https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGsltKdHNkTXkQWNZXZjgMvzTTh

"Now, in a new study published in Nature, scientists have managed to spot quantum tunneling in what classical physics would deem an impossible reaction between hydrogen molecules and deuterium ions—heavy, charged versions of hydrogen. This is the first time that researchers have managed to experimentally confirm a theoretical prediction about the rate of tunneling in a reaction involving ions. “Quantum mechanics in theory should be able to predict this [rate] very well,” says physicist Stephan Schlemmer of the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved in the study. “But nobody was sure whether this was really true.”

***

"The reaction between hydrogen gas and deuterium ions is simple enough that it’s possible to predict the reaction rate with quantum mechanics alone. That is why Wester’s team chose to study this reaction: the researchers could actually check theory against reality. In the reaction, a molecule of hydrogen gas collides with one deuterium ion to produce a hydrogen ion and a heavy, deuterium-containing hydrogen molecule. But when theoretical physicist Viatcheslav Kokoouline of the University of Central Florida and his colleagues crunched the numbers in 2018, they predicted a reaction rate that was hundreds of times lower than the upper-limit estimate that was previously measured by Wester’s team.

“'[The results] disagreed so much with the experiments, we didn’t want to publish,” Kokoouline says. Worried that they had made a mistake, he and his colleagues repeated their calculation using three different theoretical methods and got the same result. It was certainly possible that the calculations were wrong, but “we tried our best, and this is the number we [could] provide,” says Kokoouline’s former student Isaac Yuen, who is now a theoretical physicist at Kansas State University.

“'[The results] disagreed so much with the experiments, we didn’t want to publish,” Kokoouline says. Worried that they had made a mistake, he and his colleagues repeated their calculation using three different theoretical methods and got the same result. It was certainly possible that the calculations were wrong, but “we tried our best, and this is the number we [could] provide,” says Kokoouline’s former student Isaac Yuen, who is now a theoretical physicist at Kansas State University.

"The problem was the reaction’s extremely slow rate, which took the Innsbruck team about 15 years of troubleshooting and tinkering to finally measure accurately. To do it, the researchers trapped deuterium ions in a cage of electric fields, flushed them with hydrogen gas and cooled everything down to an extremely chilly 15 kelvins. At temperatures that cold, the hydrogen and deuterium lacked the energy to react without tunneling. After waiting for about 15 minutes, the scientists measured how many hydrogen ions had been produced to find the reaction rate.

***

"Tunneling reactions between ions such as this one are thought to be important for chemical synthesis in the diffuse, interstellar soup of ionized gas that provides the raw material for new star systems. Because the interstellar medium is so cold, classical reactions are very slow, but tunneling is more likely—particles move past each other more slowly at low temperatures, which ups the odds of tunneling.

***

Here on Earth, capturing this tiny tunneling rate for the first time shows that physicists are on the right track with their quantum molecular theories. And it provides a benchmark for testing future theoretical efforts to unite chemistry and quantum mechanics. “[In] our regular world of classical particles, reactions can be understood with some very simple concepts,” Schlemmer says. "But this tunneling is just a completely different world. And measurements like this open this world to us.'”

Comment: quantum world is weird as ever but becoming more well understood and useful. I still see quantum mechanics as the basis of the universe itself. To view it an old way: not turtles, but quantum activity all the way down.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-beauty-at-the-heart-of-a-spooky-mystery/...

"For decades, the debate over entanglement was seen as purely philosophical, that is, experimentally unresolvable. Then in 1964, John Bell presented a mathematical argument that turned philosophy into physics. If your model of entanglement is based on locality and realism, Bell showed, it will produce results that differ, statistically, from those of quantum mechanics. This difference is called Bell’s inequality.

"John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger put Bell’s theorem to the test, performing experiments on entangled photons and other particles. Their research has confirmed that the predictions of quantum mechanics hold up. The experiments dash the hopes of Einstein and others that causes and effects propagate in an orderly fashion, and that things have specific properties when we don’t look at them.

"John Bell died in 1990, too early to see his ideas fully vindicated—or to share the Nobel Prize, which is not given posthumously. But he left behind a collection of influential papers, collected under the title Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Ironically, quantum theorists cite Bell’s utterances like scripture, even though his own views seem fluid, unsettled, riddled with self-doubt. He even disses his own inequality theorem, suggesting that “what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” Bell’s theorem is an impossibility proof.

