Quantum strangeness in Helgoland

Quantum theory is disturbing

Helgoland’ is an excellent popular work by Carlo Rovelli. Tied with Étienne Klein, Carlo is the best at enlightening amateurs. More salient incursions into the philosophical field for Étienne, while Carlo does the same at the forefront of fundamental physics. Author of one of the most prominent theories of quantum gravity.

Carlo’s work is intimate. He shares his youthful amazement at quantum phenomena. If you’re not puzzled, he says, you haven’t understood them. The story begins with Heisenberg’s stroke of genius in Helgoland. The 22-year-old physicist isolated himself on this island to think about the insoluble problem that Niels Bohr asked him to solve: finding a model of the displacement of the electron allowing it to occupy only orbits spaced around the atomic nucleus.

Heisenberg takes off his preconceptions

No one finds any explanation. Heisenberg abandons any preconceived notions about how something moves. It only takes into account the positions that the electron can take. He thus constructs a 2-dimensional matrix replacing the classical spatial coordinates of a particle. The electron is no longer in one place but in a superposition of possible places, listed by the matrix. It no longer has a trajectory; it jumps from one to the other of these possibilities.

The theory fits perfectly with the measurements. Quantum mechanics was born. Physicists are only at the beginning of their surprises. The quantons behave as both a wave and a particle. Contrasting or even contradictory properties. Not only does the quanton have a more evanescent presence than a crazy fire, but it is as much fire as ice!

Did I really understand?

Carlo’s confession about quantum strangeness awakens in me an old worry: having never felt a good astonishment, I have long thought I had not understood anything about the theory. Spontaneous remarks had protected me from petrification.

The first is that quantum theory describes all microscopic reality. Would you consider that this is likely to widen our disarray? Not. I would have been more embarrassed that this mechanic concerns only part of its scale of reality, producing universes as incompatible as they are mixed. But that is not the case. The theory has the kindness to be universal, creating a homogeneous foundation to the Whole. So I feel comfortable in my macroscopic level, a kind of tectonic plate placed on the heart of the universe in quantum fusion.

Second remark: the quantons have the right to organize themselves as it sings to them. Who are we to impose a partition on them? We are the listeners, not the composer. The surprise is anthropocentric. Well, the quantons do not wander like humans! As long as they don’t live on my landing I don’t see a scandal.

Quanton is looking for accommodation

Carlo Rovelli incidentally makes an additional remark: Heisenberg arrived at his brilliant idea by refusing any teleological a priori. Why roll back our own talent by reintroducing these conservatisms? My representations are searching themselves in the world, and when they are not found it is up to me to enlarge, not to the world to reduce.

Surimposium, which makes complexity a concrete dimension of reality, never questions quantum theory. This is simply limited to the level of reality of the quantons. Based on their relationships. The quantons create their mechanics among themselves. They do it neither for us (we do not exist on their scale) nor for their own constitution, from which they are relatively emancipated.

When observed, the organization found with the observer (instrumental and/or human) concretizes an additional level of reality. Understand: these are not the same quantons that have changed their appearance; it is a new entity resulting from the observation, which surimposes itself on the previous one. The multiple potentialities of the quanton have not disappeared. They are merged into the quanton+observer entity. Organization likely to reverse.

Another quantum interpretation

A level of reality is a complex attractor. All the self-defining quantons of their relationships as they do in our universe create the same macroscopic organizations. These attractors are the closest correspondence with the notion of substance. The grains of matter that occupied this status have vanished. Reality has become a structure of relationships. However, substance is not juxtaposition of structures; it is stacked. We are in block quantons, atoms, biomolecules, cells, organs, neural networks. Fusion of levels of reality with relative independence that I tried to render in the term ‘surimposition’.

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