HI
I came across this story in another forum, I in fact liked it, Is the universe this mysterious?
There is so less material which discuss these things seriously, The author himself of herself seemed to have chosen the cricket metaphor as an indirect device to delve into the baffling aspect of our reality.
When I came across the name "use-less-science" I thought this is the right place to discuss these things without feeling embarrassed. "use-less-science" x "use -more -mystery" = life.
The Professor and the Imp
(C) Mark Lee. 2007. Singapore
How many lives can a man have, how many more can he live at the same time?
R was a hard core materialist by choice, or at least he was one till his nightly swoons were invaded by strange sequences of dreams. Spooky dreams.
It was ok till these manifestations were restrained just to the nightly sky, to the stars and the moon, but such it was not fated to be, in time it leaked and seeped into the waking hours of the Sun...
Let’s cut this poetical crap and get down to business.
Now...You readers might be wondering as to who I am, and how can I know what I know. I am omnipotent, omnipresent, all seeing highly opinionated Imp. You have a problem with that? No! Good.
I know everything, or at least I know every thing as they happen and occur and so I can report ‘any’, and I mean any event to you as they happen. I may sometimes add, comment, insert, even quiz; Or for example in the case of the our specimen R, I may jump in, jump out, talk, question, inquire and hint (which by the way always misleads); What I cannot do is predict what will happen. So you can strike away what I said a few lines above about omnipotent, omnipresent blah blah blah...So who am I? I am a sutradhar; more so a rope climber trying to catch the tip of the rope that rises ever up to the tune of its own fate.
For example I can tell you that our professor whom we call R is at this moment leaving his flat. Oh! you don't know that he is a professor and that he teaches Particle Physics at IIT Delhi? Never mind, I assure you that you haven't missed anything..His life was a drab...There was nothing to talk about, now, its different; that is; from past few nights everything about him has taken an interesting turn. So relax, hang on as I take you for a professor’s day out..
Through my special powers I know that one of his student has bunked the class to watch first day first show Sridevi blockbuster Mr. India.
Now I am going to impersonate him in his class. I am after all an Imp and that is what an Imp is supposed to do. If you have any moral hang ups about what I am going to do, then you may very well leave right away...what do I care, go play gilli danda, or goti, that's what they call marbles in Mumbai don't they...Mungi for ants and kanda batata which always reminds me of my long departed friend Ibn Batuta.
Professors as you know are creatures of second degree blindness; They tend to see with their eyes on their palms where as artists suffer from first degree blindness. Among the artists the painters see with their minds, the poets see with their hearts, but both are blind. For example If I ask you to paint a portrait of a certain God that you haven't seen yourself, you are in my point of view painting blindly. Like the six blind brahmins and the elephant. I am sure you must have read the story so I am not going to repeat it here.
So, why do I consider an artist higher than our professor, any professor for that matter...it is because they are closer to the essence of Kalpana, they have no qualms that they confabulate, where as professors would rather commit suicide than accept that their elaborate systems are nothing more than carefully worked out confabulations.
And to what degree of blindness does an Imp like me belong; To tell you the truth, these questions don't apply to Imps, we are after all the confabulous confabulating at its peak. All that matters to us Imps is the timing. Everything that we do is timed precisely to achieve maximum effect over you serious people, you my readers. Its the mastery we excel in. Now sit back and enjoy the show.
************
Hello, Good morning; So where were we yesterday?
"Pauli’s Angels" I shout. "Yesterday Professor, I was reading your favourite book, and by the end of the night I was left with questions and I thought: Who else can enlighten us about these mysteries than our good professor?"
“Ok, if you are over with your flattery, then we can proceed to the topic.”
"Pauli’s Angels" I shout again.
"Yes Pauli’s Angels" the class erupts. I knew that they would, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that every living creature is intrigued by mystery, especially when you happen to be a student of Particle Physics.
"Pauli’s Angels" the professor sighed, "where to begin." I could sense nervousness crawl over his reluctant brow; This was one area our professor knew everything and understood nothing; There was a yawning gap between knowing and understanding, between explanation and insight.
