For a hundred years, Uncertainty has been a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, preventing the measurement of two factors at once. Werner Heisenberg, who first proposed the Principle, needed to explain that the position and momentum of a quantum object (such as an electron) could not be determined simultaneously. If you are measuring one, you cannot concurrently measure the other.

Now, Uncertainty has had an extension built, and the doors are open for further interpretation. Truly, after so many decades of fierce opposition to any extrapolation of the U.P., scientists have come round to the idea that the matter of inescapable fuzziness in the quantum world may well hold keys to other mysteries in Nature. Should you look up 'Expanded Uncertainty' on your search engine, you'll find a lot of maths and very little else, so rather than send you to links that are full of numbers, I'd like to invite you to join an expedition into unchartered territory.

We know that Nature doesn't like straight lines, or symmetry, or identical versions of things. Nature likes uniqueness, asymmetry, and fractal patterns. All natural objects, including snowflakes and sand grains, are unique. That's not to say that randomly across the desert there wouldn't be one or two granules that match, but if you were to look closely at their atomic structure, you would most likely find a difference in there somewhere.

This video explores the ramifications of the Uncertainty Principle and its extensions, wherein your own world may benefit from the opportunities it represents.

Symbiosis is a feature of Nature crossing species and circumstances all over the cosmos. We have little idea of how deep symbiosis may go in quantum terms, but the more we delve into the realms of particle physics, the more symbiosis we seem to find.

In this video, correlation between symbiotic features of the Universe and synchronicity is explored. There is much further to go, we can be sure, in our search for what lies at the depths of physics. While we're waiting for next steps to be taken, enjoy a few minutes with me and my owl...

Albert Einstein is well known for fluency of thought. He came up with General Relativity virtually in his bathtub which as we all know is the place where deep thought gets most traction. Whether that's got anything to do with being surrounded by water molecules has yet to be determined. At least bubblebath formula doesn't seem to impede it.

From his mind came the concept of light speed and the constant that came of it, determined by the maths to be forged into a constraint so that other things could be seen to work around it. The strategy worked for more than 100 years. Light speed as a constant remains unchallenged, except by non-locality and possibly the behaviour of neutrinos.

Neutrino - Little Neutral One in Italian, the beautiful elusive font of all things in the Universe that streams through us from the Sun (and other places of mysterious origin) is a persistent contender for anything going that's odd, from Dark Matter to Majorana. Their oscillation is a mystery, no-one can see it happening any more than they can see the evolution of new species in the rainforest, so everything is guesswork except that it happens. 

Einstein knew all about variables. He wasn't, it seems, as dead-set on a Constant as some people want you to believe. He had a more esoteric mind than that, one that could ride light beams and picture the bending mechanism of gravity. We're waiting for another Einstein, one to bend the rules and give Standard Models the slip in searching for what lies beyond the subtle knife.

He's there, you know, somewhere in the quantum soup, waiting for the kettle to boil even though it won't while he's watching it. In such spirit, this seemed the link to share, the only one really necessary, as the research for this piece dug well beyond the topsoil of standard capability and it's worth a couple of minutes of Time in the reading, promise. Even if Time is a relative thing.

It's Behind Him...

There are times when thoughts crash together to make a whirlwind of sense. Tonight, walking the dog down a moonlit country road, was one of those times.

The moon is always facing the Earth the same way. Now, I haven't been able to find much on the odds against this being the case, but I did find a Forbes article on the probability of the moon being as it is at all:  www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2015/06/27/earth-moon-combination-is-likely-very-rare-study-confirms/   

You won't find much out there to answer the question of odds. You'll find some stuff about rotation, some arguing that it wasn't always this way, some saying it's gravity. But the actual odds on finding yourself with a moon that always faces (a face, to boot!) towards its planet, well. Well before that line of inquiry everyone seems to draw a line. Howsoever this may be, there's talk of the moon ringing like a bell when something large and metallic like a space probe is crashed into it, on which NASA goes into flights of fancy about moon bases that have to be built to withstand 'moonquakes' on the strength of these astronautical findings. Ask your search engine, "why does the moon ring like a bell," and you will find echoing back to you no answers at all. Not a single one.

