The Matrix: Introduction to Quantum Weirdness

Could the reality we experience be a simulation like the Matrix?  Bishop Berkeley in his philosophical writings proposed a scenario three hundred years ago reminiscent of a Matrix, divinely upheld. Recent disclosures of Quantum physics have to come to strongly suggest something very similar.

The implications of Quantum physics have baffled physicists for a century. Science, rooted in the universe of Newton and his “billiard balls striking one another” universe of Classic Realism, showed all phenomena could be explained and predicted by natural forces working on matter. There is little necessity for a hypothesis like an Almighty God or any god for that matter. A universe runs like clockwork in this scenario.

In conjunction with that by the 20^th Century the universe was deemed to vast and eternal. Great balls of gas swirling in immense eons of time began to form a solar system and a sun with planets. If there was a God, he indeed was far removed. Earth was dethroned from being the center of the universe and eventually the image of man encountered the same denigration to a primate with elevated problem-solving skills.

In the late 19^th century science began to think it had pretty much everything about the universe explained. There was one tiny anomaly, black body radiation conundrum. That’s where solid objects, when heated, begin to glow red, then orange, yellow, white and blue. Under classical physics as an object, say iron, was heated the radiation was expected to increase incrementally in intensity with gradually shorter wave lengths. However at certain elevated temperature (5000k) suddenly the radiation intensity was shown to collapse inexplicably.

The search for an answer shook the foundations of Classical Physics itself, which envisioned the universe composed of solid, real particles being operated on by forces. And that’s the common popular understanding of world even today.

Max Planck devised a mathematical formula that formalized the observed Black Body phenomena; he was not sure exactly why it should. The best he could surmise is that light was emitted in packets or quanta, not in continuous graduations of energy.

It was discovered that speed of light was constant under a Michelson and Morley led experiment in 1887. The consensus of science at the time that light propagated itself in space through a medium called ether, like a wave through water. Surprisingly, no matter which way Michelson and Morley pointed their detectors whether forward the earth’s orbit, where speed of light should be faster, or behind earth’s orbit, where light should be slower, the speed of light remained 300k km per second, constant.

The assumption about the speed of light was similar to behavior on a moving walkway at the airport, when you walk with the walkway; your speed is added to the speed of the conveyor and vise-a-versa. With light the speed was constant no matter which way the detectors were pointed.  Idea of ether that 97% of scientists believed was discounted; once again in science consensus doesn’t account for much.

Some time thereafter, Einstein arrived at the astonishing counterintuitive conclusion termed Relativity that connected time, space and light in a way that belied common sense; physics began to get real quirky.

Physicists scratched their heads at a Universe in which the speed of Light has limits to it and attempts to increase our speed slows time and increases mass. What kind of universe did we inhabit? Science, oddly enough, began to lose ability to formulate answers.

But that was just the beginning of the peculiarity it turned out. Science was studying atomic and sub-atomic behavior at the same time as the cosmos. This study revealed that photons acted like waves when sent towards a two slit screen. The waves of light appeared to crest and cancel each other just as ocean waves do; an interference pattern of vertical bands of light and darkness appear on a surface.  Oddly enough other electromagnetic particles like electrons behave in the same way; they create interference patterns like a wave would.

Scientists were baffled by this wave behavior in electrons. They set up a detector behind one of the slits and sent just ONE electron towards the slits. Amazingly, upon detection the electron reveals itself as a PARTICLE. The electron is seen passing through one or the other slit, just as a Particle would do. Without observation the electron behaves like a WAVE and demonstrates an interference pattern of vertical bands of light and dark.

Prior to this observation what is deemed a particle is what physicists call a superposition, neither wave nor particle. It is the observation that determines the reality of the event. The so-called particle is everywhere and nowhere in Hilbert space, a vectored potentiality, until observed.

Additional craziness was encountered upon the discovery of entangled particles, a pair of particles generated sharing spatial proximity creating a correlated dependent quantum state. When separated, distance between them doesn’t preclude them from acting in conjunction. When one is observed, the other particle behaves accordingly. It’s as if they knew what the other had done. They were connected somehow. Einstein argued mightily against the idea that the particles were connected mysteriously at the time of the observation. His paper with Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) in 1935 proposed that there were hidden properties at the time of the initial creation of the entanglement that caused them to be correlated. Some thirty years later this was disproven by an Irish Physicist Stewart Bell in 1964.

Added to entanglement, Heisenberg presented his Principle of Uncertainty in 1927 regarding the subatomic world. Movement or position could be ascertained but not both. The micro world was fuzzy. Measurement of the velocity of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, alters it, so that a simultaneous measurement of its position is impermissible. This again makes little sense in a matter and energy world, where one billiard ball strikes another in a predictable manner.  

The Quantum world was strange indeed. There’s inexplicably a limit on the speed of light. Electrons and such can’t be determinately measured. Entangled particles can work together violating the speed of light.  A physicist might say if you claim you understand Quantum physics, you haven’t grasped its weirdness.

Quantum physicists generally throw their hands up in the fact of these puzzles; they tout the predictive power of what is termed the “Standard Model” of quantum physics with its milieu of particles, anti-matter, quarks (postulated but unobserved) and such. But the quirky, weirdness, aforementioned, they basically got nothing. The multi-verse hypothesis has become somewhat popular but it’s first unobserved and widely speculative.

At the beginning of the 21^st    century Quantum physicists began to formulate hypothetical scenarios that questioned Classic realism; a foundation science has been based on for centuries. Could we be immersed in a simulation and like fish swimming in the ocean not sense the water? In some sense the ancient Prophet encounters the Beyond in the Presence of God. Plato wrote about the Allegory of the Cave and the reality outside it. The person in a near death experience is convinced that they have chanced upon a reality far more substantial than we experience here. Like Neo in the Matrix, who becomes unplugged and discovers he was in an alien simulation. I’ll look to see how the Quantum physicist begins to uncover the clues of a deeply hidden simulation.