New physics + new psychology = new questions
Thanks again to Clint Sprott for the fractal to the left. I'll apologize again for being more than two weeks to post the follow-up to "bad apples." I had a lot going on with a book on pain management due to Routledge Press and the new semester at Chapman starting last Monday. It may turn out to be the case that during the busy times of the semester, I will only be able to post every two weeks, rather than every week as I had hoped. I'm going to post this whole thing too, even though it is pretty long.
Despite the distractions I legitimately had, I have also been procrastinating on writing this one up. I had originally intended to write a follow up to "Bad Apples," which would have been easy, addressing questions of how to manage internal and interpersonal conflicts. Instead, I am going to share an anecdote in the life of a new career academic psychologist (me) that I hope will be interesting and some day lead to some more formalized work on my part. In other words, this post will not include polished, useful information for any readers. Sorry about that. In fact, it will be unpolished and incomplete - living up to the spirit of a web "log" I hope.
The story begins at Chapman University, where I am an assistant professor, at the start of this new semester. Chapman has made some big hires lately in order to step up in quality from the top 10 of smaller western region universities into the elite schools at the national level. The latest of their grand acquisitions was picking up an entire physics department and more from George Mason University. The move is not unlike a basketball team purchasing marquee players through free agency. Because chaos and related theories are used across each of the sciences, and because I am a big fan of popular physics books, I assigned myself the summer reading of a book by one of these new professors, most likely our new Dean of the newly forged College of Science at Chapman (parenthetically we had a cantankerous 30+ minute discussion on whether "science" should have an "s" on it or not at our first faculty meeting of the year - 20% frustrating, 30% sad, and 50% hilarious IMO).
The book is called: "The non-local universe: The new physics and matters of the mind" by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos (Kafatos is the new professor). The book is small, but is a tough read - very dense and very smartly written. It combines philosophy of science with the latest experimental physics results on the wave-particle duality of matter and as the title suggests, non-local interactions found in physics experiments. Here is where I may butcher the physics, and wander into "new age" thinking. So since this is a public forum - (a) scientists please forgive me for technical errors; and (b) New-ager's please do not try to recruit me. I am an open minded scientific psychologist who read an interesting book, nothing more or less than that.
These caveats in mind, "Non-locality" refers to a number of well replicated studies in mainstream physics that have demonstrated that particles that were once united continue to remain united, even when separated by great distances - many miles apart. Imagine splitting a particle and sending the two halves off miles and miles apart. In principle, these studies demonstrate that these connections would occur even if the distances were infinite. If you do some act of measurement on one part of the particle, the other part will show an effect from this measurement. And the effect will occur instantaneously. There can be no signaling, no information sent from one particle to the other, not without going faster than the speed of light, at infinite speed in fact. It is like the distance between the two parts is not really there.
In many dense pages, they connect these results to other similar lines of evidence from mathematics and physics. Most of the examples came from nonlinear dynamics theories (chaos, complexity, self-organization, and so on covered in my prior blogs). You see, the new systems theories carry heavy philosophical implications, and they knock classical science (reductionism, Newton's clocklike universe, and so on) on its butt. This is why I keep saying with so much certainty that the psychology of the bell curve (independent events) and linear relationships (strait line one directional cause and effect) is so uninteresting and insignificant.
Anyway, they got into the "wave-particle dualities" from Schrodinger and Heisenberg, in which the act of observing a wave turns it into a particle, and in which it is impossible to ever know the position AND the momentum of a particle at the same time. They also got into a bit of "fuzzy set theory," in which one may prove mathematically that A may be equal to B and also not equal to B at the same time, violating the foundation of classical mathematics dating back to Aristotle. Overall, their focus was on the longstanding debate between Einstein and Bohr. Einstein famously argued that ‘God does not play dice' with the universe, while Bohr argued that accumulating experimental results in quantum physics were correct, indicating that there are hard and fast limitations to the ability to ever understand the entire universe objectively.
I remained slightly on Einstein's side while reading the book, to be honest, even though he was wrong it seems. And I became interested in what I thought was a possible solution to wave-particle duality. Essentially, very small bits of matter (particles, strings, whatever) are best described mathematically as waves. But when they are observed, they appear as a particle. My proposed solution was that time depends not only on velocity (i.e., Einstein's "theory of relativity"), but also on size, or scale. So very fast moving matter relatively would slow time down, and very big things relatively would have slower time. The solution here would be that on the quantum level of the very small, matter would exist as a wave, a particle moving very quickly across some attractor space. But at our big human elephant size scale, quantum time would appear to freeze when we try to observe this wave, leaving us only ever to detect experimentally a frozen, static particle. The metaphor is a movie, which looks like it is moving only when moving quickly. If you grab a film reel and it stops, you see that it is just a single frame. Waves are animated particles.
So when I saw that our new physics department chair, Jeff Tollaksen, was talking about this stuff in a lunch presentation last week at our start of the year faculty conference I was excited to grab him afterward and ask if I had solved the Einstein Bohr debate or not, and figuring I had not (I'm not quite that cocky actually), why not? I got even more excited when Jeff started presenting on non-locality occurring not just over great spans of space, but also across different periods of TIME. He was suggesting that you could change the outcome of some physical measurement at the quantum scale at a time in the past, based upon how you did some measurement at a later point in time. Paraphrasing him: ‘It appears that on the quantum scale, not only does the present affect the future, but the future has an effect on the past.'
Please keep in mind at this point that these are hard-core mainstream physicists. This is not at all from the fringe. And their results are based on repeated experiments, even technology already in use that uses such time warps. All of this seemed to fit well with my thinking: that size "scales" with time. Essentially, our act of observation at this very slow scale we live in has already happened long ago at the speedy quantum level. If anyone ever watched the Speedy Gonzalez cartoons as a kid, it's like when speedy gets El Gato (the cat) to hit himself in the face by repositioning things while the slower El Gato is preparing to pounce. Andale!
So I grabbed Jeff by the stack of pizza's we had for lunch (good choice Chapman - yum!) and asked him if I had solved wave particle duality or not. He paused a pretty long time, and tried to find the words to answer telling me it was an interesting question. I don't think he was just stymied by my lack of knowledge, or that he was just trying to be nice. That said, I don't think I have solved the issue. His basic answer, what I could follow, was "yes," this was possible, but that the ultimate truths would be much more far-out than just that.
