Zeropoint: basically, the discussion concerns the transitions within a fractal, between the material first locale and the second locale, wave: energy, laws, intellect, mind, etc. Talk of the myoclonic spasm has to do with the psycho-neurologic balking (panic) at the transition required for certain types of experience one can expect to undergo when "abducted" or riding in his own contraption and warping. There is the near certitude that an aggressive vehicle will perform such shifts. Death is the effect of such a shift if the individual is entangled in derivative attachments depending on the body or corporeal digressions, resulting in the dropping of the body rather than its conversion, as demonstrated by Elijah, Enoch, very probably Moses, and the Jesus for sure. This effect can be rendered by a "transporter" which was clearly used in the film of a person being abducted and returned 15 minutes later, on his hands and knees, vomiting. (That person quit the locality where he had the experience and can't be found.) A back and forth between the two states is an instance of shimmer in its fullest form, just under being and not being. Zeropoint is not ready to criticize beyond a few tiny comments inserted in the text. Comment should be expected on the nature of "duplicity" but l will leave that alone for a while and remind you to keep in mind Hudson's comments about the physical body and the "divine" body, the energetic counterpart to the gross physical body. There is a bifurcation in each locale. WEIRD SCIENCE.......... BY David H. Freedman DISCOVER MAGAZINE. NOVEMBER 1990 If you've grown comfortable with particles being in two places at once, dissolving into waves when no one is looking, and communicating faster than the speed of light, then these latest experiments in quantum mechanics won't bother you at all. Captions for images (not particularly keen) 1. Raymond Chiao has set up parallel laser beams to explore what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Each beam knows instantly what happens to the other. 2. The classic two-slit experiment. When a wave arrives at a barrier with two openings, it squeezes through both simultaneously. On the other side of the barrier, the emerging pairs of waves overlap in an interference pattern: crests and troughs reinforce in some places and cancel out in others. 3. Claudia Tesche hopes the tiny electronic "squid" at the heart of this silicon board will find weird quantum effects at a bigger-than-atomic scale. (Being told of trilaminar balls would make her career!!) 4. Probing atoms with a laser, Way Itano observed the quantum Zero effect: the more he looked, the less likely the atoms were to change states. ................ In a small, cluttered room at the University of California at Berkeley, two parallel laser beams zigzag across a tabletop. When Raymond Chiao interrupts them with an index card, twin cherry-red spots of light stare back at him, glowing like rodent eyes. When he removes the card, the beams resume their zigzag course, guided by lenses and mirrors, until they encounter a burnished gunmetal and walnut apparatus that looks like a carpenter's tool. "It's a beautiful piece of workmanship, isn't it?" says Chiao. The tool is an interferometer, a device that splits and then recombines beams of light. The interferometer holds a venerable place in the history of experimental physics. It was invented more than a century ago by physicist Albert Michelson; with it, in 1881, he and chemist Edward Morley discovered - to the consternation of physicists the world over - that the orbital motion of Earth has no effect on the speed of light. That discovery would pave the way for a young patent examiner named Albert Einstein and his theory that the speed of light is constant no matter what the motion of an observe, and that space and time are relative. Now, with this vintage piece of equipment, Chiao's achieving results that would have caused Einstein to break out in a rash - for Chiao's experiment is one of many providing striking confirmation of Einstein's least favorite theory: the seemingly eccentric theory of quantum mechanics. Although the theory was essentially complete by the late 1920s, until rather recently the only way to investigate its most bizarre predictions was by performing "thought experiments"; laboratory equipment wasn't up to a complete test. But today's lasers, superconductors, and other sophisticated devices have opened new realms of observation to experimenters, and researchers are on the verge of witnessing the strange theory's strangest predictions. With all the activity, you might think the physics community had serious doubts about quantum mechanics. Nothing could be further from the truth. No major scientific theory has ever done a better job of meeting the two key criteria of internal consistency and harmony with experimental observation. Yet as reliable as quantum mechanics has proved to be, the theory still bothers a lot of researchers - because, no matter how you slice it, a quantum mechanical view of reality still flies in the face of ordinary experience. At the cornerstone of quantum mechanics is the bizarre- sounding truth that bits of matter and energy sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves - depending on