Introducing the divinity of the Universe
to pave the way for scientifically credible theology
Chapter 18: Quantum amplitudes and logical processes are invisible
Synopsis
The Christian God is in principle completely invisible. All we know about them are inspired creations of the authors of the Bible. The Deposit of Faith maintained by the Church is completely dependent on textual sources that have been copied, recopied and translated over centuries. Much has been lost. The Universe itself is a vast trove of information. In particular we are all aware of our own thoughts and feelings. The backbone of this book is the idea that if the Universe is divine, careful study of its observable features leads us closer to Divinity. Our detailed knowledge of the world has improved exponentially over the last few centuries but we cannot actually see that is going on behind the scenes in the quantum world. The results that we can observe only partially constrain what is happened at this level, leaving much open to speculation.
Contents
15.1: Limited resolution15.2: Symmetry
15.3: One must act to be seen
15.4: Mathematical formalism and physical dynamics
15.5: The microscopic view
15.1: Limited resolution
Much of what goes on at the smallest levels in the universe is invisible to us for three main reasons:
1. Limited resolution: many features are too small to be seen;
2. Symmetry: there is very little or nothing to be seen;
3. An object must act to be seen: it must transmit information to us.
The dynamic resolution of the universe is limited to one quantum of action. In our classical spacetime the quantum has units of angular momentum, ie energy.time or momentum.distance. Like a ruler marked in discrete units this establishes a fixed degree of uncertainty proportional to Planck's constant. Precision in measurement of position is traded off against precision in the measurement of momentum and precision in the measurement of time is traded against precision in the measurement of energy: as expressed by the equations:
Δx × Δp ≈ ℏ Δt × ΔE ≈ ℏ
Consequently an exact measurement of momentum (if it were possible) would need to take the whole Universe into account; an exact measurement of energy would require an eternity of observation.
From the opposite point of view detailed measurements of position require high momentum. This is why an electron microscope, using high momentum electrons, can resolve distances invisible to a light microscope using low momentum photons of visible light.
Similarly, we need high energy to measure short intervals of time. It may be that the actual smallest interval in the universe is the Planck time, 5 × 10−44 second. Using the equation above, the numbers show that we need approximately fifty billion Joules of energy to resolve this period. Since Large Hadron Collider can accelerate a proton to about 10 000 times its rest mass, we can guess that it would take an accelerator about a billion billion times more powerful than the LHC to see a Planck interval. It is effectively invisible. Electron microscope - Wikipedia, Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia
This is an extreme example of the fact, that given the fixed quantum of action, high energy events are very fast. At the opposite end of the scale we find eternity, infinite time and zero energy where nothing happens.
The quantum of action controls action in the microscopic world. The magnitude the quantum appears to be exact. When an electron moves from one orbital to another in an atom it emits or absorbs a photon with one quantum of angular momentum and the electron changes its orbital angular momentum by one unit in the opposite direction. We can exploit the precision of such atomic events to construct atomic clocks accurate to one second in the age of the universe. W. F. McGrew et al: Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level
15.2: Symmetry
A second source of invisibility is symmetry. An ideal snowflake is symmetrical, with six identical arms. Because they are identical we cannot tell which is which. If we look away and someone rotates the snowflake, we have no way of telling how far it was turned. Symmetry - Wikipedia
Symmetries are situations where changes produce no observable effects, like a perfectly smooth and balanced spinning wheel. To show that it is spinning we must break the symmetry by putting a mark on the wheel.
We may picture this to a degree by imagining the string of a piano or guitar. When struck, the string vibrates at every point except at the ends, which are fixed to the instrument, and the nodes, which are fixed by the symmetrical motion of the overtones. The initial symmetry at the foundation of this story, if we could see it, would look like the absolutely simple God of Aquinas, an empty mind. We can identify this symmetry, which sees all structures identically as energy, with gravitation.
All our experiences are experience of the evolved physical mind of God, the Universe. They are measurements of God, events that we see as fixed points in the divine dynamics. We can learn a lot more about the natural God than the traditional theologies can learn about their Gods. The natural God is only partially visible, but since we are continually in contact with them, we have a good chance of learning how they work. All we know about completely invisible Gods is what their prophets have chosen to tell us. Revelation - Wikipedia
Nevertheless true knowledge of God is necessary for survival. The role of science is to discern the divine world. The principal advantage of religious fictions, if they are widely believed, is that they form a basis for cooperation which is the most powerful force for survival.
