The strangeness of Quantum Mechanics, the central howling strangeness, is that what it suggest is that all this stuff about probability curves is actually happening in reality.
We're not just dealing with the problem of not being able to map the electron's specific position and speed.
It doesn't actually have a specific position. It doesn't actually have a specific speed.
It actually exists as a probability. The electron exist as a probability curve, and when an interaction happens, this probability collapses, through a moment of infinity where the electron is both everywhere and nowhere at once, and then it vanishes.
So before it is interfered with, the electron actually exists as a probability of an electron. When disrupted, a kind of catastrophic probability collapse is triggered. The probability curve vanishes — because you now know exactly where the electron was.
But then, it's not there anymore… because you stuck a photon into it, and the added energy makes it leap to a different position, where it can 'fit' the extra energy in — this is the famed Quantum Leap. But then — you're back to square one — because the speed and position of where it leaps to exists again, as a probability.
So like I said, it's not so much complex (although, yes, there's a certain level of complexity to it) as it is strange. The strangeness of it.
This is really what the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is saying, as I understand it. It's not incredibly simple, but it's not incredibly complex either — what it is, is incredibly weird.
Now, there are many things about this idea that are strange, but I've saved the strangest of all till last. Because the thing is that all observation is a form of interference. You can't get any information on something without, in some way, interacting with it. And because these particles are so very tiny, this is a very pronounced effect.
It's not just that this is weird because of the jumping around of the electron, or the “existing as a probability” issue. It's weird because this gets triggered every time someone's watching. Every time a measurement is taken, the probability collapses. If someone's watching, it happens. Every time, like clockwork, in the world's weirdest clock.
It is very strange that the electron exists only as a probability. Strange, but ok, fine, we can accept that, because reality is what it is. If it wants to be a probability, fine. Say the electron then wants to vanish, then burst back into existence at some random point along that probability curve?
Ok, if that's how electrons work, that's how they work.
It's strange, but not really that much more strange than the idea of atoms as mini-solar-systems. Once you get to a certain depth, it all looks pretty unusual. But then you add the problem of the observer.
This is the key problem of the Copenhagen interpretation, and revolves around a very famous fictional cat, belonging to Irwin Schrödinger. That when a measurement is taken, the probability collapses, and something becomes real.
If you put a cat in a box, and put a small bomb next to it (laughing evilly as you do, presumably) and then hook the detonator up to a computer that's measuring the random decay of an unstable atom?
The decay of that atom exists in the state of probability — this much probability that it has decayed, this much that it hasn't. When it gets measured, then the probability resolves itself into coherence, into reality. Simply put, it happens.
So what about the cat? The cat's life is tied to the state of the atom, and the atom's state isn't set until it gets measured. So is the cat alive or dead? Is it both at once?
And from the Copehagen interpretation, the answer is, basically yes. Yes, it's alive and dead at the same time, and doesn't resolve itself into reality until that box gets opened, and you see either a delightful little kitty, or a godawful mess.
This is the beating heart of the mad weirdness of Quantum Mechanics. How can human consciousness, being produced by the brain, have anything like this effect? Because it does — and it has been shown by countless experiments to have this effect. Those experiments are the 'double slit' experiments, where light is shone through slits in a card, and measurements are taken at various points in the light's journey.
What we see is that actually, it does seem to do this. No-one's tried with the cat, as far as I can tell, or at least, if they have, they're not going public with it. But every experiment ever done backs up this strange reality.
Observation causes the collapse of probability into the real.
This isn't actually something Niels Bohr was every comfortable with, because it is so very strange. Einstein was appalled. God does not play dice, he said. And the overwhelming majority of physicists share this discomfort, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the nature of observation, of consciousness, has not been fully accounted for.
Because while it's easy (ish) to understand that the interference in a system can change it, what about observation? What about consciousness? Can that just be set aside, and ignored?
Or does it play a far more central role in all this than has so far been imagined?
Because there's another experiment, and quite a recent one, in the history of Quantum Mechanics. It has quite a delightful name, as many things in the Quantum world do, and it's this — the Delayed Quantum Eraser.
The Delayed Quantum Eraser is an amazing experiment, which I heartily recommend that you research yourself, because what it demonstrates, among other very strange things, is that measurement, and interference, is not as important as observation. Nothing like as important.
I won't go too much into it here, I'll save that for the book, but put it like this. You have a ray of light, shining. That light is made of photons. These photons pass through an apparatus, with lenses and such, bouncing around.
At various places in this apparatus, there are measuring devices. These devices measure the photons at various stages of their journey, and as we've seen, all the weird Quantum effects happen as predicted by the Copenhagen interpretation.
But then… they get clever. And what they do is quite insane. These measuring devices store the measurements they make in a computer, in a file.
What they do is run the experiment as normal, and then delete the file.
They delete the file of measurements before they open it.
What do you think happens?
Quantum effects disappear.
It's not measurement that's causing the collapse of probability curves. It's not interference.
For all the world, it seems to be consciousness. Consciousness causing the collapse of probability into the real. Without conscious observation, none of these effects occur, no matter what you measure.
Something else is going on.
Now, we've looked at the brain in a way it hasn't been seen before. We've seen the primary purpose of both hemispheres. But we haven't seen anything that can account for this. We haven't seen anything like it. And any attempt to draw some kind of bridge between brain activity and the collapse of electrons on the other side of the room run into what is, in all fairness, an absolute beast of a problem.
The Quantum equations describe events that are happening on a level so much smaller than the activity of the brain that it might as well be happening in another universe.
It's easy to get mixed up when dealing with the very small. Neurons, the nodal points of the brain itself, are very small. The 'wires' that connect them, the synapses, are smaller still. Once you start getting down to axons and dendrons (the cells that bookend those wires) you are talking very small indeed.
But not Quantum Mechanics small. Quantum Mechanics small is a totally different level of small. It is small in a way you literally cannot imagine.
So the idea that a single neuron (let alone something as big as a brain) could be exerting an influence on the collapse of subatomic particles into reality is ridiculous on its face.
Unless of course, consciousness is something very different to what we think it is. Or, if the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics isn't confined to the very small, but is actually happening on a large scale too, in human life.
Or both.