"Einstein’s Anger", I quickly prompted quoting page so and so from the book, “especially where he holloed like a child at the mention that if one has to take the findings of new physics as facts, then it implied that reality is observer-created.”
“Aha”, the professor said, quoting Einstein, “‘I cannot imagine, that a mouse could drastically change the universe by merely looking at it.’ Einstein would from that day onwards challenge and polemicize the very fundamentals upheld by the new physicist who according to him ‘were attempting to restore man (and mouse) to the center of the cosmos from where Copernicus had ousted them nearly five hundred years ago’. ‘The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject,’ maintained Einstein, ‘is the basis of all natural science.’ And ‘If’” professor stressed, “‘The findings of this new physics were true, and its premises provable, then it was bound to have dreadful consequences for the future of science. That is if one accepts that there are interconnections that somehow communicate faster than the speed of light, which implies that at the fundamental level of our existence everything is instantaneously connected, which meant that ‘space and time’ are illusions and that ‘distance’ a semblance.’ For Einstein,” he continued, “nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Over time he started using strange words to describe the essence of this new physics as ‘voodoo like’ “like telepathy’ ‘it's spooky’ ‘it's ghostlike’. His last words in his biography were, ‘On this I absolutely stand firm. The world is not like this’. But then just ten years after his death one of the most famous physicist John Bell showed that the world must be like this. Its not as if there are two realities one where Newtonian and Einsteinian laws operate with their iron fist, where nothing goes faster than the speed of light, but rather what the new physics was saying is that everything is non-local, instantaneous and dependent on our observations and actions. We and our world, were deeply entangled with each other.”
“What makes this book such an exciting piece of written document”, the professor continued spewing superlatives: The most exciting blah blah in the history of mankind, blah blah; that his blah blah had started to bore me. And, when I get bored, I make sure that I bore you all.
“There are 4 core areas,” I shouted back, “‘The double slit’, the ‘EPR’, the ‘Bell paradox’ and the 4th ‘the observer with his senses’.”
“There is no 4th” he corrected me.
“But the fourth,” I said, “is the most important, without it the very issue under preview becomes a meaningless mindfuck game.”
“Mind your language” said the professor “and If you are so knowledgeable as you are pretending to be today, why don't you come up here and lecture us on this.”
“Certainly” I said. This was the opportunity I have been waiting for all along. I don't care if you are bored to death by my Impish philosophy and pipish interpretation of the current state of your physics. To blah blah to an audience has its own tongue watering charm.
“The mystery” I beamed “as quoted by our earnest Professor had led Einstein to object to the idea of an observer-created reality. The new physicist were rather quick to counter Einstein's objection by saying: quote ‘that the actual situation is quite the other way around. It is not so much the system,’ they said, ‘which is affected by an observation, as the observer who becomes correlated to the system.’ unquote. The moral of their story to Einstein was simple: quote ‘if you don't want to split, stop looking at attribute-laden systems’ unquote.”
I can assure you that the professor understood nothing of it. In my humble opinion he is just a bundle of quotes parading itself as acade[mia]. Like a bird who lives and feed on macacademician nuts.
“Pauli,” I continued - “was sympathetic to Einstein”. His advice to everyone was: quote ‘One should no more wrack one's brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about, exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle.’ unquote. What was at stake here is the very fabric that underlies all reality, the fundamental nature of matter. There was no doubt that existence at its most fundamental level behaved unusually strange; but what he and Einstein were lobbying was that this new physics cannot be taken as a complete description of reality. According to Pauli’s ‘exclusion principle’: quote ‘two angels cannot occupy the same space, so the question of how many angels can sit on the head of a needle is best left unasked’ unquote.”
“According to new physics, a particle exist in a state of super-position till an observer related phenomena collapses it to one of its definite positions or velocity.
Consider this example: We all know that Murlidharan is an ace spinner of balls, his googlies have left the top batsmen world around twisting their eyeball into knots. But lets for the sake of argument assume that we have a Super Tendulkar who can watch the whole bowling in slow-motion, he can then determine from the angle of its initial spin where the ball is going to turn after it pitches and thus go for his big hit.”
I paused and looked around, the students were all enthralled, and what else did I want, I was enjoying every moment, every second, every word I was vomiting.
