The Sirag Numbers

Saul-Paul Sirag, a "hippie that saved physics"

Yesterday, I issued a challenge to my physicist friends to solve a problem that, as Jeffrey Bub informed me, does not even exist. My challenge was based on the fact that for quantum spins 1/2 and 1, the squares of the spin components J(x), J(y), J(z) commute although the spin components themselves do not. I erroneous believed that this result was TRUE FOR ALL SPINS--what I called the "Commutation Conjecture" and asked for either a proof of this conjecture or a refutation. Within a few hours Jeffrey Bub (physicist at University of Maryland) replied that this conjecture was false and that no one in the field had ever believed otherwise. Casey Blood (physicist formerly at Rutgers) also sent a refutation a few minutes later. This contest is now closed.

My so-called "challenge" was a mistake from the start, but it led to an interesting discovery--the "Sirag Numbers"--named after my colleague Saul-Paul Sirag now living in Eugene, Oregon. Conversations with Saul-Paul concerning the quantum spin operators spurred my own refutation of the "Commutation Conjecture" that invokes a brand-new set of numbers.

If we assume that the Commutation Conjecture is true--that for every spin J, the operators J(x)^2, J(y)^2, J(z)^2 commute, then these spin squares are simultaneously observable. And furthermore these three observables must add up to J(J+1).

Now define the Sirag number J* such that the spin squared components of J* no matter how selected cannot be made to sum to J(J+1). If a Sirag number exists then the Commutation Conjecture is refuted because it leads to a contradiction.

Proof that "3" is a Sirag Number (ie, that its spin components squared cannot add up to 3(3+1)

The spin components of a spin-3 system are 3, 2, 1, 0, -1, -2, -3.

The squares of these components are 9, 4, 1 and 0.

It is impossible (by inspection) for 3 of these numbers to sum to 12.

Thus 3 is a Sirag number and the Commutation Conjecture is refuted.

Several questions immediately present themselves:

1. Is the number of Sirag Numbers finite or infinite?
2. Does an algorithm exist for calculating all J*?
3. Have these numbers been discovered before?
4. Is "137" a Sirag Number?

A little research shows that "3/2" is the smallest Sirag Number and that "3", "7/2" and "12" also belong in the class of Sirag Numbers. Today the largest known Sirag Number is "12" but that record is not likely to stand for long.

[Breaking news: the Sirag Numbers have been redefined to exclude 1/2 integer values; "3" has been shown NOT to be a Sirag Number; Mark Buchanan, president of Optical Alchemy, using an ad hoc
iPad app, has declared the lowest THREE Sirag Numbers to be 12, 15 and 19.

The Sirag Number J* is now officially defined by this equation:

X^2 + Y^2 + Z^2 = J*(J* + 1)

A integer J* is a Sirag Number, if no triplet (X, Y, Z) of integers exists that satisfies this constraint.

Saul-Paul's birthday is August 31 and Nick's birthday gift to him is this set of numbers.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAUL-PAUL!

[[ Sirag Number cognescenti will not fail to appreciate that the Buchanan Program, through some lucky circumstance, has revealed 1. J*(1) = 12, the first EVEN Sirag Number. 2. J*(2) = 15, the first ODD Sirag Number and 3. J*(3) = 19, the first PRIME Sirag Number. The BIG QUESTION now is: What is the value of J*(4), the fourth Sirag Number? ]]

[[[ Late Breaking News!!! On Saul-Paul's birthday, Mark Buchanan calculated ALL SIRAG NUMBERS between 0 and 1000. A partial list: 12, 15, 19, 44, 51, 63, 76, 83, 108, 112, 115, 140, 143, 147. Sad to say, Saul-Paul's favorite number 137 is not on this list, but the numbers 371 and 911 do make an appearance. ]]]

Direct from Mark Buchanan's smoking iPad: the first 92 Sirag Numbers:

12 15 19 44 51 63 76 83
108 112 115 140 143 147 172 179
204 211 236 240 243 255 268 271 275
300 307 332 339 364 368 371 396 399
403 428 435 448 460 467 492 496 499
524 527 531 556 563 575 588 595
620 624 627 652 655 659 684 691
716 723 748 752 755 780 783 787
812 819 844 851 876 880 883
908 911 915 940 947 960 972 979 

Fun with an Argon Atom

Photon-recoil bilocation experiment at Heidelberg

A recent experiment on Argon atoms by Jeri Tomkovic and five collaborators at the University of Heidelberg has demonstrated once again the subtle and astonishing reality of the quantum world.

Erwin Schrödinger, who devised the Schrödinger equation that governs quantum behavior, also demonstrated the preposterousness of his own equation by showing that under certain special conditions quantum theory seemed to allow a cat (Schrödinger's Cat) to be alive and dead at the same time. Humans can't yet do this to cats, but clever physicists are discovering how to put larger and larger systems into a "quantum superposition" in which a single entity can comfortably dwell in two distinct (and seemingly contradictory) states of existence.

The Heidelberg experiment with Argon atoms (explained popularly here, in the physics arXiv here and published in Nature here) dramatically demonstrates two important features of quantum reality: 1) if it is experimentally impossible to tell whether a process went one way or the other, then, in reality, IT WENT BOTH WAYS AT ONCE (like a Schrödinger Cat); 2) quantum systems behave like waves when not looked at--and like particles when you look.

The Heidelberg physicists looked at laser-excited Argon atoms which shed their excitation by emitting a single photon of light. The photon goes off in a random direction and the Argon atom recoils in the opposite direction. Ordinary physics so far.

