QUANTUM RARITIES. (Chapter 5. Part 2)

From de book: Quantum Mysticism. THE SPIRITUALITY OF QUANTUM PHYSICS. Second Edition 2021.

Author:        Luis Eduardo Sierra S.

President of Universal Alliance – Director ARIEL Magazine - Senior Instructor at the Spiritual University in Colombia.

Chapter 5 – Part 1

QUANTUM RARITIES

The Double Slit Experiment – Wave-particle differences – The Wave-Particle Dual Behavior – Einstein Was Confused, Not Quantum Theory – Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics – Nature Is Absurd – Is It Possible That Nature Is So Absurd? – Quantum Superposition and Schrödinger's Cat – Interpretation of Copenhagen Quantum Theory – The Quantum Leap or Entanglement – Bohr and His Revolutionary Atomic Model – Bilocation – Quantum Computing – EPR Experiment and Spooky Action at a Distance – Aspect and Entanglement – Grinberg and Nonlocality in Brains – Wheeler's Ray – Bell's Test – BIG Bell Test – Connection Between Emotions and DNA – Cleve Backster and His Experiments – Poponin and Biology Quantum Entangling – Invisible Clinics – Glein and the Affectation of Biological Systems – Experiences in Universities Testing Quantum Entanglement – The Chinese and Teleportation or Quantum Transportation – China, a Pioneer in Quantum Technology in Space – Connections in the Non-Local Domains of Consciousness – The Cosmos as a Network – Fields of Physical and Mental Interaction – Global Quantum Internet, Quantum Cryptography – The Uncertainty Principle – Pollak and the tunnel effect – Nature doesn't care if we understand it or not – Microcosm and macrocosm are radically different in their behavior – Chaos theory and the butterfly effect. 

The Double Slot Experiment

A simple experiment carried out by Thomas Young in 1801 revealed one of the most intriguing oddities in the behavior of matter at the particle level. In this case, it is a dual wave-particle behavior of subatomic particles. Let's see.

The idea of light as a particle was reaffirmed with the modern concept of the photon, coined by Einstein, who in turn relied on observations of Planck's quanta. In Young's experiment, what is initially done is to shoot photons one by one towards a screen on which the impacts were recorded.

Between the photon trigger and the screen to be impacted, a plate with a thin groove was placed through which part of the fired photons could pass, the rest collided with the plate, without being able to pass through the slot. Those who passed through the slot ended up impacting the screen in the places they were expected to hit. So far everything is understandable, logical, the photons acted as particles, something like marbles or tiny pellets fired from a device, which penetrated through a slot and hit a wall. The problem arose when instead of one, two slits were opened in the plate, side by side, so that the photons could pass through one of the two slits and the rest collided with the plate. Surprisingly and unprecedentedly, some photons passed through both slits at the same time.

The pattern of impacts on the screen demonstrated this. It is as if a single person entered at the same time through each of the two separate doors of a wall. 

How is it possible that the same photon was in two places simultaneously, at the same time? The answer found by physics to this quantum oddity is that the photon stops behaving like a particle and starts behaving like a wave in the double-slit experiment, so that if the waves are wide enough, they can pass through several slots at once.

Photons emitted by a reflector passing through a plate with two slits, impacting a screen in the background, observed by a camera. The photon behaves as a wave or as a particle, depending on whether the observing device is turned off or on, respectively.

But the surprise was greater when they tried to do the same test with the help of an observer (cameras, sensors or any other device), to verify if the particles were or acted in two places at the same time, observing through which slots the photon passed until it impacted the screen. In other words, more accurately, to be able to observe the change from particle to wave of light. When the sensors or cameras that detect the path of the photons were activated, using the plate with the double slit, the photons stopped behaving like waves and passed one by one through one or the other slit, as particles do, never through both slits at the same time.

When the cameras or sensors that followed the photon's fingerprint were turned off, they behaved like waves again, according to the pattern of impacts shown on the screen. Two great incomprehensible conclusions were derived from this experience: the first that the presence of an observer, the camera or the sensor, altered the result; and the second that light could behave as a wave or as a particle, something unheard of. From this experiment comes what is so often mentioned that the observer affects reality at the quantum level.

