As the beautiful
evening breeze was blowing by in the beach... i sat beside the shore
staring at the beautiful red sky-line meeting the blue horizon of the
sea... and just a little away from me was another family with a couple
and their two young kids.. both boys. And i noticed a really
interesting thing... both the boys were playing with sand... you know,
throwing sand at each other, trying to build shapes n all.. And every
time their mother used to turn around to check on her kids they used to
hide their hands and stay put. It was very interesting to see... too
bad sometimes words do fall short to draw the exact picture... or else I
am sure you guys would have loved it too...
but when i looked closely into the picture i came across a very interesting question in my mind.... “Whether the lady really knows what their sons are doing... whether she will ever be able to figure out what her sons are up to... because obviously the “turning around” thing is really not working......
Believe it or not but the world we see and the world we think there really is around us is continuously under the investigation of our perception... And if you are able to correctly mathematically model your investigation... it’s called a measurement. But what we never realize is this that in the act of our measurements... we are also disturbing the natural world... and hence our ability to completely realize what exactly is going on out there and why the world is the way it is? pretty much falls apart. Just like the lady never figured out what her sons were cooking behind her( ;-) ) by turning around every now and then....
But this is all quite fishy... isn’t it??... what ll we do if we stop perceiving things... how am i supposed to know about the world without investigation??.. well, all that we can say about it is that in any natural process if you are taking say two measurements... one at the start and one at the end, if you do interfere with a third measurement in the middle and then your last measurement will get distorted n ll no more give you the previous results!!!....
this distortion is less in the classical world and starts becoming more and more prominent as we keep decreasing the dimensions...
(tThis has been assured by many quantum mechanical experiments like the electron diffraction experiment by Thompson and Davisson )
And then we come across a new trouble... if we really don’t know what’s happening in the middle... then say we have a process that can take place in many alternative paths... and since all the paths start at one point and end at another particular point... then all the paths are completely “indistinguishable”... By keeping the results constant there is absolutely no way that we can say in which way the process might have taken place... coz the final point(the consequence) is also identical for all the alternative paths..
for the first time our hands are tied... we need to stop interrupting in what nature is doing... in what she really is up to. We need to set her free in the wild.
So finally we realize that the best way to understand the whole system is to track down the probabilities... But guess what, what does happen when you track down the probabilities is even more awesome then you could ever have thought in your wildest dreams..... “ the probabilities interfere”.... Obviously if a process can take place in two paths say... path1 or path2.. the net probability should be the sum of both... but the net probability of the occurrence isn’t the sum of two... the final probability is a complicated function of both... as if the probabilities are interfering like waves of light... remember the way two bright lights interfered and gave weird distributions of light in young’s experiment... well the same thing happens... only statistically in terms of probabilities.....
what really happens is this that instead of just getting sum of both we get one more term that signifies the intersection of the event taking place through both the paths!!... as if its not either this or that... its both!!.. which is truly bizarre for alternative paths of a process where its absolutely impossible to imagine how it can simultaneously take both the paths at the same time!!...
(I wish i could show you guys the interesting mathematical manipulation involved by giving an example of any experiment.... but as we all know words also fall short during mathematical manipulations ;-) )
When I first heard of such a thing.... I thought may be time itself is bifurcating!! Its hard to believe but if the two ways can interfere and since we need to bring in the physical realization of the intersection, the simultaneity of both the paths, then may be both are taking place... but both cannot take place at the same time... so may be time itself divides into two.. with two separate events taking place on two different time lines together... But then i figured thinking of the bifurcation of the river of time is way too radical and i am no hotshot theoretical physicist to play around with time...
The interference of the probabilities of the indistinguishable paths of a certain natural process is a fundamental concept and a very deep mystery that lies at the very heart of quantum mechanics... We don’t know why it happens or how it possibly might have occurred. There’s no one till now who have ever been able to unlock this beautiful mystery of the universe. In order to mathematically model the probabilities... the scientists came up with a new physical quantity... “Probability amplitude”(analogous to the electric fields of the young’s experiment). And it is these which superimpose and the modulus of their sum gives us the final probabilities.... Even though we know what the probability amplitudes do for us... and how they help us to understand many physical phenomena... but we still don’t know what they really are...What is the exact physical realization behind these mysterious quantities?...
They are like beautiful mermaids playing around in the deepest of the oceans of nature... and even though we are able to understand what they do for us... and how they make our world beautiful and understandable... and even though we are able to appreciate the dance of the beautiful mermaids but we still don’t know what they are... where they have come from.. and what their real significance is in this mysteriously beautiful universe.
