Thursday - Random photos vs. quantum probability

 I spend a lot of time thinking about quantum mechanics - sort of obvious if you've been reading my blog entries the past few months. One of the questions I've been pondering is about the quanta of the macroscopic world. Nothing so deep as quantum gravity - that's a problem I haven't been wrestling with - but more along the lines of myself as a quantum and how I exhibit some of the same phenomena in my daily life that should not be impactful even if all the phenomena described by quantum mechanics do happen at the human scale.

The physicists I've been listening to - Dr. Brian Greene, Dr. Erica Carlsen, Dr. Sean Carroll, Dr. Leonard Susskind, and more, caution me to be aware that at the scale where I can detect phenomena without the aid of very sensitive instruments, there is too much going on to solve the problems, that the phenomena I might want to solve for is too - and I hesitate to use this word - entangled with too many other things going on, to be able to distinguish the answers.

And yet, as I mentioned not too long ago, I can seem to someone who wants to know where I am or where I am going and about when I might get there, in a sort of superposition. I am told that the quantum wave function is real yet describes where a particle might be found when I look for it, and that the particle does not know where it is or where it will be found until it is observed.

I won't ascribe consciousness to a particle. An electron, a quark, a photon can't know where it is because as solitary particle its properties have been measured and quantized. Yet the question of what the outside world saw of me when I was alone, in my car, without any tracking devices, essentially unmeasured and undetected until I arrived at my destination, remains with me.

From inside that car, knowing where I was and where I was going, I'm pretty sure I wasn't in superposition.

And here are a handful of random photos. Well, they aren't random in the sense that I rolled dice or flipped coins to pick them, more along the line of I was walking along and saw something that caught my eye so I took a picture of it.

That my children would call random.

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