Repeated the experiment over and over again by different researchers in different places, not only with photons but with other atomic particles, the result was always the same, as if the photons or electrons somehow knew when they were being observed, as if they were aware of it, and for this reason they always decided to modify their behavior. But the matter gets even more complicated. At the most fundamental and reductionist level, things are affected by observation, they have a dual character, that is, wave and particle at the same time, in addition to becoming indeterministic (their location cannot be predicted in a specific time), results cannot be predicted, only probabilities can be established, deriving from it the Uncertainty Principle, which we will address shortly.

It has already been said that Richard Feynman, the renowned theoretical physicist, claimed that "no one understood quantum mechanics", which did not prevent him from fully accepting its probabilistic essence, and he went even further when he asserted that each of the electrons that make their way to the screen actually passes through both slits. As they travel from the source to a certain point on the phosphorescent screen, each electron actually traverses all possible trajectories simultaneously, concluding that: "we have to allow nature to say what is right and what is not. Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense, but it is in full agreement with experimental evidence. Therefore, I hope that you can to accept nature as it is: absurd."

We are throwing stones into a still pool of water. The common sense given by the experience we accumulate over time assures us that doing so will produce ripples in the pond that are the product of the energy that the stone transmits when it falls into the water. A quantum pond would behave differently, when throwing one or more stones nothing will happen, and suddenly, without any connection between the cause (throwing stones) and the effect (generation of waves on the surface), the pond will begin to vibrate with waves, until suddenly it will calm down again, even if at that moment we are throwing stones. If all the stones are of the same size, and thrown from the same height, they will deliver the same amount of energy to the water when they fall. If this amount of energy turns out to be less than the quantum of energy, then we must throw more than one stone to start the movement.

Until they are measured, particles do not have defined characteristics, they exist in different states at the same time, not real but virtual, of suspended animation. It gives the impression that the particle chooses its own real state from among all the available virtual states. Even in a real state, it does not allow us to measure and observe it without affecting it. Virtual states are described by probability functions. Each virtual state has its well-defined wave function, that is, a pattern of order and information.

The double-slot experiment is widely disseminated on the web, with graphics, in videos, and mathematically complemented, being carried out under different scenarios and sophisticated props, but in fact it can also be carried out with very simple elements, polarized glass and sunlight, or using an adjustable laser, and the pair of slots on a sheet of aluminum foil. The result is always the same.

Prince Louis de Broglie in 1923, relying on the reasoning of Einstein's Special Relativity, indicated that the wave-particle duality could not only be applied to light but to matter in general, mass should also have an expression as a wave, which would later be demonstrated experimentally by other researchers. An electron, considered as a particle, could be validated in terms of waves. The result for Broglie's research was the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929.

It follows that at the atomic level particles behave in a way that stuns the brainiest of physicists, appearing and disappearing, communicating with each other simultaneously regardless of the distances that separate them, sometimes behaving like particles and sometimes like waves, or like both at the same time, and can also be found in several places at the same time. All this has been used by scientists for different technological achievements and has also served as a foundation for topics related to the unified field, which we will delve into later, and which constitutes one of the fundamental parts of this work.

Shahriar Mshar, an Iranian-American physicist, conducted a modified version of Young's double slit experiment, finding that quanta, supposedly the essential component particles of material reality, ended up looking more like waves than corpuscles. In the experiment he shows that of the two aspects of particles, the wave and the corpuscular, the fundamental one is the wave, which is present even when observing the corpuscular aspect, while the corpuscular aspect is not present when the wave aspect is questioned.

"The implications of these discoveries are revolutionary. Although what we perceive with our senses is solid matter moving in empty space, in reality the material universe -including particles, stars, planets, rocks, and living organisms- is not material: seemingly material things are waves that meet, propagate, and interact in an underlaid medium... Other experiments show that the interference fringes disappear as soon as the detector is installed, even if it is not turned on. In Leonard Mandel's 1991 experiment on optical interference, two laser beams were generated as a light source, which were allowed to interfere. When a detector was present that allowed the path or direction of the light to be determined, the interference fringes disappeared" (László, 2009).