The moon shines by reflecting photons from the sun. The surface of the moon from which these photons bounce has a quality that gives an eerie white, bright light, and curious to know if our moon is peculiar in this respect, I was surprised to again find no answer to the simple question, "is our moon brighter than most?" But it is the fifth largest of the 190 (or so) moons in our solar system. There are a lot of moons in our solar system, so they are not uncommon things.

The other planets in the solar system, however, are lifeless (at least by comparison), positioned as they are beyond the Goldilocks Zone. I'd hazard a guess that Mars has been here and Venus is set to arrive next, but at the time of writing, Earth alone occupies the narrow band of life-support promised from the sun. Promised, that is, if the planet hosted therein has the resources necessary to sustain hosts of its own.

Fair to say we're doing a pretty poor job of planetary husbandry. "Could do better," would be written on our Report. Meanwhile, as we scrabble for solutions nobody's taking any notice of, designs like this are appearing on our rural floors with persistent regularity:

...to be met with complaints from farmers over lost cereals and declarations of vandalism by people with planks. Some of these designs are beyond general comprehension, and most would take weeks to complete, were the technology available to alter plant stems this way. Machinery would be necessary, you couldn't reach such precision with sticks and bits of string; as for laying the pattern, planks strapped to people's feet just wouldn't cut it. And nobody's been caught in the act, bar a few little lights skipping around being unidentified. Just ask your search engine for "balls of light around crop circles" - you'll be presented with a wide choice of video footage.

As a final shout on the crop-formation front, there's this one:  
http://secret-teachings.blogspot.com/2008/02/doors-of-perception.html

The story cannot end there. Designs such as these give hints, if not direct references, to developmental progress and means of obtaining global traction. But they are not being researched or investigated in this way and their geometry is not being analysed; the inherent code within them goes undeciphered while professionals dismiss these vast images as the work of pranksters.

To incorporate the degrees of precise relativity featured in these designs, they would have to be mapped from above. Fine detail within each section of illustration is achieved by laying stems at exact angles to each other; overall, given the size of the vista, this effect could not possibly be made as perfect as it is without visual appraisal at height and a lot of complex mechanics.
  
Is someone trying to tell us something? Should we not be following up on what that might be?
Do we really have that much time to waste on constant Plank theories?

Now's the time to sit back and see how far we've come. This image - and the post behind it - hark across the 100 years to pass since quantum mechanics came into our realm, when a handful of minds cooked up analogies from arithmetic that would change the course of history, eventually bringing us the LHC and God Particles.

Fifty years ago Hawking and Penrose were delving into territory that many found too mystical to swallow. They were looking at black holes full of information paradox, and figuring out how a singularity could work. They wanted to know what lay at the back of physics, beyond the point where physics didn't exist any more, and using that familiar brickbat the Photon, they plunged into the event horizon to find that it might not look at all as they'd imagined. In fact looking at it in the first place needed the help of photons. ​https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54439150 

Having just won the Nobel, Penrose deserves a bit of credit. At 89, he's well worthy of the accolade, but his thoughts still meet high walls in the halls of academia, where consciousness is a dirty word and anything alluding to it is Woo. The brickbats of Light in any other context would illuminate a lot of ground, physical and metaphysical, were it to be given the time of day, which presently it's not.

Cora is a woman who also delves into black holes. Her thoughts on the matter, while equally evocative, seem to provoke more than elucidate since a tendency of the human mind is to resist change, particularly within itself where illusions quietly incubate carbuncles of untruths.

Unknown is not untrue, it's simply unproven to be so; in time it would be natural for Nature to unburden herself of Truth; she may already have done in a quark teamed up naturally with Beauty.