how you measure them - but try as you might, you will never observe both characteristic at the same time. The very act of your observation will cause the object of your attention to assume a single, mundane identity. Physicists have long been obsessed with this apparent limitation, and in the past seven decades many have designed clever experiments to catch something behaving like a particle and a wave simultaneously. All have failed. It must be fun trying, though, because a number of them are still at it. One of the most ingenious is Herbert Walther of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. Walther has constructed a thoroughly modern version of the classic "two-slit" experiment, which in its numerous variations over the years has time and again demonstrated that many types of supposed particles can sometimes behave like waves. Imagine a beam of subatomic particles - say, electrons - fired rapidly, one by one, toward a barrier with two closely spaced, parallel slits in it. Imagine, too, that a screen set up behind the barrier glows when an electron strikes it. If electrons were like little billiard balls - in fact, if they were anything resembling a material object as we commonly employ the concept - then each electron would either strike the barrier or pass through one of the slits. On the screen you might expect to see a bright stripe behind each slit where electrons hit it directly. (The stripes might not have sharp edges, the brightness might tail off if electrons grazing the edges of the slits were scattered.) And, indeed, that's exactly what happens - as long as one slit in the barrier is blocked. In that case, a bright stripe appears directly behind the other, open slit. But with both slits open you can't get two bright stripes. Instead, the two-slit experiment produces a series of alternating bright and dark stripes on the screen. There are even dark stripes where you'd think the two bright zones might have overlapped, as if brightness plus brightness added up not to extra brightness, but to darkness. Such a series of bright and dark stripes is known as an interference pattern, and interference patterns are waves' calling cards; they occur when overlapping waves line up their crests and their troughs so as to reinforce or cancel each other. Electrons, then, approaching the barrier, act as if they are waves instead of particles. Each electron squeezes through both slits simultaneously, the way an ocean wave slips through openings between posts in a piers. On the far side of the barrier the electron waves emerge from each slit as if from two separate sources. At places where the waves reinforce, bright stripes appear on the screen; where wave crests and troughs cancel, dark stripes appear. Variations on the two-slit theme are numerous; and many turn the slits into what in effect are two "paths" a particle can take to reach a screen Experimenters have tried placing detectors along these paths to see whether particles can be caught in their dual-nature act. No such luck. The devices do catch particles taking only one of the two paths, billiard- ball stall - but , as quantum mechanics demands, the interference pattern promptly disappears. The act of observing the paths destroys the wavelike behavior. And without the waves, there is no interference pattern. "If you look," says Walther, shrugging, "you see either a wave or a particle. Never both simultaneously." But what if there were some way to determine which path each particle took without looking! That's something no one has succeeded in doing. All the same, Walther is trying. And he may have a better chance of succeeding than any of his predecessors, thanks to a cleaver procedure he's come up with using a maser. In his version of the two-slit experiment, Walther is putting rubidium atoms to the test. Just as a laser stimulates atoms in a cavity o emit visible light, a maser stimulates atom to produce microwave radiation. Walther is sending the atoms in his experiment through two masers, one after the other. The atoms aren't being offered different paths through space, but they still have a choice to make : an atom can be stimulated by the first maser, emit a photon of microwave energy, then pass through the second unchanged: or it can pass through the first unchanged, be stimulated by the second, and emit a photon there. (The atom can leave only one photon behind, so it can't be stimulated by both masers. It can be unexcited by both, but in this experiment any such killjoy atoms are ignored.) According to quantum mechanics, as long as no one is looking, each atom takes both paths at the same time;' that is, the atom splits into two quantum mechanical waves, one of which emits a photon in the first maser, and the other in the second. The two waves then recombine on the other side of the masers and form an interference pattern. Normally the masers can each hold many photons, and there is no way to determine which, if any were left behind by a passing atom. But Walther has a trick up his sleeve. He has developed a way of "tuning" the masers so that, after starting off with no photons, they trap and hold only a single photon emitted by a passing atom; no other photons can enter or leave the cavity. By checking the photon detectors in