Thoughts about Quantum Mechanics

As I begin, I should point out that I am by no means a scientific expert. I have no degrees, and I didn’t even take physics in high school, since I instead studied three music subjects, German, and Ancient History. But I love science, even if only as someone who looks at it from the outside, not fully understanding how it is organised and governed, and as a writer I love it more specifically for the inspiration it can bring, and its defiant quirkiness.

It doesn’t matter if you think it’s odd that light is sometimes waves and sometimes particles and only seems to choose one or the other when observed, it just is.

Quantum mechanics is an utterly delightful field of science that I feel has come to rival religion in the list of things that scientists will pour money into to try and disprove. Erwin Schrödinger’s much-quoted example of the cat that is both alive and dead until observed is in fact an attempt to ridicule believers in quantum mechanics, a fancier way of saying “don’t be such idiots, of course it can’t be both until observed, just give up on this nonsense.” To which, presumably, people cried “well explain the light thing, then!”

A recent article on IFLS (I did warn you I wasn’t a science expert) recounts the story of two people who undertook experiments trying to clear some of the fog of confusion around the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics, that the observation of the light or atom or whatever object is when it actually becomes either a wave or a particle.

His results returned conclusions that apparently lead to one of two possibilities: ether that the theory of quantum mechanics is correct, or that a future event (the measurement) causes the photon to decide its past.

Most scientists (including the one who conducted the experiment in the article, found here: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/measurement-rules-quantum-universe) are sticking with the dominant theory of quantum mechanics, the former option, but it’s the latter that interests me in particular.

Having read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, his proposal that time does not in fact move while we stay static as we seem to observe it, but that we really move against the backdrop of a giant bubble of time in which we seem to perceive a linear timeline based on the rate of entropic decay placing each moment in order from least entropic to eventual total chaos, really struck a chord with me.

For the sake of a writer’s love of brilliant world-building gimmicks, combine these two things and you have a universe which at its basest level of photons and various other miniscule objects resists entropy’s hold over how everything else experiences time. A rock does not destroy itself in the past because it was crushed in the future; a cat is not both alive and dead until observed; but in this world I imagine, a photon can be changed for the entirety of its existence, future and present and past all, by one moment of observation somewhere in the middle.

I wish it were true, if we are being completely honest. I would like to think that entropy doesn’t decide everything. Maybe one day scientists will be able to tell us if my wish has been granted.

Science Fiction vs. Reality

Today I’ve spent several hours drawing up a basic outline for a story I’m planning on co-writing with my boyfriend – well, let me rephrase that, I’ve spent about an hour drawing up an outline, and several hours researching various forms of physics as a basis upon which to devise a historical backstory for the story I’m trying to outline.

Not only did it get me thinking about how difficult it must be to be a science teacher, since I can’t imagine trying to explain Lagrange points to somebody who can’t comprehend them, but it also made me wonder if human innovation will ever actually catch up to our science fiction dreams, or whether we will never progress far enough to actually leave our own planet.

It’s entirely possible that space flight is attainable, and if in that case we never achieve it, various archaeologists from alien races may look at our science fiction stories and movies, and our real life physics papers, and lament that we came either so close, or were so far from the real solution even though we consistently dreamt of the stars.

But it’s also possible that the laws of physics themselves negate any effort we may make to travel significant distances beyond our own world. Perhaps it would be easier if there were another habitable world in our own system, but as it is there’s just too much technology we would need to develop to be able to colonise beyond Sol.

Games like Mass Effect and TV shows like Stargate: Atlantis make me yearn for life outside our solar system and what kind of adventures and interesting people or places could be out there somewhere. Writing my own science fiction stories is equally addictive: the idea of an established human presence beyond that which now festers on Earth, as something we can aspire to in future, even if we may not reach a galactic standard of settlement.

I often wonder what the turians from Mass Effect, who were humanity’s first contact with aliens in that game, would think of us, if they could see Earth now, what with climate scientists speculating that they’re at least 50% certain we may already have irreparably damaged our planet, and all of the wars, and the general climate of fear and dehumanising anyone we don’t agree with. Have we already reached the stage where we’ve bypassed any hope we had of achieving spaceflight before exhausting our planet’s resources?

