ontologically satisfying theory, a musical universe, and I can even accept the hidden dimensions where they live, secreted away, there to give rise to everything. Apparently though, physicists can’t find gravity in the theory. Maybe it has its own gravity, and they aren’t looking in the right place.

Even if string theory is right, though, it still doesn’t tell me the original question of why particles act in such baffling ways. Physicists are always careful to explain to you how thinking about particles is counter-intuitive.

It’s not. It’s bat shit crazy. So don’t feel bad when you don’t get it.