But Tomkovic and pals modified this experiment by placing a gold mirror behind the excited Argon atom. Now (if the mirror is close enough to the atom) it is impossible for anyone to tell whether the emitted photon was emitted directly or bounced off the mirror. According to the rules of quantum mechanics then, the Argon atom must be imagined to recoil IN BOTH DIRECTIONS AT ONCE--both towards and away from the mirror.

But this paradoxical situation is present only if we don't look. Like Schrödinger's Cat, who will be either alive or dead (if we look) but not both, the bilocal Argon atom (if we look) will always be found to be recoiling in only one direction--towards the mirror (M) or away from the mirror (A) but never both at the same time.

To prove that the Argon atom was really in the bilocal superposition state we have to devise an experiment that involves both motions (M and A) at once. (Same to verify the Cat--we need to devise a measurement that looks at both LIVE and DEAD cat at the same time.)

To measure both recoil states at once, the Heidelberg guys set up a laser standing wave by shining a laser directly into a mirror and scattered the bilocal Argon atom off the peaks and troughs of this optical standing wave. Just as a wave of light is diffracted off the regular peaks and troughs of a matter-made CD disk, so a wave of matter (Argon atoms) can be diffracted from a regular pattern of light (a laser shining into a mirror).

When an Argon atom encounters the regular lattice of laser light, it is split (because of its wave nature) into a transmitted (T) and a diffracted (D) wave. The intensity of the laser is adjusted so that the relative proportion of these two waves is approximately 50/50.

In its encounter with the laser lattice, each state (M and A) of the bilocated Argon atom is split into two parts (T and D), so now THE SAME ARGON ATOM is traveling in four directions at once (MT, MD, AT, AD).

Furthermore (as long as we don't look) these four distinct parts act like waves. This means they can constructively and destructively interfere depending on their "phase difference". The two waves MT and AD are mixed and the result sent to particle detector #1. The two waves AT and MD are mixed and sent to particle detector #2. For each atom only one count is recorded--one particle in, one particle out. But the PATTERN OF PARTICLES in each detector will depend on the details of the four-fold experience each wavelet has encountered on its way to a particle detector. This hidden wave-like experience is altered by moving the laser mirror L which shifts the position of the peaks of the optical diffraction grating.

In quantum theory, the amplitude of a matter wave is related to the probability that it will trigger a count in a particle detector. Even though the unlooked-at Argon atom is split into four partial waves, the looked-at Argon particle can only trigger one detector.

The outcome of the Heidelberg experiment consists of counting the number of atoms detected in counters #1 and #2 as a function of the laser mirror position L.

The results of this experiment show that, while it was unobserved, a single Argon atom was 1) in two places at once because of the mirror's ambiguisation of photon recoil, then 2) four places at once after encountering the laser diffraction grating, 3) then at last, only one place at a time when it is finally observed by either atom counter #1 or atom counter #2.

The term "Schrödinger Cat state" has come to mean ANY MACROSCOPIC SYSTEM that can be placed in a quantum superposition. Does an Argon atom qualify as a Schrödinger Cat? Argon is made up of 40 nucleons, each consisting of 3 quarks. Furthermore each Argon atom is surrounded by 18 electrons for a total of 138 elementary particles--each "doing its own thing" while the atom as a whole exists in four separate places at the same time. Now a cat surely has more parts than a single Argon atom, but the Heidelberg experiment demonstrates that, with a little ingenuity, a quite complicated system can be coaxed into quantum superposition.

Today's physics students are lucky. When I was learning quantum physics in the 60s, much of the quantum weirdness existed only as mere theoretical formalism. Now in 2011, many of these theoretical possibilities have become solid experimental fact. This marvelous Heidelberg quadralocated Argon atom joins the growing list of barely believable experimental hints from Nature Herself about how She routinely cooks up the bizarre quantum realities that underlie the commonplace facts of ordinary life.

Alice and the Quantum Cat

From Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Few works of fiction have inspired more reworkings than Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. From Disney's 1951 animation, Tim Burton's 2010 adaptation. Grace Slick's White Rabbit, Alan Moore's Lost Girls to the definitive Annotated Alice by Scientific American's Martin Gardner, this little Victorian girl's adventures in a world of fantasy have captured the imaginations of millions.

"Why shouldn't Alice's story be brought up to date and used to illustrate the bizarre nature of quantum reality?" reasoned William Shanley, an East-Coast media personality. So Shanley engaged myself and a number of others to refashion Alice's adventures to explicate the mysterious world of quantum physics. Shanley's passion to be all things to all people brought more and more writers into the project each with their own point of view. Every author invented their own new worlds for Alice to explore and the manuscript soon became a giant kaleidoscope of altered states. Shanley sold the script to a German publisher who brought out a version called Alice Zwischen den Welten. Later a Japanese version appeared called Alice's Quantum Space with a beautiful dark blue cover showing a girl and a rabbit looking into outer space.

Alice's Quantum Space in Japanese

After her initial debuts in Germany and Japan, Shanley's brainchild recently found an English publisher in physicist David Peat's Tuscany-based Pari Publishing and yesterday I received a copy of Alice's quantum adventures in English. Because so many writers have contributed to this book, Alice's adventures span many different fields from quantum theory to modern cosmology to art history presented into twenty chapters. Because of its many different perspectives and styles, Alice and the Quantum Cat is not a book to be gulped down in one sitting but is best approached like a box of assorted chocolates to be savored one by one. My favorite chapter is (not surprisingly) one of my own called Queen Rosie--in which Rosie warns Alice about Science's Patriarchal Biases.