***

"Bell once said that quantum mechanics “carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction.” He, like Einstein, seemed to hope that quantum mechanics would yield to a more sensible theory, ideally one that restores locality, realism and certainty to physics. My guess is that if we find such a theory, it will eventually turn out to be mysterious in its own way. The mystery might be unlike our quantum mystery, but it will still be a mystery, which cuts through our habituation and forces us to pay attention to the weird, weird world."

Comment: I agree. I think the weirdness is real and here to stay.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02602-8?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_c...

"...the many-worlds theory. Originated by US physicist Hugh Everett in the late 1950s, this envisions our Universe as just one of numerous parallel worlds that branch off from each other, nanosecond by nanosecond, without intersecting or communicating. (The many-worlds theory differs from the concept of the multiverse, which pictures many self-contained universes in different regions of space-time.)

"Six decades on, the theory is one of the most bizarre yet fully logical ideas in human history, growing directly out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics without introducing extraneous elements.

***

"Quantum mechanics is the basic framework of modern subatomic physics. It has successfully withstood almost a century of tests, including French physicist Alain Aspect’s experiments confirming entanglement, or action at a distance between certain types of quantum phenomena. In quantum mechanics, the world unfolds through a combination of two basic ingredients. One is a smooth, fully deterministic wave function: a mathematical expression that conveys information about a particle in the form of numerous possibilities for its location and characteristics. The second is something that realizes one of those possibilities and eliminates all the others. Opinions differ about how that happens, but it might be caused by observation of the wave function or by the wave function encountering some part of the classical world.

"Many physicists accept this picture at face value in a conceptual kludge known as the Copenhagen interpretation, authored by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s. But the Copenhagen approach is difficult to swallow for several reasons. Among them is the fact that the wave function is unobservable, the predictions are probabilistic and what makes the function collapse is mysterious.

***

"The theory’s sheer simplicity and logic within the conceptual framework of quantum mechanics inspire Carroll to call it the “courageous” approach. Don’t worry about those extra worlds, he asserts — we can’t see them, and if the many-worlds theory is true, we won’t notice the difference. The many other worlds are parallel to our own, but so hidden from it that they “might as well be populated by ghosts”.

"For physicists, the theory is attractive because it explains many puzzles of quantum mechanics. With Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment concerning a dead-and-alive cat, for instance, the cats simply branch into different worlds, leaving just one cat-in-a-box per world. Carroll also shows that the theory offers simpler explanations of certain complex phenomena, such as why black holes emit radiation.

***

"Nevertheless, non-scientists might have lingering problems with Carroll’s breezy, largely unexamined ideas about “reality”. Like many physicists, he assumes that reality is whatever a scientific theory says it is. But what gives physicists a lock on this concept, and the right to say that the rest of us (not to mention, say, those in extreme situations such as refugees, soldiers and people who are terminally ill) are living through a less fundamental reality? (my bold)

***

"What a wacky idea."

Comment: totally untestable, like debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

QUOTE: "'It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement," Ringbauer said.

DAVID: as weird as usual, but in our larger reality we don't experience it. Yet it is the basis of the universe.

dhw: I think we experience it in our larger reality as well. Books, films, scenes, situations, events must all have an objective reality of their own, but no two observers will interpret them in exactly the same way, although barring gross factual errors, their interpretations may still fit in with the reality they have observed.

Excellent point from an excellent author.

DAVID: as weird as usual, but in our larger reality we don't experience it. Yet it is the basis of the universe.

I think we experience it in our larger reality as well. Books, films, scenes, situations, events must all have an objective reality of their own, but no two observers will interpret them in exactly the same way, although barring gross factual errors, their interpretations may still fit in with the reality they have observed.

https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter...

"Researchers recently conducted experiments to answer a decades-old theoretical physics question about dueling realities. This tricky thought experiment proposed that two individuals observing the same photon could arrive at different conclusions about that photon's state — and yet both of their observations would be correct.

"For the first time, scientists have replicated conditions described in the thought experiment.

***

"When an observer in an isolated laboratory measures the photon, they find that the particle's polarization — the axis on which it spins — is either vertical or horizontal.

"However, before the photon is measured, the photon displays both polarizations at once, as dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics; it exists in a "superposition" of two possible states.

"Once the person in the lab measures the photon, the particle assumes a fixed polarization. But for someone outside that closed laboratory who doesn't know the result of the measurements, the unmeasured photon is still in a state of superposition.

