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22. comments and considerations
Early afternoon. You are a Macy's; Carol is looking for a new pair of gloves to lunch at the park via Potbelly's before other errands. The two inches of snow are off the roads; yesterday during the whiffs of snow (nothing like New York and Pennsylvania). You watched the first episode of "Midsomer Murders" (1997) on a subdivision of Amazon called Brit Box; another you want to watch is "Inspector Morris." You asked Kim to ask Paul to subscribe to the British "Acorn TV" and said you would pay for the series; those hopefully will not have commercials.
On another note – you have not focused on Grandma's Stories because you are hopeful Carol wanted to drive more, and if she does, she needs a newer car with modern safety features. She is attached to the Honda Accord, so that was your first research. The best safety for the price is the 2021 Accord Hybrid Touring with a negotiating price of thirty-three thousand. It gets forty-three miles per gallon on nineteen-inch tires. The car has lots of new safety features, including braking at slow or fast speeds, and it is the most fun hybrid to drive, something you both like best about the Accord.
Also, below, you have two articles; and would like a more metaphysical-like (the transcending of physical matter or the laws of nature) comment from your heartansoulanmind. I will underline points and comment at the conclusion of each article. – Ms. Havisham
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SCIENCE ALERT
PHYSICS
IN A MIND-BENDING NEW PAPER, PHYSICISTS GIVE SCHRODINGER'S CAT A CHESHIRE GRIN
MIKE MCRAE
11 DECEMBER 2020
"I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice. "But a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"
It's an experience eminent physicist Yakir Aharonov can relate to. Together with fellow Israeli physicist Daniel Rohrlich, he's shown theoretically how a particle might show its face in the corner of an experiment without needing its body anywhere in sight.
To be more precise, their analysis argues information could be transferred between two points without an exchange of particles.
The theory dates back to 2013 when researchers based in the US and Saudi Arabia suggested a kind of freezing effect applied to a quantum wave still might not be enough to stop it from transmitting the information.
"We found it extremely interesting – the possibility of communication without anything passing between the two people who communicate with each other," Aharonov explained to Anna Demming at Phys.org.
"And we wanted to see if we can understand it better."
The experimental model they base their calculations on is surprisingly simple.
Think of a corridor with one end capped in a mirrored door. In quantum physics, where objects aren't defined until observed, the door is both open and closed until it's seen, not unlike the condemned cat in Schrödinger's proposed thought experiment.
If a particle were to be sent down the corridor, its fate would also be a blur of possibility until its journey was made known. It would reflect and not reflect. Pass and not pass.
That's because the particle's wave of possibility has characteristics of any physical wave. There are crests and troughs governing the chances of the particle being found somewhere, and phases as it evolves over time.
Putting it simply, a part of the particle's phase describing its angular momentum, or spin, should change in relation to the opened or closed state of the mirror, according to the physicists.
Even when the particle itself should be nowhere near that end of the corridor, Aharonov and Rorlich found that it's almost as if the momentum should be capable of reaching out with a ghostly finger to touch the closed door, before carrying back a bit of information with it.
Particles aren't typically known to let go of things like spin or charge, to have them wander away and affect distant surroundings, no more than a smile is known to remain while a face makes an exit.
"If you're talking about a cat and its grin, that's very strange," Rorlich told Demming over at Phys.org.
"But of course, all of this has to translate back to elementary particles, and if an elementary particle loses its spin because its spin goes somewhere else – maybe that's something we can get used to."
Aharonov is no stranger to the Wonderland-like absurdity of quantum physics. More than half a century ago, he worked with the renowned theoretical physicist David Bohm on an analysis involving non-local effects on particles in electromagnetic fields.
In what is now named the Aharonov–Bohm effect, a charged particle can be affected by an electromagnetic potential even if it's confined to an area where the surrounding magnetic and electric fields are both zero.
Think of a sailing boat zipping along when the ocean is still and the air is calm. Of course, 'something' must be nudging the vessel, you could argue. Without anything obvious forcing its motion, your eyes would move to the horizon with a sense of wonder what else might be responsible.
Just what that distant effect happens to be is as perplexing to quantum physicists as it is to the rest of us.
For things to move, something needs to cross its location and tell it which way to shift, or how fast. Things don't just decide all by themselves how to act.
And yet we already see some decidedly "spooky" actions in quantum physics yet to be fully explained. Waves 'entangled' by a past connection can instantly resolve into discrete particles that correlate with one another, no matter how distant they happen to be.
Aharanov's explanation rests on a concept called modular momentum: a characteristic of particles that is hard to appreciate in great detail without a solid grounding in the varied math of quantum field theory.
Basically, unlike everyday momentum – which we can experience directly in terms of shooting bullets and floating bubbles – modular momentum has its place in the quantum world of waves of probability, as they ripple and interfere with one another through space.
This isn't quite the kind of momentum we'd use to describe how a pinball bounces about in a machine. But it is a kind of momentum that makes its presence known in how we calculate the possibilities of motion, even if the consequences of its actions are a little harder to imagine.