each maser after the atom has traveled through, Walther can determine which maser has trapped the photon - and thus which path the atom took. But since no observation is made on the atom as it passes through the masers, and since this tuned version of the maser treats the atom no differently than does the regular multiple-photon maser, the atom should have no reason to stop behaving like a wave. Could it be that Walther has at long last found a way to have his quantum mechanical cake and eat it too? Forget it. The atoms are just as wily as the particles in all the other two-slit experiments. As soon as the masers are tuned, the interference pattern disappears. If the maser is detained to its many-photon normal state, so that you can't tell which path the atom has taken, the pattern instantly reappears. As it turns out, the mere presence of the tuned state is enough to destroy the atoms' wavelike behavior. Walther is not disappointed by the results he has obtained so far. "Part of the joy of physics is in demonstrating fundamental laws in better and better ways." He says. Nevertheless, he plans to keep on trying to catch his atoms unawares. "It is really necessary to keep doing such experiments." He says. "You should never take anything for granted - you never know when you'll get a different answer." ******** END PART ONE Physicists can readily speak of subatomic particles or even whole atoms being in two states simultaneously. But they stop short at applying such duplicity to larger objects. (Otherwise they'd be forced to accept situations like that of Schrodinger's cat, a thought experiment posed more than 50 years ago by Erwin Shrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. "Imagine." Said Shrodinger, "that a cat is in a box along with a vial of cyanide. There is also a radioactive particle, a Geiger counter, and a vial-smashing machine, all arranged so that if the particle decays, the Geiger counter will detect it, the vial-smashing machine will be switched on, and the vial will be broken. The cat will then breathe the cyanide and die. Quantum mechanics says that at any given instant the radioactive particle will simultaneously exist in its decayed and undecayed state - until is observed. Then, like the atoms in Walther's masers, it will be forced into choosing one state or the other. But the particle is not alone in its quantum mechanical limbo: one could make the case that the radioactive particle, the Geiger counter, the vial, and the cat are all part of the same quantum mechanical system and thus must all coexist in both states simultaneously. In other words, until someone opens the box to check, the particle is both decayed and undecayed, the vial is both broken and unbroken, and the cat is both alive and dead. Indeed, you might as well insist that until someone checks on the person who looks in the box, that first person exists in two states as well: one in which he finds the cat alive, and one in which he finds it dead. And so on. To avoid such apparent nonsense, pronounced Schrodinger, we must assume that nature draws the quantum mechanical line at atom-size objects. Below that size wavelike behavior runs rampant and particles can be in different states t once. But in larger, macroscopic systems matter and energy are somehow always committed to particular choices, leaving things to behave in the old-fashioned ways of quantum mechanical line at atom-size objects. (Zeropoint: BULLSHIT) Below that size wavelike behavior runs rampant and particles can be indifferent states at once. but in larger, macroscopic systems matter and energy are somehow always committed to particular choices, leaving things to behave in the old-fashioned ways of classical physics - like the billiard balls we've grown so found of. Most physicists re only to happy to accept this quarantine of quantum mechanics, thus avoiding having to make room in their view of reality for cats that are simultaneously alive and dead. (zeropoint: like Jesus in that tomb) But although they have rejected Schrodinger's cat, they could soon have Claudia Tesche's squid to contend with. Tesche is a research at IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, and squid is the acronymic moniker for a superconducting quantum interference device, a modern electronic invention. Tesche is designing a squid tiny enough to fit comfortably on the head of a pin but big enough to e seen with the naked eye, and that should quality it as a bona fide macroscopic system. "Quantum mechanics works brilliantly at predicting the results of experiments on a few particles," says Tesche. "But the theory has never been tested on systems that contain large numbers of particles. Perhaps it doesn't work at all past a certain point! We need to do the experiments to find out." (Zeropoint: the universe doesn't know how big it is.) In her experiment, Tesche is attempting to catch a squid in two states at once, which would make it an electronic Schrodinger's cat. "Classically," she says, "we shouldn't see anything so large exhibiting any of this two-states-at-a-time funny business." The theory behind Tesche's work comes from Tony Leggert, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has long suspected that quantum mechanics and classical physics might not