"That outsider's observation — their reality — therefore diverges from the reality of the person in the lab who measured the photon. Yet, neither of those conflicting observations is thought to be wrong, according to quantum mechanics.

***

"The two friends of Alice and Bob, who were located "inside" each of the labs, each measured one photon in an entangled pair. This broke the entanglement and collapsed the superposition, meaning that the photon they measured existed in a definite state of polarization. They recorded the results in quantum memory — copied in the polarization of the second photon.

"Alice and Bob, who were "outside" the closed laboratories, were then presented with two choices for conducting their own observations. They could measure their friends' results that were stored in quantum memory, and thereby arrive at the same conclusions about the polarized photons.

***

"The authors of the new study found that even in their doubled scenario, the results described by Wigner held. Alice and Bob could arrive at conclusions about the photons that were correct and provable and that yet still differed from the observations of their friends — which were also correct and provable, according to the study.

"Quantum mechanics describes how the world works at a scale so small that the normal rules of physics no longer apply; over many decades, experts who study the field have offered numerous interpretations of what that means, Ringbauer said.

"However, if measurements themselves aren't absolutes — as these new findings suggest — that challenges the very meaning of quantum mechanics.

"'It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement," Ringbauer said."

Comment: as weird as usual, but in our larger reality we don't experience it. Yet it is the basis of the universe.

https://www.livescience.com/63595-schrodinger-uncertainty-relation-temperature.html?utm...

"In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg postulated that the more precisely you measure a quantum particle's position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa — a rule that would become the now-famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

"A new uncertainty principle holds that quantum objects can be at two temperatures at once, which is similar to the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, in which a cat in a box with a radioactive element can be both alive and dead.

"The famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat implies that a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time — a bizarre phenomenon that is a consequence of quantum mechanics.

"Now, physicists at the University of Exeter in England have found that a similar state of limbo may exist for temperatures: Objects can be two temperatures at the same time at the quantum level. This weird quantum paradox is the first completely new quantum uncertainty relation to be formulated in decades.

"The new quantum uncertainty, which states that the more precisely you know temperature, the less you can say about energy, and vice versa, has big implications for nanoscience, which studies incredibly tiny objects smaller than a nanometer. This principle will change how scientists measure the temperature of extremely small things such as quantum dots, small semiconductors or single cells, the researchers said in the new study.

***

"The researchers used math and theory to predict exactly how such superposition affects the measurement of the temperature of quantum objects.

"'In the quantum case, a quantum thermometer ... will be in a superposition of energy states simultaneously,"Harry Miller, one of the physicists at the University of Exeter who developed the new principle, told Live Science. "What we find is that because the thermometer no longer has a well-defined energy and is actually in a combination of different states at once, that this actually contributes to the uncertainty in the temperature that we can measure."

"In our world, a thermometer may tell us an object is between 31 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 0.5 and zero degrees Celsius). In the quantum world, a thermometer may tell us an object is both those temperatures at the same time. The new uncertainty principle accounts for that quantum weirdness.

"Interactions between objects at the quantum scale can create superpositions, and also create energy. The old uncertainty relation ignored these effects, because it doesn't matter for nonquantum objects. But it matters a lot when you're trying to measure the temperature of a quantum dot, and this new uncertainty relation makes up a theoretical framework to take these interactions into account."

Comment: Another addition to quantum wackiness, which is the basis of our reality.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/should-quantum-anomalies-make-us-reth...

"Kuhn pointed out, when enough “anomalies”—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change. We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.

***

"The problem is that, according to QM, the outcome of an observation can depend on the way another, separate but simultaneous, observation is performed. This happens with so-called “quantum entanglement” and it contradicts the current paradigm in an important sense, as discussed above. Although Einstein argued in 1935 that the contradiction arose merely because QM is incomplete, John Bell proved mathematically, in 1964, that the predictions of QM regarding entanglement cannot be accounted for by Einstein’s alleged incompleteness.

***

"The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime. It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”

"It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.” And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”

"The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies. This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories. Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense. A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves." (my bold)

Comment: Since mind/consciousness affects every quantum observation, the bolded statement above must be taken very seriously. Quantum reality may be God's mind at work, as if the universe is an extension of His mind.

QUOTE: “But there’s still significant work to be done on incorporating temporal nonlocality – not only in object-property discussions, but also in debates over material composition (such as the relation between a lump of clay and the statue it forms), and part-whole relations (such as how a hand relates to a limb, or a limb to a person). For example, the ‘puzzle’ of how parts fit with an overall whole presumes clear-cut spatial boundaries among underlying components, yet spatial nonlocality cautions against this view. Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?

