Spieglein, Spieglein, An Der Wand...

-


I'm going to stick roughly to the theme of the last couple of posts here tonight, in that I was reading Carlo Rovelli's seminal 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics' this lunchtime, over a couple of pints of local beer and a poke of chips, at the Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris]; specifically his second lesson, 'Quanta', which aims to enlighten the casual reader to the niceties of Quantum Theory/Mechanics in layman's language. As always, like all good teachers, he lays out the complex in terms that most of us can at least grasp, leaving the technical and mathematical underpinning to one side in order to give a clearer overview of frankly, apparently, mind-boggling concepts. On the question of the un-resolvability of the exact existence of electrons [Heisenberg's theory], or their position in space when their interactions reveal them to us, he has this to say: '... an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a 'place' at all ...'.

Which made me think of my analogy regarding the software/hardware nexus in last night's post, which strikes me now as the perfect analogy from which to get one's head around Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger's elusive live/dead cat thought experiment. Software does not exist outside of its observability and deployment by the hardware it was designed to run on, and inversely, computing hardware is mute without software. The interface between inaction and visibility is just that: it might seem simply a philosophical nicety, but if the analogy holds in the macro world of laptops and iPhones, what's so weird about Quantum Mechanics after all? Now you see it, now you don't. That's not magic, but the nature of reality, folks...


Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more