And yet people continue to write science fiction stories that mainly come from a place of hope, not just in terms of technology, hoping that we will someday learn how to effectively manipulate and overcome the physics that governs the universe, but also in terms of attitudes and acceptance, that humanity would actually for once stand united if we were ever to come into contact with aliens. Both of these are probably very debatable topics.

But until we know the answers, if we ever do, I think science fiction is a very important part of our culture, and a tangible glimpse of our hopes for the future. The abundance of post-apocalyptic stories recently shows that humans are increasingly becoming less positive and more foreboding in their ideas of what the future will be like, and I for one am glad to be writing a story about humanity’s triumphs and not only its resilience.

Free Online Courses!

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/categories/creative-arts-and-media

So a friend of mine just posted this on Facebook and it immediately caught my attention. I’m not generally a fan of creative writing courses, for reasons I will elaborate on below, but they also give free courses in marketing, business management, organisation, time management, and that sort of thing, which seems to me to be a very useful array of skills for someone hoping to self-publish and thus maintain their own business.

I am even somewhat tempted by the language and science courses… yeah, I could learn Dutch! If I had the time…

As for creative writing courses, while I’m sure they’re invaluable for someone who is actively seeking knowledge, I took a subject on creative writing at university and the results were… inconclusive? I won’t comment on the teacher’s own writing style, mostly because I don’t remember it very well, but he seemed to think that novels and short stories were basically the same thing. Only novels have a small amount more words.

As someone who is terrible at short stories, I got a much better mark for that class than I expected, but the feedback he gave me on my piece really puzzled me. He said that during the middle of my story, he “felt the need to move around, to stand up and be outside, and we must always note our visceral reaction to things” so he docked me half a mark. I… found that… somewhat pretentious.

On the other hand, I’m sure not all creative writing teachers think that standing up while reading something is automatically bad, and I am a big fan of making appropriate use of available resources, so I wanted to share this link to as many people as possible (whoever might possibly read this blog). Free education is worth its weight in gold, so I hope you’ll take a look!

I certainly intend to investigate the business and marketing resources myself!

Starting a Blog

It occurred to me, today, in between working on my novel and spending time with friends who were working on theirs, that starting a blog was something practically anybody could do. Anybody at all! Even with people with absolutely no money!

A successfully self-published author friend of mine mentioned that he used WordPress during his daily livestream of his writing and that really grabbed my attention, like “hey, successful people use that free tool, too! Why don’t you?” Well, aside from the fact that I rarely have much to say that I feel relevant or humorous enough to broadcast publicly on the internet.

But… I’ve reached a stage in my life where I like me, and I like what I’m doing, and one of the best things about being part of my group of friends is the feeling of camaraderie involved in a whole group of writers getting together and being depressed about writing as a collective, so I like other writers, too. Obviously there are aspects of my life that aren’t writing, but it’s certainly one of the more important parts of my day-to-day life as I attempt to finish the novel I’m currently writing. So maybe it might be nice to put some things out there and show other writers that they’re not alone, I don’t know.

I also know a lot more about Tolkien than a lot of people, and I fully intend to talk about that, too, don’t you worry!

I’m currently on the tail-end of something I thought up (not to blow my own trumpet or anything) called 2K words a Day in May, which I really regret not telling more people about purely because rhymes are so pleasing, and it was a very successful endeavour in encouraging myself to produce more words, at least, as a catalyst to actually finishing my book.

I’ll probably blog more about writing, and about the editing process, which I anticipate being more difficult for me than the actual writing part. I also intend to post videos of me redoing maps for the story and art, eventually, just for the hell of it. I love maps, but I draw very slowly, so it’ll have to be time-lapse, but… yeah. That’s probably what I’ll do.

Writing, Elvish, occasionally talking about games I play or songs I listen to or movies I watch. I hope you find me somewhat interesting, or at least amusing.  I would love for this to be a place where writers can talk to each other and discuss their writer ways :3

Probably post something about Sindarin in the next day or so and actually get some things going on here! Good luck, me!