have to be confined to separate realms. He believes a squid is ideal for investigating the study borderland between quantum and classical systems because its behavior (in theory) is unusually quantum mechanical for something that contains a trillion trillion atoms. Consisting essentially of a tiny loop of superconducting wire with a gap in it, a squid forces electrons to ho across the gap to maintain a minute electric current in the loop. But quantum mechanics gives the electrons the choice of circling either way through the loop - resulting, naturally, in their going both ways at the same time. It's important to realize that it's not just the lone electrons that must be in two states at once, the atoms of the entire squid must collectively participate in the duplicity, passing electrons from one atomic site to the next (like people at a stadium doing the "wave"). And just as the overlapping waves in the two-slit experiment produce an interference pattern in the detector, so should the two opposing currents produce an interference pattern in the squid. The catch is tat, like Schrodinger's cat, a squid should just be too big for such quantum mechanical funny business. "If you plot macroscopicness on a scale with a hydrogen atom on one end and a cat on the other" says Leggert, "a squid is three-quarters of the way to cat." The squid's quantum mechanical waves are mathematical probabilities, they are alternating crests and troughs in the probability of observing the current in either direction. Although current will flow both ways simultaneously, at any given instant it will likely have a higher probability for one direction than the other - one wave will be cresting, say, while the other is nearing a trough - and there will appear to be a surge in the direction of the dominant wave. With enough measurements performed at regular intervals, and with two opposing waves, these surges from one direction to the other will occur in a predictable sequence. "In a sense," says Leggett, "it's an interference pattern in time." Of course, if the squid can't exist in two states at a time, there can be no interference pattern. The probability of seeing a current in either direction would then be random. The researchers task, then is to monitor the squid's current to see whether it adheres to the pattern predicted by quantum mechanics. To do so, Tesche is making tiny switches that are sensitive to a current surge only in a particular direction. She plans to put two such switches next to a squid, with each set to make a measurement at a different time. She'll then take a large number of the paired measurements and see whether they constitute an interference pattern. All this is a lot trickier than it sounds, however, since any direct measurement will force the current to choose one of the two-directions and destroy the interference pattern. Accordingly, if the first switch is activated when it takes its measurement. Tesche will throw out the data from that run. Only if the first switch is not activated will Tesche have her first measurement: she will infer that the current was surging in the direction the switch could not directly measure. "The only way to watch a quantum system fluctuate is not to watch it." Tesche says, "If you don't leave the system alone, then all bets are off." When the second switch takes the measurement, however, the information gained can be used whether the switch is activated or not; when it goes off that particular run is over. It will take Tesche yers to iron out all the wrinkles in her subtle experiment and perform all the sneaky observations she'll need to establish a nonrandom pattern. But eventually, if her data do fit the wavelike probability pattern, physicists may have to accept the idea that a cat could be both dead and alive; a macroscopic system will have been observed in two states at once. But if her observations don't fit the predicted pattern, quantum mechanical theory itself will seem to have fallen short. One way or the other, the half-century-old compromise between classical reality and quantum mechanicus could be blown to bits. Of course, there is always a third possibility. "If we don't see the predicted pattern," says Tesche, "It could mean that we've done the experiment wrong, or that we have the wrong theoretical model." Our power to force a particle to stop acting like a wave - to, in physicists' terms, cause the particle's quantum mechanical waves to collapse - is certainly one of the stranger consequences of quantum mechanical theory. Stranger still, however, are some of the predictions this power leads us into. And one of the strangest is the quantum Zero effect. It is named after the ancient Greek philosopher who pointed out the apparent paradox that no matter how close a runner is to his destination, he must always run half the remaining distance first, then half the remaining half, and so on; because there are an infinite number of half distances, the runner never arrives at the finish line. The quantum version applies to particles hat change state over time-such as those in radioactive decay or the atoms in Walther's masers. A quantum mechanical analysis treats each particle as a packet of waves that, over time, gradually changes its probability of being in one