The aim of this project is promote scientific theology based on observations of divine reality. This will establish a global symmetry in theology just as biology establishes a global symmetry in health care. Because we all share the same anatomy and physiology a carer can begin to treat every person with basic background knowledge. Scientific theology may play a similar role in care of the soul. We all share the same human spirit represented by our material bodies.
Through history we have constructed many social distinctions based on race, language, colour and culture. These are often divisive. The have no foundation in our shared human symmetry any more than they are reasons to differentiate the economy and health care on social grounds. Audley Smedley & Brian D. Smedley (2005): Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race
15.3: One must act to be seen
The third source of invisibility is that any entity must talk to be heard. Attention seeking, from childhood to superstardom, is a consistent feature of human nature. We signal because we want to be seen, to be acknowledged, to have a voice in our society.
Here we use a computer network as a formal model of all communication in the Universe. We cannot tell what a computer is doing unless it communicates with us, and communication is itself a computation. We cannot see every move that a computer makes because it would have to stop to explain itself after every operation. Since this explanation is also a computation it would also be required to explain the operations of explaining itself, creating an endless recursion which would prevent it from getting anywhere.
For this reason we only see the results of halted processes. We suspect the presence of deterministic digital computation in the world because of the precision with which nature determines the eigenvalues we observe. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia
This phenomenon appears at all scales. If you ask someone what they are doing and their task requires close attention, they must stop to explain themselves. In both the human and the physical world there are large number of things that could be said. At each moment only one can be said.
When we are talking to one another we have a headful of things to say. Consciously or unconsciously we choose from these possibilities. Part of our evolutionary heritage is the power of deception, which plays an important role in survival. This is stock in trade for spies and confidence tricksters, but even with the best will in the world it is very hard for two people to share a precise understanding of what they are thinking. In Chapter 20: Measurement: the interface between Hilbert and Minkowski spaces we will see why this feature has caused perplexity in the interpretation of quantum theory. Deception - Wikipedia
The arts of science, fiction and evolution all explore our space. This creative exploration is ultimately made possible by the our uncertainty about invisible features of ourselves and our world. If it weren't for the random variation arising from this uncertainty the world could not have evolved from the next to nothing to its present state.
It took physicists nearly thirty years, from 1900 to the late 1920s, to bring non-relativistic quantum mechanics to its definitive form. An important step forward was made by Heisenberg who pointed out that our only task is to explain the observable phenomena. We need not be bound by preconceptions of how the world works but are free to explore all possibilities to find satisfactory explanations. Werner Heisenberg (1925): Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations
15.4: Mathematical formalism and physical dynamics
The clock in a computer has two complementary roles. First it determines the rate of processing in cycles per second. In the physical world the rate of processing varies from zero (ie eternity) to an upper bound which represents the total kinetic energy of the Universe, perhaps 10100 actions per second. Clock signal - Wikipedia
Second, the clock hides the actual physical dynamics of logical processing. A clock signal has two 'edges' which we may call up and down. The up edge sets the process in motion, transistors switch and voltages change. The down edge shuts the process down, so everything halts and the machine comes to rest in a stable stationary state until the next up edge.
The effect of this is to make the computer behave like a purely kinetic formal logic machine. This idea first appeared in motion picture film cameras and projectors. A shutter comes down, blocking the light. The film is stepped forward one frame. The shutter opens and the camera takes a snap or the projector puts an image on the screen. The shutter closes and film advances, . . ..
The illusion of movement is almost perfect for most people if movies are filmed and projected at 24 images per second. Other animals, like flies, whose vision has much better time resolution might see a motion picture as a sequence of still images.
The clock hides the physics to reveal the formal logic. The inverse process, performed by mathematical physicists, is to try to fit formal logical and mathematical ideas to the world.
15.5: The microscopic view
The macroscopic shape of crystals give us clues to their atomic arrangements which are studied in detail by x-ray diffraction. Initial information about the electronic structure of atoms came from spectroscopy which yielded information about energy levels but few clues to their spatial structure. Rutherford studied the scattering of alpha particles by gold foil and concluded that the gold atom had a heavy component many thousands of time smaller that the atom itself, the nucleus.
