Had this been 17th century Europe, I would be deemed a witch for this write-up and carted off to be burned at the stake in the infamous witch trials. More importantly, if you are plotted anywhere around the same x,y coordinates on the spiritual graph as I am, then by the end of this post you are most likely to think, “Maybe I should join her”.
Weird World of the Tiniest
Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that deals with the tiniest of the particles that make up everything in the universe like atoms, neutrons, and protons. The interesting world of quantum mechanics is found to have weird properties and behavior that defy the logic and predictability of classical physics, thanks to the centuries-old, groundbreaking, hair-pulling experiment called the Double-Slit Experiment.
Imagine a plate with a slit on it. If you shoot paintballs at the plate, which would be whole, localized particles, most of them would get blocked, but those that manage to go through the slit would make a long line on the back screen corresponding to the slit. If there were two slits, and the same process is followed, you would see two lines on the back screen.
Similarly, if a water wave was made to hit the plate with one slit, the ripple that comes out through the slit would touch a single point on the back screen and form one line. But if there were two slits, the two ripples coming through the slits would interfere with each other in a compounded, flowery pattern and the points that touch the back screen would form multiple lines instead of just two, which is called the interference pattern.
Image credit: My search Website
The Evolution of Light
Back in the days of the renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton, light was thought to be made up of particles. Then came Thomas Young who did the aforementioned experiment and showed that light actually traveled like waves, just like the water waves did.
Image credit: My search Website
The world found this explanation to be a little iffy to accept.
A little later came Albert Einstein who did his thing and said light comes in little packets of energy called photons. He announced that sometimes light behaved like waves and other times as particles depending upon the existing factors. The world accepted this view about light being weird like that and went about life thinking maybe this weirdness was isolated to light alone. The world applauded Einstein, awarded him a Nobel prize, and peace prevailed in the valley.
But that stability lasted only for a short while until curious physicists tried to do the same experiment with matter itself, namely one of the most fundamental particles in the universe — electrons.
Particles Acting Like Waves
The physicists took the same double-slit experiment and fired a stream of electrons, which are localized particles through the slits, but instead of seeing two lines as in the case of particles, they saw the same multiple lines of an interference pattern.
Electrons that were particles were behaving like waves.
They thought maybe the electrons were bouncing off each other creating the interference pattern and decided to fire the electrons one at a time. Surprisingly, the same pattern emerged. The electron behaved as if each one went through both the slits at the same time which means a single electron was in multiple positions, interfered with itself to form a wave-like pattern.
Each electron knew where the previous electron has landed and where the next one was going to land and decided its landing position on the screen in order to ultimately form the wave-like pattern.
To figure out the conundrum, the physicists decided to observe which slit the electrons were passing through by placing a measuring device next to the slit. And this is where weirdness started taking a whole new meaning.
The physicists fired the electrons one by one while the detector was turned on and interestingly, the electrons behaved like particles creating two lines on the back screen instead of multiple lines. The electrons behaved as though they knew that they were being watched and decided to act like a particle and not like a wave.
The mere act of observation seemed to have altered the nature of the electron. But when the detector was left there and the data was not collected, that is, not observed, the electrons displayed the same interference pattern of waves.
Physicists vs Electrons
In order to confirm their miserable failings against the quantum system, the physicists tried something crazy — they upped their game by measuring the electron after it entered the slit but before it hit the screen, which meant that the electron couldn’t have “known” whether it was being observed or not until after it passed the slits (Delayed Choice).
Interestingly, the electrons crossed the slit behaving like waves. But when random measurements were made, the electrons acted like particles, essentially going back in time to the past and altering their behavior before crossing the slit.
The physicists tried a variation to this experiment by relying on the concept called quantum entanglement. This is where two electrons, when entangled with each other, share the same information and any alterations made to the physical properties of one will automatically affect the corresponding other. They fired the electron through the slit and grabbed the exiting electron, split it in two with a beam-splitter, sent one on its original path to the back screen, and studied its pair to gather data about the other.
But once again the wave-particle duality appeared as though the electron yelled back to its pair, “Hey buddy, these guys are onto us. Act accordingly!”.
