Just a bit more science about that sixth sense.

Yesterday, I wrote about how science was coming up with some pretty strong evidence that humans do have the ability to communicate in a way that might be called ‘telepathic’.

If (and that’s a big ‘if’) I have any understanding of the science, I believe it has much to do with quantum physics.  So I thought it fun to take a small diversion in today’s Post and give you some material on this very strange world of the very, very small.

From A Lazyman’s Guide to Quantum Physics,

What is Quantum Physics?

That’s an easy one: it’s the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means ‘discrete amount’ or ‘portion’. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you couldn’t get smaller than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit.

Why is it weird?

Niels Bohr, the father of the orthodox ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum physics once said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it“.

To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experiments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, Schroedinger’s Cat.

Two Slits

The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.

Light Bulb

Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schroedinger came up with a nine-letter-long equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point. He envisaged a kind of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the filament. Once you look at the photon, this ‘wavefunction’ collapses into the single point at which the photon really is.

Schroedinger’s Cat

In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cyanide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an isolated electron and determines whether it is ‘spin up’ or ‘spin down’ (it can have either characteristic, seemingly at random). If it is ‘spin up’, then the bottle is opened and the cat gets it. Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated and you opening the box. Nobody has actually done this experiment (to my knowledge) but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.

To conclude I will offer this quotation reputed to be from the great master himself, Albert Einstein,

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.