See for yourself. Each copy sold buys a can of cat food for Onyx, my very own quantum cat.

Quantum Alice appears in English

Schrödinger's Cat: Lab Results

From J Orlin Grabbe Site

Quantum Assimilation: Resistance is Futile

Mark & Heinz Pagels circa 1980

In Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature, his best-selling quantum theory book, physicist Heinz Pagels explains how an alien intelligence has entered the human world and is beginning to reprogram our culture according to its own inhuman logic. Here I excerpt from his Cosmic Code a segment in which Professor Pagels foresees our inevitable quantum assimilation.

"I think the universe is a message written in code, a cosmic code, and the scientist's job is to decipher that code.

If we accept the idea that the universe is a book read by scientists, then we ought to examine how reading this book influences civilization. Scientists have unleashed a new force into our social, political and economic development--perhaps the major force. What distinguishes this new knowledge is that its source lies outside of human institutions--it comes from the material universe itself. By contrast, literature, art, the law, politics, and even the methods of science have been invented by us. But we did not invent the universe.

In 1965 I was walking through the Boston Commons with friends and met an elderly woman with bright and lively eyes. She was wearing a homemade dress. A poet, she belonged to a small community which rejected the use of machines. The woman told me that her small group saw the human spirit as corrupted by modern life and by technology. She explained that a demonic spirit had come upon this earth about three hundred years ago, a spirit inimical to humanity, which it set out to destroy. The malevolence began when the best minds were captured. The conquest was all but complete, she said, only a few held firm against the final fall. I thought of William Blake, another poet, lamenting Newton's blindness.

The woman asked me what I did, and when I said I was a physicist I was greeted by a look of horror. I was one of "them", the enemy. I felt a chasm open between us.

Some years later I spoke to a mentally disturbed young man. Very agitatedly, he described to me how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth. They were formed of mental substance, lived in human minds, and controlled human beings through the creations of science and technology. Eventually this alien being would have an autonomous existence in the form of giant computers and would no longer require humans [as hosts.] Soon he was hospitalized because he was unable to shake off this terrible vision.

The old poet and the young man are correct, in their perception that science and technology come from "outside" the realm of human experience. They were sensitive to this perception in a way that most of us suppress. What is outside of us is the universe as a material revelation, the message that I call the cosmic code and that is now programming human social and economic development. What may be perceived as threatening in this alien contact is that scientists, in reading the cosmic code, have entered into the invisible structures of the universe. By the nature of the phenomena it studies, science has become increasingly abstract. The cosmic code has become invisible. The unseen is influencing the seen."

Schrödinger's Cash

Schrödinger's Cash: Minting Quantum Money

Money = Information
Because of the Quantum No-cloning Rule
Quantum Information cannot be copied.
Therefore the laws of physics guarantee that
Quantum Money cannot be counterfeited.
More on efforts to create Quantum Money
here.

Benjamin Bunny Faces Reality

In the early Eighties while working on a book about reality, I met Randy Hamm and his wife Gypsy Flores who were living in a quaint trailer park called Leprechaun Woods just around the corner from the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. Our families formed a close bond and Randy and I decided to collaborate on a project that would mix quantum physics and animation. This was in the days before computers, when every frame had to be drawn by hand and separately captured on film. And Randy Hamm was becoming a master of this now-archaic art.

Out of Randy's portfolio of original creations, which included many animated household objects (Randy had learned to draw fire from a retired Disney animator living in Santa Cruz.) and several weird animal and humanoid creatures spawned in Randy's fertile brain, I selected a rabbit character drawn hitch-hiking out of Las Vegas, and we named him "Benjamin Bunny". Randy, inspired by a picture of my eccentric physicist friend Saul-Paul Sirag, then created an Einstein-like character who we cast as Benjamin's mentor--the all-knowing "Professor" who speaks most of the lines in the film. Benjamin never talks; he just listens and reacts non-verbally. Such was Randy's skill that he was able with just a few ink lines to pull a lot of subtle emotions out of this simple-looking rabbit.

Our project was continually being interrupted because Randy, after graduating from UCSC, was being sought after to work on feature-length animation projects. His last movie project was as a senior animator for Plague Dogs based on a novel by the author of Watership Down. One of my last memories of Randy was in my living room in Boulder Creek. Randy was on all fours on my carpet showing me how a dog walks. He had drawn this action hundreds of times and had the motions memorized. It was hilarious. For the sake of his art, Randy had actually learned how to walk like a dog.

Unfortunately for his friends and family, Randy died in an unusual climbing accident shortly after the completion of Plague Dogs.

For the sake of raising money for the completion of our film, Randy & I had cobbled together a kind of story board and sound track which we had turned into a slide show. We put on a few presentations in Santa Cruz to promote the project and I took it to Esalen to show participants in some of the quantum physics seminars led there by myself, by the real Saul-Paul Sirag and by physicist Heinz Pagels.

Recently, while searching for something else in my messy files, I ran across what remained of the Benjamin Bunny project and decided to post it on YouTube. This version of BBFR is dedicated to the memory of Randy Hamm and to everybody Randy touched and taught in his brief and colorful career.

The Age of Entanglement

Louisa Gilder speaking at Telecosm Conference

My physicist friend the late Heinz Pagels believed that the 20th Century would not be remembered for its wars or its Moon walks but as the century in which humans first encountered the "Cosmic Code"--Heinz's pet name for the mysteries of quantum mechanics. The Cosmic Code, according to Pagels, is the unhuman language Nature speaks that brings into existence the material world.