state or the other. Since observing a particle instantly collapses its waves, looking at the particle at any time collapses the probability of its eventual arrival at its new state. The more often its observed, the less likely it becomes that it will ever arrive. In 1989 physicist Wayne Itano and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder became the first to unambiguously observe the quantum Zero effect. The group trapped 5,000 beryllium atoms in a magnetic field and exposed them to radio waves, which from a quantum mechanical point of view, gradually transform the atoms until they are in an excited state. To determine how many atoms had actually made it to the new state at any particular time, Itano's team looked at them with a short pulse of laser light. The pulse had no effect on excited atoms, but those atoms still making the transition instantly absorbed and re-emitted a small amount of the light. Thus, by measuring the amount of light re-emitted, Itano's group could calculate how many atoms had made the transition. As it turned out, when the team waited a quarter second before turning on the laser, they found that nearly all the atoms had made it to the excited state. If, however, the researchers preceded that quarter-second pulse by a pulse sent in halfway through, after one eighth second, they found that by the end of the quarter second only half the atoms had made the transition. If they sent in four pulses over the quarter-second interval, the final proportion of excited atoms dropped to a little more than one-third. With 64 pulses, scarcely a single atom made the transition. There is no classical explanation for these results. Common sense would dictate that no matter how you divide and measure an interval of time, the same number of particles should arrival at the finish line after the same total time. But, in fact, fewer arrive when you divide that same interval into shorter segments by sneaking a peek along the way. *************** END PART TWO. Itano's explanation is that the atoms making the transition are in both the excited and unexcited states simultaneously, as long as no one looks. The laser pulse acts as an observation that collapses an atom's quantum mechanical waves, forcing it to commit itself to one state or the other. If you send in the pulse before the atom has worked its way through most of the transition, its quantum mechanical waves will most likely collapse back into the unexcited state and start all over again. Thus if the pulses are frequent enough, the probability that the atom will be able to change approaches zero. "It's an effect that people have talked about for years," says Itano, "but it was hard to show in a clean and simple way that it actually happens." Particles that behave like particles only when you're watching. Particles that sneak from one state to another only when you're not watching. What could be more contrary to common sense! Well, there's worse, and it involves the aspect of quantum mechanics that Einstein simply could not endure. It also brings us back to Raymond Chiao's zigzagging laser beams at Berkeley. No one dismissed quantum mechanics more than Einstein, and he devoted considerable energy during the later half of his life to lobbing grenades at the theory. Einstein's best shot was aimed at the quantum mechanical concept of "entangled states," which refers to two separate particles that are mysteriously connected. In a famous thought experiment developed in collaboration with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, and later dubbed EPR after its creators, Einstein showed that quantum mechanics requires believing that if you determine the state of one particle in an entangled pair, you must instantly affect the state of its partner - even if they are millions of miles apart, traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions. It's as if the two particles were in touch through some sort of quantum hot line that allows them to swap information at infinite speed. Einstein called this concept "spooky action at a distance," and he considered it one rung up the ladder of credibility from voodoo. So perhaps it's just as well he never lived to see the results of Chiao's experiment, a version of EPR brought to a lab bench. The experiment starts by hurtling a stream of laser-produced photons into a crystal that splits them into pairs of entangled photons. These pairs are not physically connected (zeropoint: consider bifurcte.gif) in fact, they never meet again. They are entangles only in the sense of originating from the same parent. After the parents are sliced in two, the entangled offspring follow parallel courses around the table and into Chiao's interferometer and strike separate detectors. It should come as no surprise at this point that having a choice of two paths means that each photon in the entangles pair takes both paths, resulting in an interference pattern at the detectors. In this case the pattern reveals itself as a rise and fall in the rate of hits by photon pairs when Chiao slowly varies the length of the longer interferometer arm, millionths of an inch at a time. That's because changing the length of the arm changes the travel time of the quantum mechanical waves that make the longer path, which in