“Now imagine” I continue, “we have a Super Murlidharan and he balls super googlies, his fingers seems to twist and turn in all direction at the same time and so no matter what our Super Tendulkar does he has no way to determine the initial spin value of the ball, but here is the mysterious part, not only could he not determine its spin, but the ball after pitching seems to mysteriously split into many ... It seemed to be pitching everywhere, as if the super googly has forced the ball to split into as many possible balls each going in all possible direction: simultaneously. This even for a Super Tendulkar is bad news, for no matter where he swings, he is in trouble. But just about the same time our boys at the defence Lab come up with a measuring device called googly buster; And guess what, they choose the on going series between Super Murli and Super Tendulkar to test their findings. When they placed this device to the left or right of Tendulkar, they found that the ball would now pitch straight or turns either to the left or right behaving just like a normal googly. It was now clear that as soon as they switched this device on, the very act of doing so made the ball aware that it was being studied and so it would instantly jump out of its super googly state and start behaving like a normal ball. But, when they removed the device from the pitch, then the ball would happily split and go crazy. It seemed that the act of measuring somehow forced the ball out of its super googly state or for the lack of better words, one could say that it chose to behave in an ordinary way.”
“What Pauli was saying all the while is this, quote ‘if you cannot measure the spin about different axis, what's the point in trying to wrack our brains whether the ball has a definite spin or that it is in a state of indeterminism and spinning in all axis simultaneously. unquote.” What it meant was that if all we can ever know is that the ball either spins right of left after we place the googly buster, its best for us to remain silent about things whose state we can at best only speculate, that is, the direction and axis of its spin prior to its pitch.
“But by speaking about the unspeakable John Bell like a magician altered the very axis and direction of history. He argued,” I said quoting from another famous text ”quote, ‘that, if you can't actually determine the spin of Super Murli’s googly about more than one axis, still, if in fact it has a definite spin about all axis, then there are testable, observable consequences of that spin; Bell found that there are important and far reaching consequences connected with a particle having definite spin values. By using axis at three angles, He showed how one could after all count Pauli's angels.’ unquote.”
“The results were even bizarre; for example, suppose we have two pitches facing each other in a line, and our Super Murli could ball both ways, that is he releases two balls that flies in the opposite direction, one onto the front pitch and one to his back and we by some magic bring in not one Tendulkar, but two, each batting front and back. Now, after our Super Murli has released the ball, that is the ball has already left his fingers, one of the Tendulkars, for example the one in the front decides to install on the these new googly buster on his side..meanwhile the ball has left Murlis fingers, and as it comes close to the buster, Tendulkar switches it on, makes his guess and takes a swing at it; but here is the weird part, as you know that we have not placed any googly buster on the opposite pitch, so there is nothing there to help the other Tendulkar;” I pause, there is pin drop silence in the class. “Ahem” I clear my throat and continue, “ Well, as we have seen, once the first Tendulkar switches the device on, the ball immediately spins to the left...now for the freaky part, this is bizarreee...Ok, when the ball bowled to the first Tendulkar turned to the left, at that very moment the other ball instantaneously morph's itself out of its super googly state and also turns to the left. It was now obvious to our new physicists that the two balls axis of spin were somehow entangled and so in the new physics”, I continue quoting, “the act of measuring one particle ‘compels’ the other, possibly distant particle (even several miles apart) to snap out of the haze of probability spin positions and take on a definitive spin value -a value that precisely matches the spin of its distant companion.”
“It means,” I continue “that they seemed to be communicating faster than the speed of light and this spooky behaviour for Einstein was simply unacceptable.”
“To Einstein It seemed that this new physics had thrown away the baby with the bathwater, they had exchanged the truth for the sake of mere appearance, and the talks surrounding its reality sounded less like the science he knew and more like the Hindu concept of Illusion; For him, accepting the present state of physics made no sense, because physics was something synonymous with demonstrable certainties; its methods were ordered measurements and solid proofs; he was certain that the universe was coherent, consistent and governed by Logos; for him when it came to the Laws of the universe, he snapped: quote, ‘God doesn't play dice’ unquote; for him: quote,‘something was seriously wrong’ unquote, even though: quote ’the world seems as if to exists in some strange and indescribable state when no one was looking at it. And then in some mysterious way when we did look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone was trying to pull something over our eyes’ unquote.”
