On physics and job interviews...

one wonders what whim has possessed me to be on blogger at this time, all i can say to answer this is perhaps that i'm simply procrastinating or escaping from the anxiety that should have befallen me by now, seeing that i have my first ever job interview tomorrow!!! royal melbourne intern, imagine that... me, a doctor... one year, even scarier - 7 and a half months, from now, that could well be reality... patients' lives falling into the desperate realm of my responsibility and counsel... a humble fluffy bug doing all he can to heroically thwart the attempts at conquest being made by bugs of a far more sinister kind...

meanwhile, all excited by such stuff, the mind has been contemplating truth of physical reality to the minutest detail - that is, quantum (argh - took me 3 goes to spell that word properly!!!) mechanics... jus finished reading a fascinating account of the search for an accessible interpretation of quantum reality by john gribbin called "schrödinger's kittens"... it culminates in a rather dramatised unveiling of a fairly commonsense interpretation, which is nevertheless very impressive, that is cramer's transactional interpretation...

basically - transactional interpretation tackles the difficulty of explaining quantum reality (as suggested by experiments) by using the following principles:
-time can stand still (it does, for a photon... or anything that "travels" at lightspeed)
-things can be implied to go backwards in time (backwards communication, by virtue of the use of quantum waves to communicate quantum state, is in fact simply atemporal from the point-of-view of the quantum wave - so nothing truly does travel backwards, it's jus happening simultaneously)
-the quantum states of an object and all dependent objects, are simultaneously determined

i'm struggling to come up with a way to make this into an easy explanation... - oh well... but the paradox, anyhow, goes that an electron is within a closed box with a partition that can be moved to close off one half from the other... the electron's position is indeterminate at this stage... the partition is closed, and two identical capsules (one connected to each half of the box) are opened to the box, so that the indeterminate electron will enter one or the other capsule... each capsule contains a diabolical device, which releases a poison gas if it detects the presence of an electron... each capsule also contains a cat, and all the necessary goodies to keep the cats alive (and yes, in these miraculous capsules, telomerase and antioxidants are abundant - these cats don't age!!!)... - each capsule then fires off in opposite directions across the universe, and they end up, say, millions of light-years apart...

tradition says that the electron is in an indeterminate quantum state until the presence of an "intelligent observer" intervenes to "collapse the wave function" into a defined presence or absence of the electron... so, this traditional interpretation has puzzled scientists by implying that each cat is in an indeterminate state (or a superposition of states, both dead and alive simultaneously) until some intelligent observer opens the capsule and consigns one cat to its fate by collapsing the wave function (and simultaneously consigning the other cat, a million light-years away, to the opposite fate)... - einstein called this "spooky action at a distance", and it makes some degree of sense, and, believe it or not, has practical application in instantaneous faster-than-light communication in quantum cryptographic techniques...

but how can stuff travel faster than light?!? this is what so puzzled einstein... and many others... including richard feynman, whose theories regarding the nature of light ironically inspired the transactional interpretation of cramer... - the scenario, in the transactional interpretation, would be that, once an interaction occurs (that is, observation of the cat - because reality for the observer is grounded in observation), the quantum state is communicated backwards in time, through the poison gas, through the diabolical device, through the electron, back to its original box, and then forwards in time again, to the other capsule... - this is possible because quantum states traverse time, and photons and quantum-state waves have no meaning of time - and therefore can seemingly travel backwards (even though no time elapses for them)... the quantum states are, from our viewpoint, collapsed (and consign the distant cat to its fate) - but the quantum reality is that, as far as any conventional time-frame is concerned, one cat was dead all along, and the other was alive all along!!! there was no superposition of states where the cats are both dead and alive...

if this is hard to make sense of, it's probably coz i haven't explained it very well... ;p but anywayz... i better go now... and return from fascinating phenomena of physics to a state of mind where i'm once again contemplating a career as a competent, caring clinician... ;p with Christ as my guide, i shall hopefully be one next year at royal melbourne!!! - wish me luck!!!

God bless,
dave ;p