turn determines whether those waves reinforce or cancel the waves that take the shorter path. When the arm is adjusted so that the recombining waves reinforce, photon pairs hit the detectors in coincident beats; when the arm is moved a little so that the waves cancel, the detectors stop seeing these pairs of arriving photons. The entangles photons never touch, so it's clear that the interference pattern is not caused by any interference between the two. Rather, the pattern is caused by each entangled partner simultaneously taking two different paths that join up at the end, like the particles in the two-slit experiment. Surprisingly, however, when Chiao blocks one of the beams, eliminating one of the partners in each pair, the interference pattern disappears from the other beam; the detection of photons no longer changes when Chiao adjusts the interferometer's longer arm. The ability of an entangles photon to interfere with itself somehow depends on the existence of its partner - despite the two photons' total separation after their birth. "The two photons have nothing to do with one another, and yet this photon." Says Chiao, stabbing one of the two beams with a finger, "knows what this other one is doing." There seems to be no physical way for the paired photons to communicate, so how do they do it? Enter quantum mechanics' celebrated uncertainty principle, which asserts that the more you know about one aspect of a particle, the less you know about some other aspect: the more precisely you know velocity, for example, the less precisely you know position. In Chiao's experiment the tradeoff is between knowing the energy of photons and knowing their size - which, in quantum terms, is the probability of finding the photon at a given point. Here's how the quantum trade-off works: Because the paired photons are created by hacking a single parent in two, the energy of the original photon is split between the offspring. Although the distribution of energy between the two is unknown, the total energy bound up in the pair is known- it must be equal to the energy of the parent photon. This knowledge does not come free, however. If the paired photons are thought of as wave packets, with crests and troughs representing higher and lower probabilities of finding them at any given point, then the knowledge of the photons' energy comes at the expense of knowledge about their size - it "smears out" the probability of finding the photons in a particular place in a particular time. In effect, the ignorance makes the photons larger. When these large photons take the unequal-length paths simultaneously, they are large moving targets. When its time for them to recombine, they're not likely to miss each other - like two speeding buses trying to get through the same intersection. The recombining waves of each photon easily overlap after their unequal detours and make an interference pattern at the detectors. Hen an entangled photon loses its partner, however, some of the total energy bound up in the pair is no longer bound up - that is, it is no longer "shared" by the pair. The consequent uncertainty in energy lends more certainty to the survivor's size, effectively shrinking it. When the surviving proton now takes its separate paths, its waves can't recombine. One completely passes through the intersection before the other, taking the longer detour, gets back. If the two waves can't recombine, they can't interfere - so there is no interference pattern at the detector. The uncertainties that govern Chiao's results cannot be eliminated; they are fundamental to the experiment. As Chiao hacks the parent photons in two, he can't now both the energy and the effective size of each offspring. "Even God doesn't know this information." Says Chiao. "If he [sic] did, the interference would disappear." Chiao is now shooting for the brass ring of EPR experiments: a violation of Bells inequality. The inelegant expression refers to a theorem proved by physicist John Stewart Bell in 1964. Bell's theorem sets a limit on how quickly one of the paired photons could physically respond by any known mechanism - while obeying constraints such as the speed of light - when Chiao blocks the path of its entangled partner. To violate Bell's inequality is to exceed that physical limit, and thus to prove the reality of spooky action at a distance. It's been done in the lab before in different forms, but EPR measurements are so delicate that there has always been room for doubt, and confirming experiments are welcome. Before Chiao can add his experiment to this elite list, though, he needs to produce a more pronounced interference pattern. And to get that hell need more sophisticated equipment. "We're designing a new interferometer and trying to get a faster detector," says Chiao - which means the end of the line for this fine old instrument. Will this and other experiments being planned help us get a better handle on the peculiar aspects of quantum mechanics? Not necessarily. No matter how sophisticated the experiments become, their results will be no more puzzling in essence, than those produced by the first two-slit experiments. The dual nature of our world will likely remain a mystery. But like any good mystery, it's one that's hard to put down. End, XXX