Quantum Theory predicts the rate of radioactive decay. Not once in history has Quantum Theory been wrong. An investor in the stock market forecasts how the market will behave. The weather bureau forecast the weather. News media predicts elections. Are they always right? Do they succeed in predicting the future in each and every situation? Of course not! In fact, they hardly do better than the rest of us. But what can we say of an investor who is correct more often than we? We say that she knows some things that the rest of us do not know. We say that she knows something about the innermost secret plans of corporations, regulatory agencies, and other investors. And since the weather bureau does not do all that badly we say that it knows a bit about the vagaries of wind, intrusions of high pressure, and shift in humidity. The media know something about the opinions of voters. We say that the investor and the weather bureau and the media have to some degree succeeded in seeing the underlying truth that is hidden to the rest of us. Physicists have a term for those truths: we call them “hidden variables”. They are variables because they could have one value or another- an electron could be here or there, an atom could have this energy or that. And they are “hidden” because we do not see them: they are hidden from our gaze. “Hidden variables” is physicist-speak for what is actually going on: the real physical situation that we do not perceive, but that Quantum Theory apparently does.

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Some researchers now argue that sensory substitution shares characteristics of, and is an artificial form of a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which sensory information of one type gives rise to precepts in another sensory modality. ****For example, the physicist Richard Feynman was a grapheme-color synesthesia, for whom each letter of the alphabet elicited the sensation of a specific color, so that he saw colored letters when he looked at equations. {Did this allow him to perceive the chemical quantum reality in a different way from the start, which is why he was one of the most brilliant physicists of all time?}

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The universe is made up of atoms, the “force” that holds everything together are the strong and weak nuclear forces in atoms; weak force enables nuclear fusion, and the strong force works on the nucleus of the atom. Baryonic matter, material made of protons and neutrons, makes up everything that we can see. But when you count up all the matter that exists in the universe, baryonic matter only makes up for about 16 percent of all matter- the rest of the matter approximately 84% of the matter that exists we cannot see. If you take all of the stars, gas, and dust in a galaxy and use what you see to calculate its mass, the galaxy turns out to be far more massive than it should be; something doesn’t add up.

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In the West, the intuitive, religious type of knowledge is often devalued in favour of rational, scientific knowledge, whereas the traditional Eastern attitude is in general just the opposite. Socrates in Greece made the famous statement ‘I know that I know nothing’, and Lao Tzu in China said, ‘Not knowing that one knows is best.’ Rational knowledge is derived from the experience we have with objects and events in our everyday environment. It belongs to the realm of the intellect whose function it is to discriminate, divide, compare, measure and categorize. In this way, a world of intellectual distinctions is created; of opposites which can only exist in relation to each other, which is why Buddhists call this type of knowledge ‘relative’. {If we create the reality we experience we also create our knowledge.} Abstraction is a crucial feature of this knowledge, because in order to compare and to classify the immense variety of shapes, structures and phenomena around us we cannot take all their features into account, but have to select a few significant ones. Thus we construct an intellectual map of reality in which things are reduced to their general outlines. Rational knowledge is a system of abstract concepts and symbols, characterized by the linear, sequential structure which is typical of our thinking and speaking.

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Action at a distance, would make particle physics simpler by making electrons sole masters of their own fate. They would govern their own interactions without an intermediary. Wheeler pondered the idea of “everything as electrons” including not just electromagnetism but also the other particles and forces. This would lend a beautiful unity and simplicity to the universe. Part of the motivation for resurrecting action at a distance in quantum electrodynamics stemmed from a growing understanding that many quantum phenomena coordinate their features remotely. Such remote interplay, called entanglement, transpires when two particles with complementary values of a quantum number [ a parameter designating the specific quantum state] such as spin are linked in the same system, no matter how distant they are physically.

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Motivated by the demonstration in April 1914 by James Franck and Gustav Hertz, of Bohr-like atomic transitions in mercury vapor under the bombardment of electrons, Einstein set out to describe theoretically the mechanisms by which these transitions might take place. He found once again that the energy of light itself should indeed be quantized, and further that the quanta would have momentum and an associated direction of travel. All this would seem to confirm light as a quantized particle. But acceptance of this idea would still not come until nine years later.

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Since the 70s, many techniques for controlling single Quantum Systems have been developed. For example: methods have been developed for trapping a single atom in an ‘atom trap’, isolating it from the rest of the world and allowing us to probe many different aspects of its behavior with incredible precision. The Scanning Tunneling Microscope has been used to move single atoms around, creating designer arrays of atoms at will. {What are the implications of this? Does the US invest in this tech anymore or is at all warfare now?}

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In a famous myth related by Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, some men are chained at the bottom of a dark cave and see only shadows cast upon a wall by a fire behind them. They believe that this is reality. One of them frees himself, leaves the cave, and discovered first the light of the sun and the wider world. At first light, to which his eyes are unaccustomed, stuns and confuses him- perhaps even pains him. But eventually his eyes adjust, and he can see. He returns excitedly to his companions to tell them what he has seen, they find it hard to believe. We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness suspended over the immense abyss of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless- it makes it interesting and precious.

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