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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Quantum Figments


I had the opportunity to step on the gas this afternoon and enjoy a brief moment of sudden acceleration. People enjoy this. People enjoy shooting guns. Both involve acceleration of pieces of metal. With cars you have a large piece of metal accelerating on the order on one gravity. With firearms you have small bits of metal accelerating at hundreds of thousands of gravities (One Gravity is roughly 10 meters per second squared. So a hundred thousand gravities is roughly one million m/s^2). Acceleration is indistinguishable from gravity (theoretically speaking anyway). Could your brain be detecting a disturbance in the gravitational field caused these accelerations? Could that have anything to do with why people enjoy this things?

Context shift. A common story element involves people who know each other well, like twins or spouses, separated by a long distance, something bad happens to one, and the other senses it instantly.

I wonder whether these two phenomena might be related. Theoretical physicists have been talking about quantum entanglement for 75 years now, more or less. How a pair of particles can become entangled, and then when separated by even a large distance, one will react when something affects the other. Action at a distance that defies the law of relativity.

Could our brains be quantum activity detectors? Could twins have particles that were entangled in the womb and then separated as they grew? As far as we know, the brain runs on very low level chemical and electrical signals. Could there be even lower level activity going on that we do not yet know how to detect? (The old you don't know what you don't know issue.)

At this point most of all of this stuff could be explained by other factors, or written off as coincidence, but I just wonder ...

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