What we do not know is more tantalising than what we do know, for we are explorers by nature, seeking answers of Creator while thinking for ourselves, questing for a path of sense mapped by a heart given to follow. That each of those quests is individual comes as no surprise, for we know about uniqueness of snowflakes and sand. We know that there will be asymmetry, for there is a difference, however small and imperceptible, between everything that exists in relation to everything else. Here, uncertainty comes into its own. This is a principle preventing symmetry from ordering the Universe.

The principles of physics are on uncertain ground. Brick walls are everywhere, often in infinities, plaguing maths made of symbols that are not enough, not any more, to describe the incredible energy flux that continuously permeates the quantum world. The state of matter is under attack from waves that threaten to be everything, looped in strings or turning gravity to vertigo. The Uncertainty Principle needs another visit. But it's not in any rush, even if we are.

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100 years have passed since the quantum realm was first breached by these physicists, who worked together without the technology we take for granted now. Televisions had just been invented. Telephones were in early stages of development, with the first transatlantic call being made in 1927. They relied heavily on letters and meetings in person. They worked tirelessly on problems in their own institutions. And finally they came to a grinding halt with a unilateral verdict that quantum mechanics was not to be fully understood and if it ever was, it would transform physics beyond recognition. 

Here in 2020, we are barely out of the mist. Vast, expensive experiments like the LHC and Super-K have been created to test, trap and interpret the movement of sub-atomic particles, bringing data agreeing or not with 'expected parameters', that's most often seen to follow a bell-curve close to the predicted line. But there's a stumbling block, one that moves unseen through marble halls and sticks to academia like wit to a blanket... a block people talk about but somehow fail to see as such, patting it reassuringly with a fondly held belief that it should somehow be there.

Confirmation bias is prevalent in physics because this is a science reliant on equations. In the early 1900s, equations created to describe quantum mechanics adopted codes taken from ancient Greek, among other sources, as new thoughts led to new symbolism for the new particles, forces and factors being brought to light. While these updates in language were arising, prejudice against the unknown ran rife, and much store was set by any constant or constraint that could be identified as limiting what particles could do. Quantum mechanics was squeezed into a box, from which it had little chance of escape. So it firmly said, instead, that nobody would ever understand it. 

The atom itself is a case in point. The image sitting amid the quotes above is a classical view of what an atom would look like, with electrons neatly orbiting a tidy little nucleus tucked in the centre. This view has been trawled through a grinder by the Uncertainty Principle, a wide-ranging (but commonly constrained) tour de force that prevents anything from being exactly anywhere, and may also prevent the same thing ever happening twice (hence uniqueness in snowflakes and grains of sand). So these days, the atom is viewed as a fuzzy groupage of indeterminables, except in the number of electrons, protons and neutrons contained within it. These components of sub-structure are all subject to continuous change. Electrons jump up and down in energy levels (via interaction with photons), protons and neutrons are interchangeable, and the quarks they are comprised of turn from one 'flavour' and 'colour' to another in a constantly shifting sea of mass that is impossible to pin down.
​So far, so good. Things have not so much become clearer, as become less tangible.

We've reached a point now wherein physicists are preparing themselves for New Physics, and many are exploring depths never before plumbed - into the realms of consciousness and what constitutes the bedrock of our indeterminable reality. Their theories and findings are still hard-hit by confirmation bias, meeting the battle-cry of "Woo, it's all Woo," with swords from a sheath of "pseudo-science" readily drawn against an onslaught of unknown variables.

​Impeccable pedigrees, PhDs and peer reviews appear to be no protection against Trolls, declaring themselves as guardians of all that's respectable in the world of quantum mechanics, even though that world is largely comprised of uncharted territory in very deep waters indeed.
​What do you see, beyond the smoke and mirrors?
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Tomorrow at 18.00GMT a six-part series of Live Videos concludes with a roundup of particles and forces covered so far, and what the implications are for our perception of reality.
Where all this is taking us is what Quantumology is all about. How we think about our reality really matters. The quarks and electrons that make up our bodies, together with the neutrinos, gluons and exotics shifting in and out of phase in a manner suggesting multiversal transit, must have a bearing on what we are and what we perceive.