"But if this was weird consider this. When the balls flew from the fingers of our Super Murli, at that moment, it seemed to them that the world split into many worlds, each parallel world representing a definite possibility, a definite outcome; but as soon as the ball close in and the device was switched on, at that very instant, all the possible worlds collapsed to just one of its definite physical state, that is, the ball then snapped out of its super googly position and spun either to the right or to the left". The world I boomed "is expanding and collapsing at each given instant, at every instant, there are billions of Murlis and Tendulkars, and in every one of these worlds, either the ball is hit for a 6, a 4 or Tendulkar is bowled out."
I waited for a possible reaction either from the professor or the students. None...what a bunch of fools. “Any way” I concluded, “that's all there is to Pauli’s Angels, and don't ask me for explanations, I have none. Now the professor can return to more mundane and practical things such as superconduction and ground state anomaly.”
************
It was really smart of me, I mean the particle physics and the cricket match ‘pau bhaji’. I also have a feeling that they believed in my cricket harangue.
What the professor and students are not aware is that their ini-mini-tiny little classroom is not the only world they inhabit at any given moment. I hence forth declare that we are surrounded by worlds, we walk through them; and still we never experience any of them because our basic inner sense apparatus always remains locked into the ‘tricone of language that allows only its own past to be projected into its future states and thus shaping its own present self awareness of itself and the world by first ingesting it from the outset with its own-most possibilities, thus locking and binding him in all sort of knots by series of evolving mantras that appear like inverted triangles.
You may be wondering how I can speak about these things with such great confidence; You forget my dear readers that I am an Imp, and Imp are creatures who have direct access to these worlds, that is, I can slip in and out of it like you slip in and out from one classroom to another.
Also don't forget that Iam a talkative Imp. You may complain “Bahut Bolta hai sala” But for an Imp who exist only as a voice within you, to talk is not a choice, but a necessity.
So...When we come to the 4th area, 'the observer agent', who also happens to be the ultimate detector, an observer for whom all this is a matter of concern and who according to the point of view of the new physicist happens to appear simply out of nowhere, but whose mere presence makes the universe dance into forms. It seems as if the Universe gives itself over to him like a devotee to his unknown god. Further, if their own physics is to be taken seriously than from that of an Imp’s, then it is plausible that the world they as well as you my readers know as yours is but a chimera spun by your senses. An order which is after all a result of a series of collapsing states brought about by the observer who is himself governed by blind memories and history. A history which may have no beginning or an end. According to my Impish philosophy, your body along with your mind is just entwined threads of blind information that keeps collapsing the universe to its own uncoiling blindness.
When you think about the moral and ethical consequences of your mere existence, it boggles ones mind out of its evolutionary sockets.
************
But there are things that even I do not understand, for example in all this holla-ho, I sometimes wonder where does this obnoxious Imp fit in..somewhere this obnoxious Imp has risen out of the sores and spits of all the accumulated dirt, absorbing in itself all the distortions and mischief that it at some point got caught in and locked on to this waste, making it, its sole projection. And if the wind could by some magic spell blow away all my projections including yours my dear readers, then would my gaze be any different from yours?
In my 'gloomiest' hour, I sometimes wonder if it can all be undone by merely changing the way I see things. But then, how do I see any differently than what has from the outset already marked and saturated me with its history. One does not see anything but always this or that..and what ever informs this as this and that as that.
An Imp, my friends, is a lonely creature, a creature of isolation and coldness. But there are certain advantages to its imp-i-ness. He after all in a certain sense remains protected by the evolution of his own twisted knots; for example he does not know what sorrow is, and so he is forever immune to suffering. Thus being an Imp has its own evolutionary advantages and benefits; On the other hand Imp’s don't dream, they don't know what sleep is, what it means to lie in peace, to be free, to experience the little joys that fill your sighs with songs and celebrations.
But there is one thing an Imp can do which you humans cannot, for example I can know what you are thinking, dreaming...I can even become a dream in your dream. Imagine that.
The End