Niels Bohr produced a structural model of atomic electrons which accounts quite closely for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom. Bohr rejected the classical belief that moving electrons must radiate energy, collapsing the atom. He guessed that the electrons move in fixed orbits whose angular momentum is measured in integral multiples of the quantum of action. The energy changes that occur when an electron moves from one orbit to another accounts for the atomic spectrum. Bohr model - Wikipedia
Initially quantum mechanics was driven by the study the electronic structure of atoms which are revealed by atomic spectra. The study of the nucleus began with the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896. The energy of nuclear events is typically millions of times greater than that of electronic events. Nuclear physics led to a steady stream of discoveries of new particles. Until the 1930s the nucleus was thought to comprise protons and electrons, but in 1932 Chadwick discovered the neutron which became a very useful tool for studying nuclear reactions.
Until the 1960's the known massive elementary particles were generally considered to have no internal structure and many of them, like the electron, were supposed to be pointlike, having zero size. High energy experiments began to suggest that the proton, neutron and other heavy massive particles (hadrons) have internal structure. We now explain this structure with quarks (fermions) and gluons (bosons). Discovery of the neutron - Wikipedia
Almost all our information about fundamental particles is collected by scattering them off one another in particle accelerators. As noted above, our knowledge of cells began with light microscopes which use light photons whose energy is a few electron volts. Electron microscopes operate with high energy electrons to give them much higher momentum and shorter wavelength. They magnify structures up to 10 million times, enough to make an atom appear a thousandth of a millimetre in diameter. Particle accelerators also function as microscopes. Beginning in the 1960s electrons accelerated to 20 billion electron volts by the Stanford Linear Accelerator began to reveal the inner structure of protons, leading eventually to the current Standard Model of the fundamental structure of the Universe. Richard E. Taylor (1990): Nobel Lecture: I. Deep Inelastic Scattering: The Early Years, Quark - Wikipedia, Gluon - Wikipedia
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Notes and references
Links
Audley Smedley & Brian D. Smedley (2005), Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race , ' Racialized science seeks to explain human population differences in health, intelligence, education, and wealth as the consequence of immutable, biologically based differences between "racial" groups. Recent advances in the sequencing of the human genome and in an understanding of biological correlates of behavior have fueled racialized science, despite evidence that racial groups are not genetically discrete, reliably measured, or scientifically meaningful. Yet even these counterarguments often fail to take into account the origin and history of the idea of race. This article reviews the origins of the concept of race, placing the contemporary discussion of racial differences in an anthropological and historical context.' back |
Bohr model - Wikipedia, Bohr model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In atomic physics, the Rutherford–Bohr model or Bohr model, introduced by Niels Bohr in 1913, depicts the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus—similar in structure to the solar system, but with attraction provided by electrostatic forces rather than gravity.' back |
Clock signal - Wikipedia, Clock signal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal is a particular type of signal that oscillates between a high and a low state and is utilized like a metronome to coordinate actions of circuits. Although the word signal has a number of other meanings, the term here is used for "transmitted energy that can carry information". back |
Deception - Wikipedia, Deception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Deception, beguilement, deceit, bluff, mystification and subterfuge are acts to propagate beliefs that are not true, or not the whole truth (as in half-truths or omission). Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda, and sleight of hand, as well as distraction, camouflage, or concealment. There is also self-deception, as in bad faith.' back |
Discovery of the neutron - Wikipedia, Discovery of the neutron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The essential nature of the atomic nucleus was established with the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932 and the determination that it was a new elementary particle, distinct from the proton. The uncharged neutron was immediately exploited as a new means to probe nuclear structure, leading to such discoveries as the creation of new radioactive elements by neutron irradiation (1934) and the fission of uranium atoms by neutrons (1938). The discovery of fission led to the creation of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons by the end of World War II. Both the proton and the neutron were presumed to be elementary particles until the 1960s, when they were determined to be composite particles built from quarks.' back |
Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In linear algebra, an eigenvector or characteristic vector of a linear transformation is a nonzero vector that changes at most by a scalar factor when that linear transformation is applied to it. The corresponding eigenvalue, often denoted by λ, is the factor by which the eigenvector is scaled. Geometrically, an eigenvector, corresponding to a real nonzero eigenvalue, points in a direction in which it is stretched by the transformation and the eigenvalue is the factor by which it is stretched. If the eigenvalue is negative, the direction is reversed. Loosely speaking, in a multidimensional vector space, the eigenvector is not rotated.' back |