DAVID's comment: Our universe is grounded in quantum reality. We will stay confused, perhaps as God intended, until we understand it, if we ever can. God must exist in the layer of quantum reality that we can currently only glimpse at across the wall of uncertainty.

dhw:If there really is a different reality out there which includes your God, I doubt if we will ever understand it unless he explains it to us! But what interested me in the above quote was “the puzzle of how parts fit with an overall whole”. This is the question which I think may pave the way to a reconciliation between materialism and dualism. And one day I'll try to tackle it!

Months of promise. Why not now?

DAVID's comment: Our universe is grounded in quantum reality. We will stay confused, perhaps as God intended, until we understand it, if we ever can. God must exist in the layer of quantum reality that we can currently only glimpse at across the wall of uncertainty.

If there really is a different reality out there which includes your God, I doubt if we will ever understand it unless he explains it to us! But what interested me in the above quote was “the puzzle of how parts fit with an overall whole”. This is the question which I think may pave the way to a reconciliation between materialism and dualism. And one day I'll try to tackle it!

https://aeon.co/ideas/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-check-out-entangled-time?...

"Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?

"The answer, as it turns out, is yes. Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn’t get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted. Previous experiments involving a technique called ‘entanglement swapping’ had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.

***

"The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

***

"The lesson carries over directly to both spatial and temporal quantum nonlocality. Mysteries regarding entangled pairs of particles amount to disagreements about labelling, brought about by relativity. Einstein showed that no sequence of events can be metaphysically privileged – can be considered more real – than any other. Only by accepting this insight can one make headway on such quantum puzzles.

***

"These findings drive yet another wedge between our beloved classical intuitions and the empirical realities of quantum mechanics. As was true for Schrödinger and his contemporaries, scientific progress is going to involve investigating the limitations of certain metaphysical views. Schrödinger’s cat, half-alive and half-dead, was created to illustrate how the entanglement of systems leads to macroscopic phenomena that defy our usual understanding of the relations between objects and their properties: an organism such as a cat is either dead or alive. No middle ground there.

"Most contemporary philosophical accounts of the relationship between objects and their properties embrace entanglement solely from the perspective of spatial nonlocality. But there’s still significant work to be done on incorporating temporal nonlocality – not only in object-property discussions, but also in debates over material composition (such as the relation between a lump of clay and the statue it forms), and part-whole relations (such as how a hand relates to a limb, or a limb to a person). For example, the ‘puzzle’ of how parts fit with an overall whole presumes clear-cut spatial boundaries among underlying components, yet spatial nonlocality cautions against this view. Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?

"Discerning the nature of entanglement might at times be an uncomfortable project. It’s not clear what substantive metaphysics might emerge from scrutiny of fascinating new research by the likes of Megidish and other physicists. In a letter to Einstein, Schrödinger notes wryly (and deploying an odd metaphor): ‘One has the feeling that it is precisely the most important statements of the new theory that can really be squeezed into these Spanish boots – but only with difficulty.’ We cannot afford to ignore spatial or temporal nonlocality in future metaphysics: whether or not the boots fit, we’ll have to wear ’em."

Comment: Our universe is grounded in quantum reality. We will stay confused, perhaps as God intended, until we understand it, if we ever can. God must exist in the layer of quantum reality that we can currently only glimpse at across the wall of uncertainty. Look at the diagram to understand how they conducted the experiment.

DAVID: Yes, acceptance of First Cause is a big step, but logical. "Why is there anything?". Whether theist or atheist something is eternal. What for the agnostic?

dhw: Some folk claim that the First Cause was the big bang, and there was nothing before it; others claim that an impersonal universe of unconscious, ever-changing energy and matter was the First Cause; theists claim that a conscious being was the First Cause. First Cause is whatever you want it to be, and consequently has absolutely no value in itself as an explanation.

DAVID: Then you have no concept that there must be a first cause?

dhw: Of course there has to be a first cause, and I have just given you three options. I mentioned First Cause as an example of “lofty labels and clever constructs” that explain nothing. Here is the context:
An excellent and illuminating presentation of one half of the story. The other half, of course, is that theism leaves theists to explain the unexplainable through a stranger-than-fiction narrative whereby, through lofty labels and clever constructs (First Cause springs to mind), an infinitely powerful and conscious being did not come from anywhere but has always existed.

