I’ve just had my mind boggled by the strangest book I’ve ever read: Taking the Quantum Leap, by Fred Alan Wolf. This is the closest I’ve ever come to outright rejecting a scientific theory despite the mounds of evidence in its favor—but let me give you a taste of it so you understand what I mean. Taking the Quantum Leap is, superficially, a history of the science of Physics from the Greeks to now. There was, to the Greeks, a disparity between the two ideas: continuity and discontinuity. Did things move constantly? If you shot an arrow, did it hit every point between the bow and the target, in a mathematically smooth fashion? Or did it move, in the manner of video frames, in a disjointed manner?
Common sense seems to say, “of course it moves smoothly!” But then, oh then, we have quantum physics to deal with…
It took a long time for people to work up to atoms and molecules, to find and put down in laws the electromagnetic force, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. It took longer to find all the little particles we claim make up the universe, and even now we’re not sure quite what goes where. But particles are like animals in zoos: we know they’re animals and if we can’t quite classify them, we can still watch them. When we watch them, we see their caged behavior, not how they act in the wild, and with particles this turns out to be quite important.
Quantum Wave Functions (which can be acronym-ified to QWF, or qwiff for pronunciation) behave like waves in water, like light, or sound waves. Then there are matter waves, but qwiffs govern all of this. Qwiffs are continuous and smooth, like the first arrow.
For anyone versed in quantum theory or statistics, this is an easy idea. This function of four variables (the three spatial dimensions and time) describes the position of a given particle. We can assume an electron for ease of thought. Now a particle is a localized thing; it’s got only one position at a given time. But its qwiff is the probability to find the particle at a given point at a given time. Until this is observed the particle is everywhere and nowhere. Until some observer pops the qwiff, we have Schrödinger’s cat for every particle. If we want to know where the electron is, we have to observe it: pop the qwiff, and change what was a smooth mathematical probability into a discontinuous chunk of knowledge, knowledge that rapidly decays if we take the uncertainty principle into account.
Every damn particle.
Wolf carried this to its logical conclusion: if you need to observe, what observes? If I see a photon, what happened? Call it a star: some star emitted a qwiff which represents all possible points that the photon could be in. Light-years away, this qwiff hits my retina; the qwiff pops. The photon has been detected. But was it the lens? The lens bent the light, was that the pop? The light hit the molecule, but the molecule has no way of knowing it was hit, so it has its own qwiff of hit/wasn’t hit. Then the molecule has to change shape (another qwiff), then this has to depolarize the membrane (yet another), then the signal has to not be damped out by another neuron (and another, another, another), then someone in there, the “I” or “me” has to notice it. Because if I fail to notice the dot of light, was it really there? Did the qwiff pop?
This is both problem and solution. If you take quantum theory as an accurate description of reality, which I am forced to do, then everything exists in a world of qwiffs, or as Wolf calls it, the Big Qwiff. This is popped constantly by this thing or another, to make the reality we know. Physics turns into philosophy here: because the Big Qwiff must be popped, what pops it? Idea One is solipsism: me. I do it. Only I exist and everything else is a choice I made to notice qwiffs at particular points in space/time. I dislike that one, but since there is another solution: every particle, atom, thing, has its own observations. If we take all those observations, each one has that essential Observer, or Mind, which can pop qwiffs. All those little things make up us, our unconscious, and then “I” and “Me” would be a sort of super-consciousness which observes our observations.
And damn me if this doesn’t all follow logically from Wolf’s arguments! I’d recommend reading the book, if only for the ideas, and especially because I haven’t the writing talent to convey his ideas.
And damn me if I don’t have to redesign the entire magic system of Phoenix Enchained to accommodate this. And damn again, I’ve done that already! Twice!
“It is a causal world of exact mathematical accuracy, but there is no matter present. It is a world of paradox and utter confusion for human, limited, intelligence. For it is a world where a thing both occupies a single point at a single time and an infinite number of places at the same time. Yet there is an explicit order to the paradox. There is a pattern to the many positions, a symmetry.
But we, who exist in the world of matter, can only disrupt that perfection of paradox by attempting to observe the pattern. We pay a large price for a material world. […] We cannot make total order of our observations. […] Our very helplessness to create a perfect order allows us to create. You might say the uncertainty principle is a two-edged sword. It frees us from the past because nothing can be predetermined. It gives us freedom to choose how we go about in the universe. But we cannot predict the results of our choices. We can choose, but we cannot know if our choices will be successful.”
~Taking the Quantum Leap, Fred Alan Wolf
[[Friday August 21]]
So, I'd like to start selling art...