"Although it's very surprising that properties can leave their particles, it is not as surprising as to say that nothing happened and there was an effect," Aharonov told Phys.org.
Just what practical implications – if any – the groundwork might have will lie in the hands of future experiments and engineers.
For Aharonov and Rohrlich, the analysis aims to resolve the notion of what it means for particles to act locally, implying its properties – like the Cheshire cat's smug grin – might sometimes matter more than the whereabouts of its body.
This research was published in Physical Review Letters.
Selected and edited from - https://www.sciencealert.com/schrodinger-s-cat-gets-a-cheshire-grin-in-a-mind-bending-quantum-physics-analysis
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Selections of this article I underlined remind me of how the elementary particles losing their spin may be akin to spiritual properties losing their biochemical (physical body) properties – becoming less and more in the moment – very Alice-like. – Ms. H.
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SCIENCE ALERT
PHYSICS
PHYSICISTS SUGGEST ALL MATTER MAY BE MADE UP OF ENERGY 'FRAGMENTS'
LARRY M. SILVERBERG, THE CONVERSATION
11 DECEMBER 2020
Matter is what makes up the Universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists.
Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not made of particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is made of fragments of energy.
FROM FIVE TO ONE
The ancient Greeks conceived of five building blocks of matter – from bottom to top: earth, water, air, fire and aether. Aether was the matter that filled the heavens and explained the rotation of the stars, as observed from the Earth vantage point.
These were the first most basic elements from which one could build up a world. Their conceptions of the physical elements did not change dramatically for nearly 2,000 years.
Then, about 300 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton introduced the idea that all matter exists at points called particles. One hundred fifty years after that, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the electromagnetic wave – the underlying and often invisible form of magnetism, electricity and light.
The particle served as the building block for mechanics and the wave for electromagnetism – and the public settled on the particle and the wave as the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all kinds of matter.
This was a vast improvement over the ancient Greeks' five elements but was still flawed. In a famous series of experiments, known as the double-slit experiments, light sometimes acts like a particle and at other times acts like a wave. And while the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the Universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales.
Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity.
But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.
Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the Universe. Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave.
Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle is a source of matter that exists at a single point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that create them.
My colleague and I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.
FLOW AND FRAGMENTS OF ENERGY
Our theory begins with a new fundamental idea – that energy always "flows" through regions of space and time.
Think of energy as made up of lines that fill up a region of space and time, flowing into and out of that region, never beginning, never ending and never crossing one another.
Working from the idea of a universe of flowing energy lines, we looked for a single building block for the flowing energy. If we could find and define such a thing, we hoped we could use it to accurately make predictions about the Universe at the largest and tiniest scales.
There were many building blocks to choose from mathematically, but we sought one that had the features of both the particle and wave – concentrated like the particle but also spread out over space and time like the wave.
The answer was a building block that looks like a concentration of energy – kind of like a star – having energy that is highest at the center, and that gets smaller farther away from the center.
Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow.
We named it a fragment of energy. For the math and physics aficionados, it is defined as A = -⍺/r where ⍺ is intensity and r is the distance function.
Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the math necessary to solve physics problems. The final step was to test it out.
BACK TO EINSTEIN, ADDING UNIVERSALITY
More than 100 ago, Einstein had turned to two legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift – or precession – in Mercury's orbit, and the tiny bending of light as it passes the Sun.
These problems were at the two extremes of the size spectrum. Neither wave nor particle theories of matter could solve them, but general relativity did.
The theory of general relativity warped space and time in such way as to cause the trajectory of Mercury to shift and light to bend in precisely the amounts seen in astronomical observations.
If our new theory was to have a chance at replacing the particle and the wave with the presumably more fundamental fragment, we would have to be able to solve these problems with our theory, too.
For the precession-of-Mercury problem, we modeled the Sun as an enormous stationary fragment of energy and Mercury as a smaller but still enormous slow-moving fragment of energy. For the bending-of-light problem, the Sun was modeled the same way, but the photon was modeled as a minuscule fragment of energy moving at the speed of light.
In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got the same answers as those predicted by the theory of general relativity. We were stunned.
Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong.
The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically – and update the way people think about the building blocks of the Universe.
Larry M. Silverberg, PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING, North Carolina State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Selected and edited from -- https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-suggest-energy-fragments-is-the-best-way-to-describe-matter
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The above article reminds me of the physical attributes of thought, thinking of thought as a fragment rather than a whole. A thought would appear to be whole unless the thought leads to a question. In actuality, what is the difference between a thought and a question in their separate grammatic forms? Both are nothing in an existential sense. The meaning of each is not the thought; it is the endpoint, at least from a soul's perspective, and this triggers the heart and/or the mind, both also nonphysical. Ms. H.
2254. I'll end this here. I don't know whether the above comments by Ms. H. are reasonable or not. I assume they are because I understand the words in context, but the science (knowledge background) is beyond me. [Note: I did not make grammar changes in the articles above.]
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