Thursday, May 20, 2010

Quantum Physics

What on earth has Quantum Physics got to do with miracles?
One way of looking at Quantum Mechanics is that there is a little slop in the gears of life. When ball A hits ball B it veers off at a precise angle, all mathematically calculable, but not quite. Quantum freedom allows the ball to veer off at any angle it feels like, so long as it is sufficiently close to the precise angle. What I am talking about is something deeper than the slop you would expect because the ball isn’t quite round, the table not quite flat etc. At a fundamental level, atomic particles have choice, within limits, to do what they damn well please. It is called Heisenberg uncertainty. Please excuse the simplistic anthropomorphising; I am trying to reach a non-technical audience too.
The Many Worlds Hypothesis is the mathematically simplest way of resolving Bell’s Theorem. Bell’s Theorem is a mathematical proof derived from physics demonstrating that whenever two particles interact, they are thereafter connected in a mysterious faster-than-light way that doesn’t diminish with time or distance and can’t be shielded. Also known as the "mechanism of non-locality ". There are other explanations besides the Many-Worlds Hypothesis, but, historically, the mathematically simplest explanations tend to win out in the long run.
The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that the universe continuously branches into multiple parallel worlds — creating all possibilities allowed by quantum randomness / uncertainty / indefiniteness (which is a far cry from all possibilities conceivable!). You might imagine the tree of life with incredibly luxuriant lush branching. Because all possibilities, even the "almost impossible" ones, manifest, the many worlds hypothesis explains why we live in such an improbable universe. We humans just don’t exist in most of the probable universes — just in the improbable ones we inhabit.
The most recent work in Quantum Mechanics says that, in some way, various unlikely possibilities cancel each other out, so that in practice, in general, we manifest an orderly predicable universe.
In some sense, everything possible, past and future is pre-existing

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