Weird on Top

In the next few weeks, there may a breakthrough in physics unlike anything seen in the last hundred years. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are closing in on the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives atoms their mass. If this particle actually is proven to exist, it will change much of the way we think about matter, the Universe, and, well, everything.

On this occasion, I thought I’d take a stab at writing down an explanation for one of the weirdest (proven!) scientific theories I know. It concerns the rules that we understand about the Universe on the smallest scales we know of. These rules are collectively called “quantum mechanics”.

So what’s so important about quantum mechanics in the first place? Well, we humans have figured out the physics how things work on big scales.. and by that I mean things atom-sized and larger. We understand most things about how gravity and electromagnetism works, and use that information to create all the cool, useful tools we have today. For example, did you know that GPS satellites have to take into account how the mass of the Earth distorts space-time when they’re figuring out the best way to get you to the mall?

So we’ve pretty much squared away how things work on a macroscopic level. However, when you start looking at things on smaller and smaller scale, the less sense they make. Then things quit making much sense It appears that empty space itself is full of random pairs of tiny particles that spring into existence out of nowhere, then collide and return to nothingness again. It’s a kind of “quantum foam” that forms the very fabric of the universe. And because the particles appear only to disappear again mere billionths of a second later, no energy is gained or lost. We kind of understand how this all works, and in fact about a third of our tech gadgets use some aspect of this odd, counterintuitive side of the Universe to make them work.

But it gets weirder than that. Say you have a flashlight that only emits one photon at a time. If you shine it at a window, does the photon bounce back at you or pass right through? The answer is… *it depends on whether you’re watching or not*. This is where things get seriously crazy. Until you check, the photon actually does both. It passes through *and* it gets reflected. And until someone looks, it stays merely a probability (say, 50% refraction/50% reflection). But when someone looks, or checks on it in some more subtle, indirect way, it finally decides where it is -- inside the house or out -- and retroactively makes it appear that it had been that way all along.

Now, you might be thinking the same thing I did when I heard about this: WHAT THE HELL?!?! Up until I started looking into this, the way I believed the Universe worked was very linear. Allowing for some distortion, time moved forward. But if we accept what the evidence is telling us, it requires time to be rewritten as things move along. Either that or… and this seems to be the solution that seems most elegant to me… multiple universes.

This is an idea that I had been turning over in my mind for a long time, just from reading lts of sci-fi, but never really had any context to put it in. The idea is that both results exist, and when you check to see how it turned out, you push the Universe along a particular path. The fact that other people who check will see the same thing proves that everyone is moving along the same path. But the truly mind-blowing thing is that this is happening millions of times, every second of every day. (It also brings up the thought of who actually can push the Universe along a path by observation – if a cat looks, is that enough? How about an amoeba? Is sentience required? Or any kind of consciousness at all?)

This theory is something Brian Greene talks about in his book The Hidden Reality. I haven’t read it yet, but I have heard interviews with him, discussing the theories involved in it. Apparently this idea of multiple possible universes meshes nicely with “string theory”, which basically says that all particles are made of unfathomably small loops of some unknown cosmic material, and when they vibrate at different frequencies, they become a photon, or an electron, or any of the other particles we know about. The geometry of the strings apparently explains how our universe can exist alongside others almost like it, and how they can split off from each other.

But one of the great things about this theory is that it’s somewhat testable, which has been the problem with string theory up until now. One of the many things they’ll be doing with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is smashing particles together and seeing how much energy they get out of it. If what comes out is less than what they put in, they’ll know that in high-pressure and high-temperature situations, it’s possible for energy to get knocked out of our Universe and into a nearby one.

So, as usual, the Universe (or the Multiverse, as some people are now calling it, considering there might be many slightly different ones right alongside ours) turns out to be more complicated and bewildering the closer you look at it. Barry Gifford wrote it and David Lynch used it as the main idea of one of his movies: “The whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” And it just keeps getting weirder.