Electron microscope - Wikipedia, Electron microscope - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia, ' An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects. A scanning transmission electron microscope has achieved better than 50 pm resolution in annular dark-field imaging mode and magnifications of up to about 10,000,000× whereas most light microscopes are limited by diffraction to about 200 nm resolution and useful magnifications below 2000×.' back |
Gluon - Wikipedia, Gluon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' A gluon (/ˈɡluːɒn/) is an elementary particle that acts as the exchange particle (or gauge boson) for the strong force between quarks. It is analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles.[6] In layman's terms, they "glue" quarks together, forming hadrons such as protons and neutrons. In technical terms, gluons are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Gluons themselves carry the color charge of the strong interaction. This is unlike the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic interaction but lacks an electric charge. Gluons therefore participate in the strong interaction in addition to mediating it, making QCD significantly harder to analyze than quantum electrodynamics (QED). ' back |
Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia, Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam, about four times the previous world record. After upgrades it reached 6.5 TeV per beam (13 TeV total collision energy, the present world record). At the end of 2018, it was shut down for three years for further upgrades.' back |
Quark - Wikipedia, Quark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Quarks . . . are a type of elementary particle and major constituents of matter. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most well-known of which are protons and neutrons. They are the only particles in the Standard Model to experience the strong force, and thereby the only particles to experience all four fundamental forces, which are also known as fundamental interactions.' back |
Revelation - Wikipedia, Revelation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities.' back |
Richard E. Taylor (1990), Nobel Lecture: I. Deep Inelastic Scattering: The Early Years, ' Soon after the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced Henry Kendall, Jerry Friedman and I agreed that we would each describe a part of the deep inelastic experiments in our Nobel lectures. The division we agreed upon was roughly chronological. I would cover the early times, describing some of the work that led to the establishment of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center where the experiments were performed, followed by a brief account of the construction of the experimental apparatus used in the experiments and the commissioning of the spectrometer facility in early elastic scattering experiments at the Center.' back |
Symmetry - Wikipedia, Symmetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Symmetry (from Ancient Greek: συμμετρία symmetria "agreement in dimensions, due proportion, arrangement") in everyday language refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, "symmetry" has a more precise definition, and is usually used to refer to an object that is invariant under some transformations; including translation, reflection, rotation or scaling. Although these two meanings of "symmetry" can sometimes be told apart, they are intricately related, and hence are discussed together in this article. ' back |
W. F. McGrew et al, Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level, ' The passage of time is tracked by counting oscillations of a frequency reference, such as Earth’s revolutions or swings of a pendulum. By referencing atomic transitions, frequency (and thus time) can be measured more precisely than any other physical quantity, with the current generation of optical atomic clocks reporting fractional performance below the 10−17 level. However, the theory of relativity prescribes that the passage of time is not absolute, but is affected by an observer’s reference frame. Consequently, clock measurements exhibit sensitivity to relative velocity, acceleration and gravity potential. Here we demonstrate local optical clock measurements that surpass the current ability to account for the gravitational distortion of space-time across the surface of Earth. In two independent ytterbium optical lattice clocks, we demonstrate unprecedented values of three fundamental benchmarks of clock performance. In units of the clock frequency, we report systematic uncertainty of 1.4 × 10−18, measurement instability of 3.2 × 10−19 and reproducibility characterized by ten blinded frequency comparisons, yielding a frequency difference of [−7 ± (5)stat ± (8)sys] × 10−19, where ‘stat’ and ‘sys’ indicate statistical and systematic uncertainty, respectively. Although sensitivity to differences in gravity potential could degrade the performance of the clocks as terrestrial standards of time, this same sensitivity can be used as a very sensitive probe of geopotential. Near the surface of Earth, clock comparisons at the 1 × 10−18 level provide a resolution of one centimetre along the direction of gravity, so the performance of these clocks should enable geodesy beyond the state-of-the-art level. These optical clocks could further be used to explore geophysical phenomena, detect gravitational waves, test general relativity and search for dark matter.' back |
Werner Heisenberg (1925), Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations , 'The present paper seeks to establish a basis for theoretical quantum mechanics founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable.' [From Sources of Quantum Mechanics, edited by B. L. van der Waerden (Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1967)] back |