Encounters With Quantum

Poster for Crane Arts Exhibit: May 10, 2012

I used to joke with my buddies in the Stanford physics department about the dangers of researching quantum reality. Look what a mess E = mc2 unleashed (atomic weapons, dangerous nuclear reactors, growing stores of radioactive waste) and that equation is essentially still classical and superficial--it doesn't really penetrate into deep reality. There are deeper mysteries than E = mc2--for instance, the quantum transition from possibility into actuality (P-to-A), which underlies everyday existence and which no physicist really understands. Messing with this process--the P-to-A transition--could lead to a "reality bomb" in which things that have already happened are simply erased as if they had never happened. Responsible governments have passed laws to keep Uranium, Plutonium (and marijuana) out of the hands of ordinary people because of the obvious dangers to civilization if these substances became widely available, but devices in which the quantum P-to-A transition is accessible are still not outlawed. At present anyone is free to mess with the fundamental process that brings this world into existence.

The Metaphase Typewriter is such a device. MT takes a fundamental P-to-A transition (radioactive decay) and turns the patterns of these decays into text and speech. MT explores the dangerous assumption that consciousness enters the phenomenal world by controlling P-to-A transitions. According to some thinkers, your brain may be such a P-to-A transition machine thru which "You" perceive and control (a part of) the world via this fundamental reality-creating process.

The Metaphase Typewriter is a P-to-A device which at present lacks a "soul" to animate it.

The Metaphase Typewriter is an open invitation for rogue consciousnesses, discarnate human spirits, alien minds billions of years superior to us in evolutionary fitness to insert themselves into our immature, childlike culture. Or human unimaginable forms of intelligence that will change our fragile culture in humanly unimaginable ways.

Construing MT as an "art project", Australian artist Lynden Stone has built and installed a Metaphase Typewriter at Crane Galleries in Philadelphia. She turned it on today. At the reception, crowds of sophisticated Americans will be sipping wine and socializing while the fundamental process that creates reality itself will be opening itself to occupation by any raw consciousness that decides to seize the day.

Congratulations, dear Lynden Stone, for accomplishing this feat before it becomes illegal.