However far the physicists moved the entangled electron away from its pair, it still seemed like information was exchanged between the two electrons faster than the speed of light.
The physicists tried this experiment with photons, atoms, and even larger molecules and the same wave-particle duality continued. In whichever manner the physicists approached the experiment the electrons still seemed to be two steps ahead in the game — behaving like particles when observed and behaving like waves when not.
The Deep Implication
The Double-Slit Experiment is considered by far to be the coolest, mind-blowing experiment in the quantum field. Why do elementary particles do weird stuff like being in multiple positions at the same time, go back in time to alter its state, affect the nature of a connected particle even if it is on the other side of the universe, and best of all, know when it is being observed?
Whether it is observation done by human consciousness that is collapsing the system or something entirely scientific is still up for debate. But at the heart of various theories and interpretations that try to explain the workings of the quantum world lies one common thread, which barring all the technical brain friers is this — the very act of observation/measurement will cause changes to the original state of the thing that is being observed or measured.
For example, we can measure the temperature of something using a thermometer, but sticking a thermometer in an object tends to alter the temperature of the object from its true state by a minuscule amount due to the presence of the thermometer itself. Maybe on the macro level, this doesn’t mean much, but at the quantum level, even the beam of light that is used to see things better will skew the result of the quantum particle to a great degree.
The profound fact the quantum world imparts is that the fundamental things in the universe exist as a wave of possibilities until we observe, at which point they collapse into a singular reality.
And prior to that collapse, it is meaningless to try and define a particle’s properties as our observation is bound to be skewed or limited.
So essentially, we can never know the nature of something with absolute certainty because the moment we observe/measure/analyze something, the thing we wanted to observe gets compromised from its true state and it is no longer what it originally was.
While this has been the story on the quantum physics side, classical physics has some equally interesting phenomena up its sleeve.
Dark Energy
Scientists have found evidence that our universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. What this truth implies is that there is the presence of a repulsive force of gravity, which instead of keeping things together like the gravity we know works, is pushing everything away by means of expansion. Scientists call this Dark Energy, not because it is sinister but rather because we don’t know anything about it.
Dark Matter
Also, scientists have concluded that the unusual manner in which stars at the edge of the galaxies are moving could only be explained by the presence of a different kind of matter made up of exotic particles. They call this Dark Matter, named for the same reason as dark energy.
These dark entities don’t emit light or radiation and are completely invisible to us, thus making it hard to study them.
Now, this dark matter makes up for 27 percent of the universe’s mass and dark energy a whopping 68 percent. The rest of the 5 percent is what makes up for everything we know — particles, matter, lifeform, us, earth, stars, planets, and galaxies.
The Hard Pill to Swallow
We don’t know what dark energy is or what constitutes dark matter because we are not privy to its nature and laws. Truth is that our knowledge is so limited that we don’t even know what the deal is with 95 percent of the universe.
On the other hand, quantum physics has proved that the rest of the 5 percent universe that we do know says, “Don’t observe me, and I will be”.
And yet we somehow assume that the ultimate force that had put all of these things in the universe together, the force that we call God, is readily available in His uncompromised form for our observations and interpretations.
We dare to confine this force within limited parameters like name, background story, His nature based on the good and bad as we know Him, His intentions, and also His grand goal for us. We, the clueless, define the undefinable. We create religions based on the fallacy that we know God, while God probably ceased to exist the moment we thought we knew God. I don’t know what would be more amusing to God — our ignorance or the arrogance of our ignorance.
In the light of all this, Sruti’s writing in The Hidden Value of Not Knowing is starting to make better sense –
“This space of not-knowing is the fabric of God’s unconditional love, but dropping into it does not require faith or belief. It is simpler than faith. It is earlier that what we think God is.”
The Hidden Value of Not Knowing
We don’t know God. We cannot know God.
We have blindly bought into stories and beliefs instead of experiencing anything firsthand spiritually. Even when we do experience things personally, what we are experiencing has been compromised from its original form, so there is no way to know anything in its true nature.
If so, I then wonder what these religious institutions of the world have been selling to us all this time?
So, witch trials, anyone?
