Friday 1 March 2002

Pic of the day: Wherever we go, we are surrounded by invisible cosmic forces that connect all of existence, if only we could see them ... OK! OK! I confess. It's just another Mandelbrot fractal.

Quantities of entanglement

"Trust synchronicity". As I was walking down the street on my way home from work on this beautiful but chilly Friday late afternoon, I heard a familiar tune from my right. There, the loudspeaker of a local eatery played:
... 'cuz I have known the safety
of floating freely in your arms
and I don't need another lifeline ...

Yes indeed, the very song that I quoted on Monday. That was two months after I decided to buy it, after hearing it at SuperWoman's place. (Well, technically her parents' place, may they die surrounded by happily married grandchildren, if at all.) Anyway, the song. Drowning by Backstreet Boys, for whom I had felt nothing but smug condescendence until that.

Not that I think SuperWoman felt she was drowning in my love. ^_^' She knows that I love her, in a way; but it's not soft mushy love. My love is like a rock on which you can stand and fight for what you believe.

Anyway, it is funny that I hear this song out of the blue after I have taken an interest in it. Nor is this the first time such things happen. I'm sure I have mentioned how I took a cassette to work, some years ago, and played Why worry with Dire Straits, which I had not heard for a couple years. Then I switched from cassette to radio ... where they were playing Why worry with Dire Straits. Suspicious, isn't it? Or the neighbor playing Circle of Life loudly just as I was about to start it on my Discman ... in fact, I first believed I had started it and fumbled with the volume control ...

***

According to New Scientist (which is all scientist and no New Age, btw) work on quantum entanglement proceeds apace. It is now possible to entangle atoms and even small molecules; larger molecules are in the pipeline. Huh? Quantum entanglement?

You may have heard the absurd notion that certain particles that share a common past continue to be "connected" across distances where no signal could reach from one to another; certainly not faster than light. And yet, once you determine one of them, the other is locked at the very same moment. In experiment after experiment, this strange feature is confirmed. Somehow the twin particles stay connected, blissfully ignoring space. This is kind of creepy, given that other notion: That once upon a time, the entire universe consisted of one single quantum particle, which exploded into space, time, the universe and everything. The tree that falls in the forest and the energy of its sound waves were all one, In The Beginning.

This is a good time to make money off simple people's superstition by bandying about buzzwords of quantum physics without understanding the maths. And yet reality is stranger than fiction sometimes. Well, stranger than some fiction. I've seen some pretty weird fiction in my time. But enough of that.

***

Last week I was home sick two days before the weekend. On Friday evening, just before bedtime, I noticed that one of my feet was starting to hurt on the underside. It grew worse during the weekend, and soon both feet were hurting. A bit back of center, but not quite as far as the heel. I was puzzled, slightly worried. But on Monday I still made my way to work. During the week, I seemed to notice that the pain actually grew less when I got into my shoes. Tonight, I put on my jogging shoes and took quite a long walk. No pain.

For some obscure reason, it seems that my feet have decided to hurt if not used within a certain time. Frankly I cannot think of any physiological mechanism that would account for this, nor have I heard of such a condition before. Of course, there could be a perfectly logical reason which I simply don't know enough to think of. Or it could be my soul at work again. Body and soul are so ... entangled ... that it is hopeless to say where one ends and the other begins.

Or it could be sheer synchronicity, I guess. Things happening close to another in time, and we try to find a meaning that connects them even if there is no connection of cause and effect. Finding patterns in random signals is something we humans are really good at. Or so I have heard. But is anything really random? Or is it all ... entangled?