I am currently reading a new popular book (thanks, Earl Crockett) which retells the exciting story of humanity's initial discovery of the Cosmic Code--Louisa Gilder's remarkable The Age of Entanglement now available in paperback. Gilder's book is remarkable in two ways: first for her solid grasp of the quantum concepts and her ease of explanation and second, for her decision to frame these concepts as conversations between the great men who struggled to formulate and understand this almost incomprehensible breakthrough into Nature's storehouse of mysteries. Louisa does not entirely invent these conversations but assembles them from letters and unpublished papers. Her method gives an impressive immediacy to these ideas which mere exposition would lack. Louisa's technique gives one the feeling of eavesdropping on the private lives of the discoverers of the greatest of Nature's secrets.

One delightful example of Louisa's conversations involves two physicists climbing a mountain as they are expressing their frustration at Niels Bohr's new quantum model of the atom which seemed to violate every rule of classical physics they had so painstakingly learned in school. And yet Bohr's model not only worked but it worked splendidly, explaining detailed features of the spectrum of hydrogen that were previously utterly mysterious. On the mountain top the two physicists take a solemn vow--that if this quantum craziness continued, they would both drop out of physics. The craziness did indeed continue; it baffles us to this day. And the two physicists did not drop out but pushed past their confusion to aid in the birth of the new quantum science.

Unusual for a book about physics, Louisa's book is crowded with people. Most of my favorite physics heroes come alive here in sketches, descriptions and witty conversations--Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, John Clauser and John Stewart Bell and many, many others.

Louisa is a true mistress of metaphor. Many times I found myself thinking, "O, I wish I could have said that so well." Here is how she handles why physicists continued then (and indeed continue today) to work on the quantum theory despite its deep and troublesome foundational questions.

It became more and more obvious that despite some odd details, ignored like the eccentricities of a general who is winning a war, quantum mechanics was the most accurate theory in the history of science.

Erwin Schrödinger was the first to discover quantum entanglement--a voodoo-like connection that persists unchanged between two particles after interaction no matter how distant they are separated. Schrödinger, using the equation that bears his name, had no trouble describing one quantum particle moving in three dimensions of space, but when he extended his equation to describe two particles he got not TWO WAVES moving in three dimensions but ONE WAVE moving in six dimensions -- a description which choreographs their otherwise separate motions (seemingly faster than light) by what Einstein dismissively called "spooky action at a distance". Quantum entanglement, said Schrödinger, is not A NEW FEATURE of quantum theory, it is THE NEW FEATURE that distinguishes it most from the classical physics we all learned in school.

Louisa Gilder argues that just as the nineteenth Century was the era when the new theory of Thermodynamics and the practical development of steam engines teamed up to produce the Industrial Revolution, so we are now witnessing the birth of a similar mutually reinforcing interaction between the theory of quantum entanglement and the practice of quantum computing. We are at the very beginning, she says, of an era whose technology we cannot yet foresee. Assembling today the rudiments of primitive quantum machines that tap directly into Nature's Cosmic Code, we are on the brink, Louisa Gilder eloquently proclaims, of a bottom-up revolutionary Age of Quantum Entanglement.

Sketch of Erwin Schrödinger by Louisa Gilder

Is Realism a Dirty Word?

Martin Gardner before a domino portrait by Ken Knowlton

One of the most intelligent and delightful thinkers of our times is Martin Gardner, formerly the long-time editor of Scientific American's popular Mathematical Recreations column and author of an amazing number of books. For anyone studying the concept of mind-created reality, I consider this essential reading: Gardner's guest essay published in the American Journal of Physics: Is Realism a Dirty Word?

Is Realism a Dirty Word?
Every now and then a philosopher is smitten with incredible hubris. "Man is the measure of all things" was how Protagoras vaguely put it. For some metaphysicians, mostly in Germany, hubris mounted to such heights that they imagined the very existence of the universe depended on human minds. Only our shifting perceptions are real. If we cease to exist, presumably the universe would dissolve into structureless fog, perhaps cease to exist altogether, perhaps never to have existed. Laws of science and mathematics, the structure of fields and their particles are not "out there." They are free creations of the human spirit.

Instead of seeing our brains as feeble, short-lived ensembles of atoms dancing to universal rules, this curious view sees our brains as actually inventing physical law--in a sense, constructing the universe. J. J. Thomson did not discover the electron. He invented it. Einstein did not discover the laws of relativity, he fabricated them. The fact that such fabrications are successful in explaining past observations and predicting future ones strikes a cultural solipsist as uncanny, inscrutable magic. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" was the title of Eugene Wigner's best-known essay.

Now there is nothing unusual about philosophers holding such opinions because no view is so bizarre that some metaphysician hasn't defended it. The amazing thing is that in recent years a few working physicists have abandoned the realism of Newton and Einstein. "The purpose of this article is to refute the fallacy that reality exists outside of us," writes English physicist Paul Davies in his contribution to The Encyclopedia of Delusions. The theme of astrophysicist Bruce Gregory's Inventing Reality: Physics as a Language is accurately described on the book's flap: "Physicists do not discover the physical world, they invent a physical world...as the poet Muriel Rukeyser puts it, 'The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.'"

For decades John Wheeler has been telling us that sentient life exists nowhere in the universe except on little old Earth, that if the universe had not been so structured so as to allow itself to be observed by us, it would have only the palest sort of reality. "Quantum mechanics," he asserts...demolishes the view that the universe exists out there." Frank Wilczek, reviewing a recent book honoring Wheeler (Science, 28 October 1988) diplomatically comments on this remark: "The importance of Wheeler's technical contributions to physics gives his statements a weight that, coming from another source, they would not have."

