Letter From the Multiverse

In Today's Mind Boggling Issue

Quantum Physics
Letter from the Multiverse
Quantum Leaps
That's Amaaaaaazing
Random Joke of the Day


Quantum physics

Quantum physics is the study of matter and energy at its most fundamental level. A central tenet of quantum physics is that energy comes in indivisible packets called quanta. Quanta behave very differently to macroscopic matter: particles can behave like waves, and waves behave as though they are particles.

Letter From the Multiverse

Hi Nev,

It’s me Nev, just thought I’d send you a quick note from the future.

Well when I say the future it’s now Wednesday and I’m writing to you on Monday.

I will bring you up to speed with the future, we have no flying cars, aliens haven’t landed and there is still no cure for the common cold. So, plenty of opportunities still around eh?

As you no doubt know, well now I think of it, you soon will, that recently as in today I’ve been looking at string theory. As you know, if this letter works, string theory is the hypothesis that we live in a multiverse. In a nutshell for every decision made an opposite is decided upon this creates an alternative version of ourselves and this world. Yeah, I know what your thinking, it’s for a story I’m writing.

This sounds farfetched but perfectly possible under the rules of quantum physics. The late Stephen Hawkins was, just before his death, working on a paper to prove its existence mathematically.

So, if this is works you should get this letter Monday. The only problem is, I don’t remember getting a letter on Monday. Perhaps it’s stuck in the multi post office.

The fact that I don’t remember getting the letter actually proves that one of us somewhere did.

Oh, and another thing watch that piece of Lego on the floor Tuesday.

Love Nev

PS If this doesn’t work, I’m going to look at time travel I’ll see you last week.

Quantum Leaps

Our material bodies and the body of the Universe both flicker in and out of existence at the speed of light. Our nervous systems cannot process these quantum events at the speed at which they are really happening, so it decodes the energy and information soup of the Universe into the experience of solid three-dimensional material bodies.

The Sun! Bringer of heat and life and basically just a giant glowing ball of hot gas. Unfortunately, classical physics predicts that the sun should undergo an Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This event would see the sun give off infinite amounts of energy at high frequencies of light, popping our eyeballs and chucking globs of flaming plasma at Uranus. Fortunately quantum physics saves us from Armageddon, if not from Jerry Bruckheimer. Quantum physics says that light energy is quantised. It can only be given off in packets called photons (fire the photonic torpedoes, Mr Bakula?) and the energy of a photon is proportional to the frequency of the light. This thankfully limits the amount of energy given off at higher frequencies and saves us all from really bad sunburn

All material things are made up of atoms (which are made up of subatomic particles- protons, neutrons, electrons, etc), which are 99.99999 percent energy and .00001 percent matter. Think about it – every physical thing in our life is not solid matter but rather fields of energy or frequency patterns of information. Matter is more “no-thing” (energy) than “some-thing” (particles). Our physical bodies and the body of the physical Universe are as proportionately empty as is all of space. The essential nature of our material bodies and that of the solid-appearing Universe is that they are both non-material. They are made up of non-stuff.

This is very bizarre sounding, but experiments have shown that until a measurement is made, many particles can act as though they are in more than one place at one time. For instance an electron being fired through a board with two small slits, if it is not measured doing so, will show an interference pattern on a screen at the back that registers impacts. This illustrates that the particle, let’s say an electron, does not go through either one slit or the other, but rather it goes through both! So the particle is in a very real sense in more than one place at a time. Superpositions of particles could potentially lead to super-fast quantum computing

Black holes emit radiation which is known as Hawking radiation, and so eventually over an insanely huge and hard to comprehend period of time, may lose their energy and disappear. Basically the idea is that when a particle and anti-particle ‘virtual’ pair pop into existence, sometimes one will be the other side of the event horizon and therefore the pair cannot annihilate. Thus the black hole effectively radiates away the actual particle.

Schrodinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment illustrating the seemingly paradoxical nature of quantum theory and how observation makes such a difference, almost forcing the universe to choose a particular path. In this a cat is put in a box and sealed in, with some radioactive matter that has a 50/50% chance of decaying and if it does it releases some poison to kill the cat. Until you open the box, you do not know if the cat is alive or dead, but in the quantum world (ignoring things such as coherence) then the cat would be in a sense both alive and dead until you open the box and force the universe to choose whether the cat is alive or dead. This gives so much power to the act of conscious observation and this may either be a profound fact about reality or a confusion of some sort on our part.

Every human being, along with every material thing in the Universe, broadcasts a distinct energy pattern, and this energy carries information. Our fluctuating states of mind, conscious or unconscious, change this pattern on a moment-to-moment basis because we are not just a physical body; we are consciousness using a body and a brain to express different levels of mind.

Quantum Entanglement Theory states that all humans and the quantum field are interconnected. It says that once two particles can be linked in some way, they will always be bonded together beyond space and time. So anything that is done to one, will be done to the other even though they are spatially separated from one another. What this means is that since we too are made up of particles, we are all connected beyond space and time. So quite literally, what we do unto others, we do unto ourselves.

According to quantum physics, we are part of a vast, invisible field of energy, which contains all possible realities and it responds to our thoughts and our feelings

THAT's AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING

Antimatter is similar to normal matter except the charges on the subatomic particles are reversed. So an anti-electron or a positron, is the same as an electron but with a positive, rather than a negative, charge. Similarly an antiproton will have a negative charge.

Less than 100g of antimatter would produce energies similar to the power of a hydrogen bomb, if annhilated (it came into contact) with matter.

Random Joke of the Day

Stealing clothes from washing lines. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.