Theists use “First Cause” as if it somehow supports their faith. It doesn’t.

Thank you for your view.

dhw: Some folk claim that the First Cause was the big bang, and there was nothing before it; others claim that an impersonal universe of unconscious, ever-changing energy and matter was the First Cause; theists claim that a conscious being was the First Cause. First Cause is whatever you want it to be, and consequently has absolutely no value in itself as an explanation.

DAVID: Then you have no concept that there must be a first cause?

Of course there has to be a first cause, and I have just given you three options. I mentioned First Cause as an example of “lofty labels and clever constructs” that explain nothing. Here is the context:
An excellent and illuminating presentation of one half of the story. The other half, of course, is that theism leaves theists to explain the unexplainable through a stranger-than-fiction narrative whereby, through lofty labels and clever constructs (First Cause springs to mind), an infinitely powerful and conscious being did not come from anywhere but has always existed.

Theists use “First Cause” as if it somehow supports their faith. It doesn’t.

dhw: An excellent and illuminating presentation of one half of the argument. The other half, of course, is that theism leaves theists to explain the unexplainable through a stranger-than-fiction narrative whereby, through lofty labels and clever constructs (First Cause springs to mind), an infinitely powerful and conscious being did not come from anywhere but has always existed.

DAVID: Yes, acceptance of First Cause is a big step, but logical. "Why is there anything?". Whether theist or atheist something is eternal. What for the agnostic?

dhw: Some folk claim that the First Cause was the big bang, and there was nothing before it; others claim that an impersonal universe of unconscious, ever-changing energy and matter was the First Cause; theists claim that a conscious being was the First Cause. First Cause is whatever you want it to be, and consequently has absolutely no value in itself as an explanation.

Then you have no concept that there must be a first cause?

DAVID: Yes, acceptance of First Cause is a big step, but logical. "Why is there anything?". Whether theist or atheist something is eternal. What for the agnostic?

Some folk claim that the First Cause was the big bang, and there was nothing before it; others claim that an impersonal universe of unconscious, ever-changing energy and matter was the First Cause; theists claim that a conscious being was the First Cause. First Cause is whatever you want it to be, and consequently has absolutely no value in itself as an explanation.

QUOTE: "Nagel, who himself is not a strict materialist, lets on that materialism is a belief system grounded, not in a rational examination of how the world is, but in a non-rational sensibility of how a person feels the world should be. The conflict arises because, as Heisenberg explained, "The ontology of materialism rest[s] on the illusion that . . . existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range".
"That leaves materialists to explain the unexplainable, absent the Cosmic Authority, with a stranger-than-fiction narrative in which everything comes from nothing through lofty labels and clever constructs.'"

DAVID’s comment: This is why I place our soul in the quantum reality level undergirding the reality we observe as I previously posed: Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 15:24. I firmly believe God's quantum consciousness runs the universe.

dhw: An excellent and illuminating presentation of one half of the argument. The other half, of course, is that theism leaves theists to explain the unexplainable through a stranger-than-fiction narrative whereby, through lofty labels and clever constructs (First Cause springs to mind), an infinitely powerful and conscious being did not come from anywhere but has always existed.

Yes, acceptance of First Cause is a big step, but logical. "Why is there anything?". Whether theist or atheist something is eternal. What for the agnostic?

DAVID’s comment: This is why I place our soul in the quantum reality level undergirding the reality we observe as I previously posed: Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 15:24. I firmly believe God's quantum consciousness runs the universe.

An excellent and illuminating presentation of one half of the argument. The other half, of course, is that theism leaves theists to explain the unexplainable through a stranger-than-fiction narrative whereby, through lofty labels and clever constructs (First Cause springs to mind), an infinitely powerful and conscious being did not come from anywhere but has always existed.

http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo44/the-unthinkable-universe.php

"Consider one of the carbon atoms in the wood of my desk. It has a compact nucleus of six protons and six neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of six electrons. Although the physical size of the atom is infinitesimal, the relative distance between the nucleus and the outer edge of the electron cloud is enormous—think of our Solar System, but on a microcosmic scale.

"The Solar System contains a huge amount of material in the sun, planets, and interplanetary media, yet physical matter makes up less than one part in a trillion of its volume. With all of that empty space, we could characterize the Solar System as a gigantic vacuum that contains a few impurities.

"Similarly, each of the gazillion atoms in my desk is a tiny "impure" vacuum that mysteriously gives rise to our perceptions of color, texture, and hardness. Yet that is only the tip of material world weirdness.