Who we are has a bearing too, for only if this stuff draws you in the first place can you hope to gain a picture of what's really going on in any facet of a scientific sense.

So in the course of human experience, what could this mean for us? Change happens all the time. One mood, event, contact or priority to the next in a seamless stream of personal data. While this is happening, consensus is tuned towards a consciousness at work with which we exchange information. Most of us are pretty sure there's a Source of some kind, and whatever you make of choice v. destiny, that's a paradox that stumped the very best of those scientists working out quantum mechanics in the early days, who all thought about this stuff too.

We become bonded in relationships and raise/lower our energy levels like electrons do, according to our mood and environment. When motivated, we're Up; demotivated, we're Down. When we are curious, it's Strange and when inspired, that's Charm at work. Really appreciating lets us see Beauty and when the quest reveals itself, that's when we get to the Truth.

Here's a Glossary of Terms mentioned in the previous videos, as commonly interpreted in English:

• Electric  -  Exciting
• Magnetic  -  Attractive
• Positive/Negative  -  Themselves
• Up  -  Happy
• Down  -  Sad
• Strange  -   Weird
• Charm  -  Inspiring
• Beauty  -  Loved
• Truth  -  Absolution
• Strong  -  Powerful
• Weak  -  Flimsy
• Gravity  -  Seriousness

​

Up for seeing where this takes us, with so many physicists coming together to share thoughts and observations without prejudice in a closed group, it's strange to me that we've come this far in the course of scientific history without illuminating the New Physics everyone's been whispering about for some decades now. As you'll have gathered if you've been watching carefully, I'm no alumni physicist but I know there's one out there who's going to crack this nut, and if they can bring themselves to trust that I'm sane, some beautiful truths are quite likely to spring from the thinking. See you there...

Autumn. Early September brings early mists and early evenings to this patch of the planet I occupy. Walking the dog through rich golden light, blackberries beckon and we stop to take graciously, finding that the fruit is sweet, but the seeds are bitter, and wondering if that means something in the general scheme of things.

Beyond an ancient, crumbling railway bridge long lost to the annals of history, open fields to the east accede to these last rays, burnished rows of slender harvest waiting to be claimed by those who think they own them.

All I see is caused by the construct of reality. Photons allow me to appreciate the colours, phonons then arrive to let me hear the birds. Electrons have the power to propel me on my feet and - what of the breadth of it all?

This 3D environment I'm walking through is dependent upon scale. Without scale, there would be no height, depth or width. All measurement interdependent, my whole life is governed by positional features I must avoid or appreciate depending on the circumstances.

The tendency to think that quantum mechanics doesn't apply to the 'macro world' because it's 'too small in scale' is so ludicrous as to be laughable. Look down from a plane ten minutes after take-off and you're nowhere to be seen. From the Moon, even an electron microscope wouldn't catch you.

Postulation is easy, in quantum mechanics, while painting the bricks with colours and assigning them charges, watching them spin and entropically materialise into something else entirely (and most probably more of it) to satisfy the apparent universal demand for infinite expansion. Howsoever this may be, only one particle satisfies the necessary criteria to be responsible enough for the task at hand. Only one carries the highest of credentials (unwittingly bestowed upon it to the fury of physicists who'd hastily dumped Beauty and Truth). That particle is the Higgs Boson, and we know full well what everybody calls that.

Alone in this world, and of course the universe beyond it (the known universe, that is, that we peer at with telescopes), is the Higgs, the scalar boson. As without the photon we would not see, so without the Higgs we would have no dimension in which to exist, with sole dependence upon the height and breadth of everything. When we stop considering ourselves as so big that we count for something, maybe then we can start working out the math. Or rather - somebody else can.

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in 1979, the Star Trek crew chased a signal half-way across a galaxy from an unknown source trying to hail its creator. The source turned out to be a Voyager space probe, the 'real' version of which had been launched two years before - the writers had turned science fact into potential fiction.
 