It is a short step from Wheeler's social solipsism to the notion that science is not a progressively better understanding of eternal laws, but a cultural creation like music and art.

Read the rest of Gardner's essay here.

Does Consciousness Create Reality?

Schrödinger's Cat: 1/2 alive and 1/2 dead at the same time?

Does consciousness create reality? Seems like a big topic for a little blog post. But because I will be considering ONLY EXPERIMENTAL ATTEMPTS to answer this big question I can skip almost all the philosophical verbiage and cut to the chase.

When we wake up and open our eyes, there's the world. But was it there before we looked? The notion that consciousness creates reality (called subjective idealism) has a long history but only recently with the advent of quantum physics has there been any opportunity to put this important question to experimental test. Unlike classical Newtonian physics which appears compatible with objectively existing substance, certain features of quantum mechanics (QM) do indeed suggest that consciousness might play an essential role in bringing the world into existence.

QM describes the world in two different ways, depending on whether the world's looked at or not. When it's not looked at, QM represents the world as mere POSSIBILITY WAVES. When it's looked at, some of these possibilities become ACTUAL EVENTS.

Unfortunately physicists do not agree about what it means "to look"--and we call this fraternal disagreement the "quantum measurement problem." The physics majority believes that what is necessary for looking is "a machine that makes a record". But how does one go about building a solid record-making machine using only possibilities as parts?

Some physicists believe that "something extra", something outside of quantum mechanics is needed to resolve the measurement problem. Some have suggested that consciousness might be the magic trick that turns airy-fairy quantum possibilities into hard actuality. An impressive minority of physicists including John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Pascual Jordan, Henry Stapp, Robert Mills, E.H. Walker, Euan Squires, Fred Kuttner & Bruce Rosenblum have argued that consciousness plays a fundamental role in the quantum picture of things.

The mascot of the measurement problem is Schrödinger's Cat who is placed in a box with a quantum device that has 50% possibility for killing the cat and 50% possibility for feeding the cat. According to Schrödinger's own quantum equation, the cat is 1/2 dead and 1/2 alive until somebody looks in the box.

In the case of the cat, the measurement problem reduces to the question: "Does a conscious being need to look in the box, to make the cat alive or dead? Or is that question already decided inside the box itself by an irreversible process (record-making device) such as the breaking with a hammer of a jar of poison?

In the past few years at least three experiments have been proposed to test whether or not consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction. The first is a thought experiment due to Bedford and Wang from University of Natal in South Africa. Instead of a cat, B & W imagine a situation in which a quantum system either opens slit A or slit B in an optical interference experiment. In the case where the quantum odds are 50/50 both slits are open at the same time in the same manner as the cat is 50/50 alive and dead. Because both slits are open, an interference pattern should be observed. However if someone looks at the slits, the wave function collapses, only one slit is open at a time and no interference is observed. If B & W are correct, this setup unlooked at produces optical interference but when a mind intervenes the interference vanishes.

A bunch of us including Amit Goswami, Saul-Paul Sirag, Casey Blood and Ludvik Bass (Schrödinger's last graduate student) considered this problem for many months. We called our quest the AMY Project. After much discussion and calculation, the AMY team concluded that Bedford & Wang were wrong. No matter what happened in their experiment--looking or not--no interference would ever be observed. The B & W experiment, we decided, fails as a crucial test for mind-created reality.

A second approach to catching the mind in the act is due to Abner Shimony and his students at Boston University (see "the Boston Experiment" in Elemental Mind) and Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam. Shimony and Bierman propose the existence of a perceptual difference between you personally collapsing the wavefunction and you merely witnessing a wavefunction that some other mind has previously collapsed. To test this conjecture, they set up an experiment (see diagram below) in which two observers are looking at identical detectors and a hidden switch decides which observer gets to see (and presumably collapse) the quantum event first. This imaginative test of the mind-created reality hypothesis has so far yielded inconclusive results. If minds create reality, these minds apparently do not find it easy to perceive what this creation process feels like.

A third approach to testing the mind-created reality hypothesis is due to Roger Carpenter & Andrew Anderson at Cambridge University (pdf). In the C & A test, two observers both look at the same quantum system but Observer A gets a random output and Observer B gets an output that tells whether Observer A's result is true or false. Thus the putative mind-created reality does not come into existence UNTIL BOTH OBSERVERS SHARE THEIR DATA. So C & A have two separate channels by which consciousness can create reality: 1. break the code by sharing data or 2, directly observe the quantum system. In a wholly quantum world, there is no reason why these two separate methods of looking should lead to the same reality. But they always did--which led C & A to conclude in favor of an objective collapse model of reality.

To this trio of mind-matter experiments I should probably add my own work with the metaphase typewriter which was a quantum system (Geiger counter and radioactive source) coupled thru speech statistics to an electric typewriter. Inspired by Jane Roberts' Seth Speaks, I had hoped that the MT might operate as a quantum spirit medium and function as a clear communication channel for a discarnate entity as talkative as Seth. But no spirits ever took over my metaphase device during the year or so that it was in operation.

Does consciousness create reality? So far there is NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE from quantum physics that supports this bold conjecture.

On the other hand, so far there is NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE for the Higgs boson or for even one of the many, many new particles predicted by the Supersymmetry conjecture. Yet physicists continue to look for these things.

