Read Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy Online
Authors: Robert A. Wilson
“Childproof bottles, my Abzug,” Marvin Gardens complained. “There isn’t a child in the world who doesn’t have the patience and curiosity to open one of them.”
“He has no name,” Malik said, “because he is Death, and Death is a nightmare from which humanity is beginning to awaken.”
“It’s time to stop worshiping gods,” Chaney went on earnestly, “and aim at becoming gods. It took four and a half billion years to produce this moment, and who’s really awake yet?”
“It’s adults who give up on the damned bottles,” Marvin Gardens went on. “They decide—I know I do—‘Agh, the hell, I don’t
need
the Potter Stewarting pills.’ What they are is
adultproof
bottles.”
“Who
is
that exciting man?” Natalie Drest whispered to Mary Margaret.
“Marvin Gardens, the brain surgeon. He’s married to
Dr. Lovelace the uh you know the first woman Bishop in the Mormon Church.”
Benny Benedict, the columnist, arrived, apologizing for being late. “I had to see my mother at the Senior Citizens’ home. Great old gal, she’s taken up tennis again since she started on
Ex-Tend.”
“Well, yes,” Hagbard Celine was saying. “I was a stage magician in my youth. Called myself Cagliostro the Great. But then I got turned on to Cabala …”
“Everybody this is John Disk he’s the assistant to Dr. Lousewart at NASA-Ames …”
“No wife, no horse, no mustache,” General Wing Lee Chee (U.S. Army, ret.) was saying. “I really resented that.”
And then everybody else had left and they were alone.
“Of course there are robots among us,” Chaney said, finishing his last speech. “There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?”
“God, you’re an attractive man,” Mary Margaret breathed, thinking of his Courage.
Their eyes locked. Because of the magnetism of his personality, neither of them was conscious of the fact that she was looking a long way down at him.
“Let’s sniff a little more coke,” Chaney suggested.
“I have some cognac left too,” she whispered.
“Perfect,” he said, and quoted:
Heart of my heart, come out of the rain,
Soak me in cognac, love and cocaine!
They went to the kitchen to get the cognac, and he was swaggering a bit, like Perry Mason about to cross-examine, or the new gun in town.
He patted her Frankel gently. She patted his new Courage.
Then they went to the bedroom, and—after circumnavigating the globe and passing through 1023 possible universes—Ulysses finally returned to Ithaca.
BELL’S THEOREM:
A mathematical demonstration by Dr. John S. Bell, which shows that if quantum mechanics is valid, any two particles once in contact will continue to influence each other, no matter how far apart they may subsequently move. This violates Special Relativity, unless the influence between the particles is not employing any known energy.
COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION:
The theory formulated by Niels Bohr, according to which the
state vector
(see below) should be regarded as a mathematical formalism. In other words—which some physicists will dispute—the equations of quantum mechanics do not describe what is happening in the subatomic world but what mathematical systems
we need to create
to think of that world.
COSMIC GLUE:
A metaphor to describe the quantum interconnectedness that must exist if Bell’s Theorem be valid. Coined by Dr. Nick Herbert.
EIGENSTATE
:
One of a finite number of states that a quantum system can be in. The Superposition Principle says that, before measurement, a system must be considered to be in all of its eigenstates; measurement selects one eigenstate.
EINSTEIN-ROSEN-PODOLSKY EFFECT:
The quantum interconnectedness as described in a paper by Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky. The purpose of said paper was to prove that quantum mechanics cannot be valid, since it leads to such an outlandish conclusion. Since Bell’s Theorem, some physicists have chosen to accept the interconnectedness, however outlandish it may seem. See QUIP.
EVERETT-WHEELER-GRAHAM MODEL:
An alternative to Bell’s Theorem and the Copenhagen Interpretation. According to Everett, Wheeler, and Graham, everything that can happen to the state vector (see below) does happen to it.
FORM:
In the sense of G. Spencer Brown, a mathematical or logical system necessary to systematic thought but having the inevitable consequences of imposing its own deep structures upon the experiences packaged and indexed by the form. See COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION.
HIDDEN VARIABLE:
An alternative to Bell, Copenhagen, and Everett-Wheeler-Graham. As developed by Dr. David Bohm, the Hidden Variable theory assumes that quantum events are determined by a subquantum system acting outside or before the universe of space-time known to us. Dr. Evan Harris Walker and Dr. Nick Herbert have suggested that the Hidden Variable is consciousness; Dr. Jack Sarfatti suggests that it is
information.
INFORMATION:
A measure of the unpredictability of a message; that is, the more unpredictable a message is, the more information it contains. Since systems tend to disorder (according to the second law of thermodynamics), we can think of the degree of order in a system as the amount of information in it. Ordinarily information is transmitted as an ordering of energy (a signal), in which the energy and its ordering (the message) is transmitted from one place to another. Dr. Jack Sarfatti has suggested that the nonlocality of the ERP effect and Bell’s Theorem may entail the instantaneous transfer of order from one place to another
without any energy transfer.