And even though there are many unanswered questions in my heart now but deep inside i have always believed that someday i ll understand the play of these beautiful mermaids.... till then i ll just sit at the shore, enjoy the beautiful sky-line , the nice cool evening breeze, the sound of the wild waves.... and of course the beautiful mermaids playing around a midst them..... ;-)
but when i looked closely into the picture i came across a very interesting question in my mind.... “Whether the lady really knows what their sons are doing... whether she will ever be able to figure out what her sons are up to... because obviously the “turning around” thing is really not working......
Believe it or not but the world we see and the world we think there really is around us is continuously under the investigation of our perception... And if you are able to correctly mathematically model your investigation... it’s called a measurement. But what we never realize is this that in the act of our measurements... we are also disturbing the natural world... and hence our ability to completely realize what exactly is going on out there and why the world is the way it is? pretty much falls apart. Just like the lady never figured out what her sons were cooking behind her( ;-) ) by turning around every now and then....
But this is all quite fishy... isn’t it??... what ll we do if we stop perceiving things... how am i supposed to know about the world without investigation??.. well, all that we can say about it is that in any natural process if you are taking say two measurements... one at the start and one at the end, if you do interfere with a third measurement in the middle and then your last measurement will get distorted n ll no more give you the previous results!!!....
this distortion is less in the classical world and starts becoming more and more prominent as we keep decreasing the dimensions...
(tThis has been assured by many quantum mechanical experiments like the electron diffraction experiment by Thompson and Davisson )
And then we come across a new trouble... if we really don’t know what’s happening in the middle... then say we have a process that can take place in many alternative paths... and since all the paths start at one point and end at another particular point... then all the paths are completely “indistinguishable”... By keeping the results constant there is absolutely no way that we can say in which way the process might have taken place... coz the final point(the consequence) is also identical for all the alternative paths..
for the first time our hands are tied... we need to stop interrupting in what nature is doing... in what she really is up to. We need to set her free in the wild.
So finally we realize that the best way to understand the whole system is to track down the probabilities... But guess what, what does happen when you track down the probabilities is even more awesome then you could ever have thought in your wildest dreams..... “ the probabilities interfere”.... Obviously if a process can take place in two paths say... path1 or path2.. the net probability should be the sum of both... but the net probability of the occurrence isn’t the sum of two... the final probability is a complicated function of both... as if the probabilities are interfering like waves of light... remember the way two bright lights interfered and gave weird distributions of light in young’s experiment... well the same thing happens... only statistically in terms of probabilities.....
what really happens is this that instead of just getting sum of both we get one more term that signifies the intersection of the event taking place through both the paths!!... as if its not either this or that... its both!!.. which is truly bizarre for alternative paths of a process where its absolutely impossible to imagine how it can simultaneously take both the paths at the same time!!...
(I wish i could show you guys the interesting mathematical manipulation involved by giving an example of any experiment.... but as we all know words also fall short during mathematical manipulations ;-) )
When I first heard of such a thing.... I thought may be time itself is bifurcating!! Its hard to believe but if the two ways can interfere and since we need to bring in the physical realization of the intersection, the simultaneity of both the paths, then may be both are taking place... but both cannot take place at the same time... so may be time itself divides into two.. with two separate events taking place on two different time lines together... But then i figured thinking of the bifurcation of the river of time is way too radical and i am no hotshot theoretical physicist to play around with time...
The interference of the probabilities of the indistinguishable paths of a certain natural process is a fundamental concept and a very deep mystery that lies at the very heart of quantum mechanics... We don’t know why it happens or how it possibly might have occurred. There’s no one till now who have ever been able to unlock this beautiful mystery of the universe. In order to mathematically model the probabilities... the scientists came up with a new physical quantity... “Probability amplitude”(analogous to the electric fields of the young’s experiment). And it is these which superimpose and the modulus of their sum gives us the final probabilities.... Even though we know what the probability amplitudes do for us... and how they help us to understand many physical phenomena... but we still don’t know what they really are...What is the exact physical realization behind these mysterious quantities?...
They are like beautiful mermaids playing around in the deepest of the oceans of nature... and even though we are able to understand what they do for us... and how they make our world beautiful and understandable... and even though we are able to appreciate the dance of the beautiful mermaids but we still don’t know what they are... where they have come from.. and what their real significance is in this mysteriously beautiful universe.
And even though there are many unanswered questions in my heart now but deep inside i have always believed that someday i ll understand the play of these beautiful mermaids.... till then i ll just sit at the shore, enjoy the beautiful sky-line , the nice cool evening breeze, the sound of the wild waves.... and of course the beautiful mermaids playing around a midst them..... ;-)
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