I hope this brief review of experiments designed to test the quantum mind hypothesis will inspire others to improve on them. Coincidentally the primary quantum system in every one of these tests was a radioactive source and a Geiger counter, a 100-year-old technology which seems as primitive as a flint ax when compared with the sophisticated quantum systems now routinely available in today's physics labs. Seems to me it's time for the mind-created reality hypothesis to be probed by light-sensitive CCDs, electron-tunneling flash drives, Bose-Einstein condensates, phase-entangled photons and the Heisenberg-uncertain qubits in quantum computers. Physicists, put on your hi-IQ thinking caps. Ladies and gentlemen, start your quantum engines.

Diagram of the Shimony-Bierman Experiment

Quantum Tic Tac Toe

Quantum mechanics is notoriously difficult to understand because our species evolved in a classical world. Even physicists who are familiar with the quantum math still experience this world classically. Niels Bohr believed that this would always be the case. "No matter how far the explanation of quantum phenomena transcends classical notions, " Bohr said, "the results of all experiments must be expressed in classical terms." In order to think like Nature thinks we must learn to think quantum-mechanically. But where can we go to exercise our minds with quantum experiences?

Recently Alan Goff, a researcher at Novatia Labs, invented a quantum version of tic tac toe which he presented at the unlikely venue of a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Perhaps Goff hoped that insights gained from playing quantum tic tac toe might lead to breakthroughs in space propulsion physics. Later he published an account of his new quantum game in American Journal of Physics which is primarily directed towards physics teachers and welcomes clear reviews and novel presentations of complex ideas. AJP is Nick's favorite physics journal.

Goff has a blog called Alan Goff's Entanglements where he discusses quantum TTT and other topics.

If you want to learn to play quantum TTT, the rules are published here, along with a Java applet that maps all the moves in real time.

In a nutshell, on each turn, a player marks two squares at once with two "spooky marks". One square can be occupied by any number of spooky marks, in which case the marks are said to be "entangled". The play proceeds, each player marking the board with two spooky marks until player A makes a move which creates a "cyclic entanglement". Then player B chooses how that entanglement will "collapse" into "real marks" that can only occupy one square at a time as in classical TTT. After collapsing the cycle (and all "stems" entangled with that cycle) B makes the usual "spooky move" on any remaining two squares that do not contain collapsed marks. The game ends when one or both players gains a three-in-a-row of collapsed marks just as in classical TTT.

Quantum TTT is in many respects a nice metaphor for quantum reality. Before observation, a quantum particle can be in two places at once and be entangled with other particles in an instantaneous kind of connection impossible in the classical world. In the quantum world as in quantum TTT, a "collapse" which depends partly on the observer's choice and partly not turns spooky possibility into concrete actuality. In both the quantum world and in quantum TTT, an action in the future can seem to affect the past, but in either case no time-travel paradoxes arise.

I live in a redwood forest surrounded by trees. Inside each green leaf or needle are trillions of chloroplasts containing two kinds of chlorophyll--antenna chlorophyll which is specialized for absorbing light energy and reaction chlorophyll which is specialized for using energy to drive the chemical reactions that build the tree. Mediating between the antenna CHPHL and the reaction CHPHL are an array of transfer molecules. Up until a few years ago it was believed that a photon absorbed by an antenna CHPHL tranferred its energy to the reaction CHPHLs via a classical random walk among the intervening transfer molecules till its energy happened to reach a reaction site or was lost. Now researchers have discovered that something analogous to a quantum tic tac toe game is going on inside every green leaf on this planet. Instead of following one path at random the photonic excitation takes many spooky paths at once till one of these paths touches a reaction site which collapses it and makes it real.

In the words of one of these chlorophyll researchers: "This wavelike characteristic of the energy transfer within the photosynthetic complex can explain its extreme efficiency, in that it allows the complexes to sample vast areas of phase space to find the most efficient path."

When you look up into the trees, can't you imagine a torrent of solar photons each triggering a spooky quantum TTT move that is efficiently sampling "vast areas of phase space"? Her everyday quantum subtlety multiplied trillions upon trillions of time in every green plant is one more reason to praise the goddess chlorophyll from whom so many of our blessings flow.

Schrödinger's Carousel

Every club has its mascot and among my tribe of physicists no mascot is more fitting than Schrödinger's Cat.

Erwin Schrödinger was a sophisticated Austrian, a reluctant participant in the Quantum Revolution sweeping through Europe in the late 1920's. Schrödinger expressed his displeasure at the new quantum world he was helping to construct by focusing attention on its strangenesses. He was the first to notice that quantum entanglement--an odd kind of instant voodoo action--was an inescapable consequence of his own quantum equations when applied to two or more particles of matter.

And he was particularly troubled by the curious notion of quantum superposition. In theory at least, an atom could not only be in state A or in state B but could exist also in a superposition state 1/2 A and 1/2 B with some "quantum phase" between them. Today this superposition principle forms the basis for quantum computers which instead of manipulating binary bits 1 and 0, compute using "qubits", quantum superpositions of binary bits.

Schrödinger tried to demonstrate the absurdity of the New Physics by taking the notion of quantum superposition to extremes. If one could superpose any number of atoms, as the equations allowed, then why could not one superpose a cat in two different states, say, alive and dead? Schrödinger showed, in a famous thought experiment, exactly how this might be accomplished and left us with an image of not just an atom, but a macroscopic object (covered with fur) existing at the same time in two extremely different states of being.

The quantum rules describe the world as waves (of possibility) when not observed and particles (of actuality) when observed. So Schrödinger's Cat maintains her twofold existence only as long as she is wavelike, that is only until she is observed, whereupon she departs her superposition state (and in a manner complete mysterious to physicists) becomes definitively either dead or alive but not both.