Thus we can have both Bell’s Theorem and Special Relativity, since Special Relativity only prohibits the instantaneous transfer of energy and does not say anything about instantaneous transfer of information.
NEURO-:
A prefix denoting “known or mediated by the nervous system.” Since all human knowledge is neurological in this sense, every science may be considered a neuroscience; e.g., we have no physics but neurophysics, no psychology but neuropsychology and ultimately, no neurology but neuroneurology. But neuroneurology would itself be known by the nervous system, leading to neuro-neuroneurology etc., in an infinite regress. See VON NEUMANN’S CATASTROPHE.
NONLOCAL:
Not depending upon space and time. A nonlocal effect occurs instantaneously and with no attenuation due to distance. Special Relativity seems to forbid all such non-local effects, but Bell’s Theorem seems to show that quantum mechanics demands them. The only solutions thus far offered to this contradiction are that nonlocal effects involve “consciousness” rather than energy (Walker, Herbert) or that they involve “information” rather than energy (Sarfatti).
NONOBJECTIVITY:
One of the two alternatives to Bell’s Theorem (the other being the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model). In order to avoid nonlocality, some physicists such as Dr. John A. Wheeler prefer this option, which holds that the universe has no reality aside from observation. The extreme form of this view says
“Esse est percepi”
—to be is to be perceived.
POTENTIA:
The name given to the presumed subquantum world by Dr. Werner Heisenberg. Space and time do not exist in
potentia;
but all the phenomena of the space-time manifold emerge from
potentia.
Compare with HIDDEN VARIABLE and INFORMATION.
QUANTUM:
An entity whose energies occur in discrete lumps—
e.g.
, photons are the quanta of the electromagnetic field. Quanta have both wave and particle aspects, the wave aspect being the probability of detecting the particle at a certain place and time.
QUANTUM LOGIC:
A system of symbolic logic not restricted to the “either it’s A or it’s not-A” choices of Aristotelian logic. Chiefly due to Dr. John Von Neumann and Dr. David Finkelstein, this approach evades the paradoxes of other interpretations of quantum mechanics by assuming that the universe is multivalued, not two-valued; Dr. Finkelstein expresses this by saying “In addition to a
yes
and a no, the universe contains a
maybe.”
See EIGENSTATE.
QUANTUM MECHANICS:
The mathematical system for describing the atomic and subatomic realm. There is no dispute about how to
do
quantum mechanics—
i.e.
, calculate the probabilities within this realm. All the controversy is about what the quantum mechanics equations
imply about reality, which is known as the
interpretation
of quantum mechanics. The principal lines of interpretation are the Copenhagen Interpretation and/or Nonobjectivity and/or Bell’s Theorem and/or Nonlocality and/or the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multi-worlds model.
QUIP:
The quantum inseparability principle. An acronym coined by Dr. Nick Herbert to refer to the nonlocality implicit in the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky argument and explicit in Bell’s Theorem.
STATE VECTOR:
The mathematical expression describing one of
two or more
states that a quantum system can be in; for instance, an electron can be in either of two spin states, called “spin up” and “spin down.” The amusing thing about quantum mechanics is that each state vector can be regarded as the superposition of other state vectors.
SUPERDETERMINISM:
The approach to quantum theory urged by Dr. Fritjof Capra in
The Tao of Physics.
This interpretation rejects “contrafactual definiteness”; that is, it assumes that any statements about what
could have
happened are meaningless. A consequence of this view is that all distinction between observer and observed, or self and universe, also becomes meaningless; I had no choice about writing this book, Dell Books had no choice about publishing it, and you had no choice about reading it, since there is only one thing happening and we are all seamlessly welded into it.
SYNCHRONICITY:
A term introduced by psychologist Dr. Carl Jung and physicist Dr. Wolfgang Pauli to describe connections, or meaningful “coincidences,” that do not make sense in terms of cause-and-effect. It is thought by some that such connections may indicate the Hidden
Variable at work or some sort of nonlocal Information System.
VON NEUMANN’S CATASTROPHE:
More fully, Von Neumann’s catastrophe of the infinite regress. A demonstration by Dr. John Von Neumann that quantum mechanics entails an infinite regress of measurements before the quantum uncertainty can be removed. That is, any measuring device is itself a quantum system containing uncertainty; a second measuring device, used to monitor the first, contains its own quantum uncertainty; and so on, to infinity. Wigner and others have pointed out that this uncertainty is only terminated by the decision of the experimenter. Compare NEURO-.
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Copyright © 1979 by Robert Anton Wilson
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