***

"Equally strange is the phenomenon of the electrons' "orbit." Unlike the Earth, whose orbit is slowly spiraling toward the sun, the electrons in an atom are held in fixed regions. But the real mystery is why, given its positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons, the atom doesn't quickly self-destruct. In fact, according to the laws of electrodynamics, atomic annihilation should occur in less than a microsecond.

"The stability—indeed, the very existence—of the atom suggests something supra-natural. But since the materialistic worldview does not allow for that, its adherents were challenged to discover a mechanism by which atomic stability could be maintained. However, instead of making a discovery, they settled for coming up with a term, "quantum confinement," which is a scientific label describing, rather than explaining, the phenomenon.

"What they did discover, albeit reluctantly, is that quantum weirdness arises because subatomic particles do not even exist in any objective sense. Rather, they are observer-dependent products resulting from our disturbance of—another descriptive construct, giving the impression of explanation—the "quantum potential."

"But get this: the quantum potential is neither matter nor energy; rather, as its name implies, it is "potentiality"—an invisible substrate that permeates the whole cosmos and provides the potential for being. Thus, when physicists talk about an electron, what they are really talking about is an existential abstraction described by mathematical formulae and probability functions. As quantum theory pioneer Werner Heisenberg once wrote, "elementary particles . . . form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things and facts."

***

"Over 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Anaximander posited an eternal, ubiquitous substance he called the "apeiron." Like the quantum potential, this apeiron was thought to be the fount of all reality.

"In the 25 centuries since Anaximander, we have come no closer than he did to gaining a fundamental understanding of this mysterious substance. Now, as then, questions remain as to where it came from, what fuels it, and why its creative ability is limitless. Is the quantum potential even a "something" in the materialistic sense?

"Those under the spell of materialism will answer yes, because any gap in their understanding of nature must be plugged with physical mortar. But since their "mortar" is neither matter nor energy, it is not physical. And because of its numinous nature, it cannot be observed. Rather, it must be inferred from its influence on what is observable.

***

"Nagel, who himself is not a strict materialist, lets on that materialism is a belief system grounded, not in a rational examination of how the world is, but in a non-rational sensibility of how a person feels the world should be. The conflict arises because, as Heisenberg explained, "The ontology of materialism rest[s] on the illusion that . . . existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range".

"That leaves materialists to explain the unexplainable, absent the Cosmic Authority, with a stranger-than-fiction narrative in which everything comes from nothing through lofty labels and clever constructs.'"

Comment: This is why I place our soul in the quantum reality level undergirding the reality we observe as I previously posed: Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 15:24. I firmly believe God's quantum consciousness runs the universe.

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/weird-quantum-mechanics-discovery-says-pushing-particle...

"Quantum mechanics continues to provide brain-busting discoveries as mathematicians find that quantum mechanical particles can move in the opposite direction of where they are being pushed. That’s like pushing a ball forward and having it roll back towards you instead.

"Scientists at Universities of York, Munich and Cardiff showed that on microscopic levels, quantum particles can travel in reverse of their momentum, exhibiting a special property called “backflow”.

"Researchers were aware of such movement previously but in free” quantum particles that don’t have any force acting on them. By using analysis and numerical methods, they found that backflow is always there, but as a small hard-to-measure effect. 

"What’s responsible for this surprising property? Wave-particle duality, which holds that every particle may behave as a particle or a wave, and the “probabilistic nature” of quantum mechanics where particle properties are not fixated until observed.

***

“'This new theoretical analysis into quantum mechanical particles shows that this ‘backflow’ effect is ubiquitous in quantum physics,” said Bostelmann in a press release. “We have shown that backflow can always occur, even if a force is acting on the quantum particle while it travels. The backflow effect is the result of wave-particle duality and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, and it is already well understood in an idealised case of force-free motion.”

"Dr. Daniela Cadamuro from the Technical University of Munich explained that while the scientists were aware of the backflow effect, it was always observed when no outside forces were acting on a particle, and the researchers showed that backflow continues to occur even with external forces present, meaning that such forces “don't destroy the backflow effect, which is an exciting new discovery.'”

Comment: Just when you think it can't get weirder it does.

dhw: So try stepping in front of a bus. (But I’d rather you didn’t.)

David: The bus has too many material quanta for me to try!

TONY: Just replace spoon with bus..

Brilliant! Thank you.