Schrödinger's Cat has been the subject of much theoretical discussion and a kind of informal contest among experimentalists to see how big a system they can coax into a quantum superposition. Superpositions of "big" systems have come to be called "cat states" as in the case of a recent experiment at Oxford University in which researchers placed 13 nuclear spins in phased-linked superposition--Magnetic Field Sensors Using Large Cat States.

Thirteen spins may seem a long way from a 10-pound pussy cat, but the recent production of Bose-Einstein Condensates has now opened the way to manipulate not just a few spins but a few million rubidium atoms into a single state and then coax that state into a quantum superposition. The mass of a few million rubidium atoms is comparable to the mass of a virus so we are still a very long way from being able to quantum-superpose cats.

A Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) is a dilute gas of atoms confined by electromagnetic fields and cooled to a super-low temperature (a few nanodegrees above Absolute Zero) until the atoms collapse spontaneously into the same quantum state.

A new way to turn a BEC into a cat state was recently proposed by three theorists (Thanvanthri, Kapale and Dowling) at Louisiana State University. Instead of confining the BEC inside a simple potential well, TKD propose to use a "sombrero potential" for confinement. In a sombrero potential the particles are trapped in the brim of an electromagnetic Mexican hat to form a kind of "moat of quantum waviness" around the central peak of the hat.

Now that you have an unmoving "ring of bright water" made of quantum stuff, the next thing to do is to get that ring to rotate by shining light that contains angular momentum on the ring. When the BEC absorbs the spinning light, it too begins to spin, forming a Quantized Vortex State, a million atoms all rotating CW, say, around the central sombrero peak. You can also get the Vortex to rotate CCW by illuminating it with light spinning in the opposite direction.

Now comes the Schrödinger Cat part. Compared to getting matter to superpose, light is easy. So now you shine a superposition of CW and CCW light on the BEC and a million Rubidium atoms begin to swirl in two directions at once--an odd state of excitation one might call "Schrödinger's Carousel".

Make no mistake, Schrödinger's Carousel is not a simple classical situation where half of the atoms are rotating in one direction and half in the other, but a truly quantum state in which ALL OF THE ATOMS are rotating halfly CW and halfly CCW around the sombrero peak. Cool quantum cat, man.

But wait, there's more. Because this experiment is carried out on the Earth which is rotating once a day, one of the cat halves finds itself spinning slightly faster than the other which gives rise to a phase shift between CW and CCW vortex matter waves that can be easily measured. The Schrödinger Carousel then behaves as an ultrasensitive gyrocompass that can accurately pinpoint the direction of True North. Nice Kitty.

The title of TKD's LSU article says it all: Ultra-Stable Matter-Wave Gyroscopy with Counter-Rotating Vortex Superpositions in Bose-Einstein Condensates.

Sombrero Potential

A Book About Reality

Quantum theory is without doubt the most successful tool for manipulating matter that humans have ever possessed. Over scales ranging from quarks to quasars not one of quantum theory's predictions (some checked to 11 decimal places) has ever been falsified. Much of today's industry--silicon chips, lasers, hard drives, flash memory, for example--would be impossible without the precise understanding of matter's behavior that quantum theory provides.

But this overwhelming success comes with a peculiar price tag: Use this theory; lose Reality.

The deepest unsolved question of quantum theory is this: how can we properly conceive a model of the world for which quantum theory is a correct description? No one has posed the Quantum Reality Question better than UCSC professor Bruce Rosenblum who says: "Classical physics could explain the world but got some of the details wrong; quantum physics gets all the details right but can't explain the world."

Quantum theory describes the world in two ways, depending on whether it's being measured or not. When not measured, it's described by a wave of probabilities (called the psi-function); when it's measured, it turns into actual particles.

The Quantum Reality Question resolves itself into two parts:

1) The Interpretation Question: what does the psi-function actually stand for? What in the world is going on when we aren't making measurements?

2) The Measurement Problem: what happens during a measurement when (in the theory at least) waves turn into actual particles?

A successful Quantum Reality would tell us: 1) what the world is like when it's not looked at and 2) how the act of looking changes the unobserved world into the world we see.

In my book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics I consider eight candidate models for a viable way of conceptualizing the world including Hugh Everett's Many-Universe Model (QR #4) and Werner Heisenberg's version (QR #8).

In Everett's Many-Universe Model, the psi-function describes not possibilities but actualities--Everything that can happen really does happen in one universe or another. That's what's going on in the world when you don't look. When you look, the universe you happen to be in splits into all possible outcomes of the measurement you chose to make but you are conscious of inhabiting only one of these branching paths. As preposterous as this model appears it ranks as the most detailed and mathematically consistent model of Quantum Reality yet put forth. The fact that such an outlandish model of reality is taken seriously by smart people is a measure of how desperate physicists have become in their quest to solve the Quantum Reality Question.

Heisenberg's Model proposes that there is only one world. But when nobody looks it's just a world of possibilities. Whenever somebody looks, one of these possibilities becomes actual. Heisenberg fails to tell us though, how the first real look happened in a world of pure possibility, nor does he say what a look looks like--that is, which sorts of interactions in the world qualify as "looks" and which are merely inconsequential dances of possibilities.

Unlike many popular physics books that trumpet the colorful successes of physics, Quantum Reality focuses single-mindedly on physics' most conspicuous failure--the Quantum Reality Question as the most embarrassing skeleton pushed way into the back of physics' secret closet. Quantum Reality explores in great detail a deep and glaringly unsolved problem located not in the hidden recesses of elementary particles or in some galaxy far away but right here at home--an unsolved mystery located literally everywhere we look.

