Some academic and interesting things.

Today, I woke up, forced myself to go to class with the Aussie prof lecturing today, came home, went and saw Up (which, I thought, was brilliant, I will be buying that DVD when it comes out), and went Bowling. After bowling, we went to this pub called "The Salt Quay" (Quay=Key for those of you who don't know Britishisms...or shipping/marina terms) and had fish and chips and the outside "beer garden" area was right next to the Thames and you could hear the river slapshing, and when boats went by, water lapped over the edge of the cement. It was very nice.

I'm currently sitting in bed, having just stripped off dirty jeans and socks that I acquired from the bowling alley for £1, thinking about the novel I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo, and plotting our reading week escapes. I think Diogo and I are going to go to Paris or Prague for a day or two, and then have a writing retreat in Wales with a few of our friends.

Oh! Yesterday, after lecture - which I didn't end up going to - Diogo and I went and saw a talk about Human Evolution and Quantum Mechanics. The Evolution lecture was only interesting in the random facts and examples, because being an Anthropology major for a year takes the "Wow, that's amazing" factor out of facts about human evolution. It's still amazing and breathtaking that we exist or work at all, but past that point, it gets a bit repetitive. Quantum mechanics, however, has always interested me in this strange way. Maybe it's because no one can understand it, so there's always something to learn. It was also nice having someone talk and give a coherent lecture on the basics, because just doing the reading can get a bit confusing beyond the Schrodinger's cat experiment - especially when you talk about mathematical probability wave-like things that create atom patterns that shouldn't exist and change whenever you do the most random of things.

For those of you that know a lot about quantum mechanics, you can disregard me, but I like to think about these things and want to share them.

So, when light is shown through a solid screen with two slits in it, the light shows through on a "wall" behind it in pattern of many bars, and interference pattern. The light has to be a single type of light - not like a household lightbulb, but one with only one wavelength. This happens because light travels in waves and when the waves go through the two slits, they compress, for lack of an easier word to explain, and when they emerge on the other side, the waves interfere with each other and create the strange pattern of bars. The explanation is found easily and things make sense to the common sensical, macrocosmic world oriented mind. Now, when atoms go through this same set up of a screen with two slits against a "wall" (which in this case is actually a radiation detector so that when the atoms land they can be accounted for), one would assume they would just go through the two slits like sand and sit in only the spaces behind the slits. The weird thing is that they have the same wave interference patten as the light waves. So, the first thing the scientists though was "Well, maybe it travels in a wave, and they interfere with each other." Well, they sent through atoms one by one, and the same interference pattern occurred, even though there could be no interference.

Weird shit, but it gets better.

When scientists try and capture the data of which slit the atoms go through or try and see how they move through the air, the atoms start behaving like we "think" they would. In the two bars directly behind the slits in the screen. Let's say they tested this with a camera in the box. Once they turn this camera off, even if they leave it IN THE BOX, the atoms go back to their interference pattern. If the camera is ON and IN THE BOX, but they erase the data as soon as it's recorded, the interference pattern returns. So, the weirdness of quantum mechanics is this: how the hell does this happen!? There's no logical and provable reason for this behavior. Which is astonishing in and of itself. Some people think that consciousness is the factor that effects the outcome, some people think that it's just "we're not allowed to see, let it go." And there are many more reasonable explanations that no one can prove. HOWEVER, the math behind the shooting of atoms through the screenshows that the interference pattern will happen. It also shows that the interference pattern won't occur with a camera on, and all of the other scenarios. This brings up the question of what the math is looking at. Also, the philosophical concern of "is the math the basis of reality, not reality the basis of math?"

Pretty weird shit to think about if I don't say so myself. I can't really wrap my head around it, but I will keep reading and re-readingThe Dancing Wu-Li Masters until that information seeps in and I can at least contain it, if not try and find ways to explain it.

That was a nice ramble. :p

Hope all of you are well, and I hope your week goes quickly.

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