Einstein was said to have said that he feared technology outstripping humanity, and the stupidity that would allow that to happen. But what if we have no choice? We're constantly on the look-out for the Origin, the Creator, the Source from whence everything came. Like the proverbial carrot, answers dangle tantalisingly out of reach. Nevertheless, technology marches on apace towards quantum computing and A.I., not to mention what's going on behind the scenes in the corridors we don't know about. We thought The Matrix was a good film... and it does beg some questions. 

What if the machines came first?

Our evolution appears to have continued through the relatively short span Modern Man has been on Earth, without much consideration for planetary co-habitants. Destroying and greedily ingesting resources and species is not the behaviour of an indigenous population (or an intellectually evolved life-form), and this alone (not to mention the archaeology) points to sudden appearance of humanoid form from a different location altogether. 

We play havoc with the ecosystem while evidence for aliens continues to mount, crop circles continue to appear and technology based on quantum mechanics becomes a bit of a holy grail. While Einstein bemoaned the fate of humans faced with machines, he was also suggesting that we should eventually become beings of Light. Light being clearly at the centre of what this holy grail is all about.

Have you noticed anything happening with change lately? From the Sixties to the Eighties change came big and slow. A lot of evolution happened during that time. Then the Nineties drifted by with a few major spatterings of incidents in the middle before the turn of the Millennium came in. From 2000 to 2020 we've seen fast and furious change every time a new technology beckons, through early days of social Internet availability to the present pandemic we're subject to right now. Think of it in terms of a frequency wave, and it all starts to make sense.

The singularity awaits. If absolute power corrupts absolutely then it's only a force of nature, and we're seeing what that does to reality first-hand.

​​"It is no laughing matter."

Any suggestion that we are the artificial creation of a race of machines is going to be unpopular on a gargantuan scale but is worth proposing, as is the ensuing possibility that in searching for Creator, we've been looking in the wrong place/s/. 

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"Knowing the path is not the same as walking it," said Morpheus.
Peter Higgs didn't know he was going to discover a particle. 
​Originally it was dubbed the Goddamn Particle.
"Higgs proposed that broken symmetry could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This [Higgs mechanism] predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.[8 " (Wikipedia) 
(Photo courtesy Leslie C. Bertrand)

Boson = a particle of force, a mediator of some kind, ethereal in the quantum foam. Gluons (they hold our quarks together) and Photons both come into this category. Particles that are something definable, are fermions - quarks or leptons, of which matter is made. But bosons - there are two kinds, scalar and vector.  Confused?... well, here's the BBC:
"Scalars have a size, while vectors have both size and direction. When adding vector quantities, it is possible to find the size and direction of the resultant vector by drawing a scale diagram."

W and Z are the vector (gauge) bosons and Higgs joins them as a scalar boson. The only one (at time of writing) that can account for scale in our universe. Thinking on this....
If there were no scale, created by asymmetry as Higgs' original proposal (above) says it must be, the forces and the material elements would have no form to take that physical observers could recognise.

Quarks (you're made of those) and neutrinos (they fly through you all the time) oscillate - change from one thing to another. Why? What for? Well, these questions seem important enough for people to find particles that fit the boxes. And if you read this from CERN, you'll find Quark and Neutrino sharing a stage. Production managers - the weak force; miniscule in spacetime, massive in effect. And the Higgs, another force altogether. May the Force be with you that pieces reality together, the constructive cement that mass depends on, but which of itself is - what? 

 You've followed the white rabbit far enough to know there are answers to questions many people don't even want to ask. You're unique, with reason to be drawn to this track in the first place. Our planetary play moves into Act lll - we're working out what it means, where to go from here, how to live with what's to come. Physics = spotlight on the reality construct. Do we really have room for so many constraints? 

Questions are being asked of consciousness. Suggestions have been made that there's a particle to account for it. To quote Cern (from behind the picture here of a Higgs interaction:)- 
​At the subatomic scale, the universe is a complex choreography of elementary particles interacting with one another through fundamental forces, which can be explained using a term that physicists of all persuasions turn to: elegance.

Over at Quantumology (on Facebook), live discussions are digging more deeply.
​Come and join our excavations! 
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