None of the eight proposed Quantum Realities (and others since invented) feels right to me. No one today, I think, really knows how this world works. One easy way to fluster a physicist: ask what he/she thinks of the Measurement Problem.

Quantum Reality has been translated into German, Japanese and Portuguese. Nick gets about $1 in royalties for every copy sold. Recently made available (Dec 2011) as an E-book.

Beverly Rubik, PhD, in Italy

Unmeasuring the World

Nobody knows what quantum mechanics really means. We simply can't say what sort of world we live in if quantum mechanics is a true description. One of the most popular ways of thinking about the quantum world (due to Werner Heisenberg) is that the world unobserved is wholly different in nature from the world observed.

According to Heisenberg the world unobserved exists in a state of POTENTIA, a bundle of mere possibilities, tendencies to exist, a state of existence, in Heisenberg's words, halfway between an idea and a thing.

But when the world is observed, in what physicists call "an irreversible measurement act", one of these unreal quantum potentias turns real and enters the world as a ACTUALITY. All other potentias completely vanish as though they had never been.

POTENTIA before observation; ACTUALITY after observation: that's quantum reality according to Heisenberg.

Recently some researchers have been investigating under what conditions this situation can be reversed. What would you have to do in the world to turn ACTUALITY back into POTENTIA?

Early work along these lines goes by the name "the quantum eraser effect". Physicist and author Casey Blood sent me a nice web page on quantum erasure. 

In a paper published today in the physics arXiv, Andrew Jordan at the University of Rochester and Alexander Korotkov from UC Riverside have proposed to "uncollapse the wavefunction by undoing quantum measurements" using techniques more drastic than the quantum eraser. After a century of effort the quantum measurement problem still remains one of the great unsolved questions in physics. Drs. J and K propose to shed new light on the problem of measurement by investigating the inverse process of "unmeasurement"--uncovering the conditions under which solid ACTUALITY can be turned back into dreamy POTENTIA.

Obviously if this measurement is in your head some kind of amnesia must happen. You're going to have to forget the value of whatever variable you happened to measure as you very carefully return the system to its original unmeasured state.

The authors discuss the unmeasurement process in theory but also apply their thinking to a variety of actual quantum systems, including quantum dots, superconducting phase qubits, electron spins and polarization states. It appears that for these small systems unmeasurement is a realizable option.

The difficulties of achieving unmeasurement increase with the size of the system so it's highly unlikely that we could weaponize this process to create a Unreality Ray that infects everything in its path with a kind of atomic Alzheimer's thus returning formerly solid matter to the Taoist's original Uncarved Block. Unreality Rays are surely the stuff of science fiction; the future of J & K's "uncollapse process" may lie instead in a sort of friendly competition between physics labs to see just how big a piece of actuality one can really unmeasure. 

Let the games begin.

Gentlemen, deploy your tools of unmeasurement.

Steven Hawking joke

My car broke down the other day.

So I took it to a garage

And the guy says that he's a quantum mechanic.

I asked him if he could fix my car or not.

And he shrugged and said:

"I don't know. I have to look at it."

This esoteric slice of YouTube humor refers of course to the notorious Quantum Measurement Problem. In quantum theory (which has never made a wrong prediction) before you look, the world exists as a wave of possibilities. After you look, it's actual particles (called "quanta").

Also physicists are not really sure what they mean by "looking".

What does it really mean "to make a quantum measurement"? We certainly know how to make such measurements but don't know what aspects of the measurement process are necessary to bring the world into existence. "What does it take to turn quantum possibility into actual fact?" is still an open question in physics.

Quantum theory does not tell you what exists but only what you will measure. Furthermore the theory says that you cannot measure everything so you must make a choice (the so-called "Heisenberg choice") what observable you will look at. Only after you have made this choice does the theory give definite predictions for the probability of observing particular values for your chosen observable.

Next you deploy an instrument to measure your chosen observable and a particular outcome occurs--a choice that Nature makes (called the "Dirac choice") of one actual result out of the many possible results allowed by the theory.

In order to physically exercise your Heisenberg choice, you must somehow acquire a real instrument that is able to measure your chosen observable. This instrument may be as simple as a cell in your retina or as complex as the ATLAS particle detector (pictured below) at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. But if the quantum world is made solely of possibilities, where do such real (not merely possible) measurement devices come from? When and where in a purely quantum world, did the first measurement occur that was able to turn lots of mere possibility into some real actuality?

No one has expressed this paradoxical situation so well as Harvard professor Wendell Furry who said, "The existence and general nature of macroscopic bodies and systems is assumed at the outset. These facts are logically prior to the interpretation and are not expected to find an explanation in it." In order to work, quantum mechanics needs to assume the real existence of measurement instruments but is powerless to explain how their existence comes about.

In the absence of real instruments, the Heisenberg choice cannot be carried out. But assuming the existence of such instruments (which have somehow mysteriously achieved "self-actualization") what properties of such instruments allows them to actualize another quantum system--the system being looked at? How exactly do such instruments provoke Nature to make the Dirac choice?

Physicists don't have good answers to questions like these which lie at the very foundation of our quantum science. CCNY physicist Daniel Greenberger has compared quantum physicists to high-steel workers who are feverishly completing floor after floor of an enormous tower while the bottom of the building is supported by precarious scaffolding that no one wants to examine too closely for fear that the whole structure will collapse.

We house broke quantum reality
Taught Schrödinger's Cat to purr
Now ordinary life's as uncanny
As atoms ever were.

The quantum measurement problem: it's no joke.