All Tangled Up

This thing of beauty is known as a Yarn Barf!

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I got interested in the word entanglement yesterday. I mean in the physics sense. I thought I might be able to understand it intuitively. I had notions fuzzily floating around in my head about what it might mean. 

I discovered a Scientific American article that does a good job of explaining, written by a physics prof in Sydney. 

Quantum Entanglement Isn’t All That Spooky After All 

The way we teach quantum theory conveys a spookiness that isn’t actually there. 

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Let me see if I can say it in a way that makes sense to me as a lay person. 

I think it’s about a connection between two things that persists even if they are not near each other, and that they have an instant common reaction to a stimulus even if they are far apart. 

Now I will quote the article: 

A typical article about entanglement tells us it arises when particles interact to create a “link,” which persists no matter how far apart those particles are. Moreover, actions taken on one particle instantly affect the other, or so we are told. But—and here’s the thing even many experts get wrong—quantum physics doesn’t say that. Quantum physics says nothing about how the world is. Instead, quantum physics only describes the experiments we do to test our theories of how the world works—it gives us probabilities for the outcomes that may happen in an experiment. The compulsion to interpret quantum physics concepts as prescriptions for physical reality derives from the unfortunate way we traditionally teach physics.

 

Ah, well, there ya go. It’s all conjecture. Or high-level inquiry that is.

*O*

I should have been thinking of interconnectedness of all areas of thought, or something like that. Sounds very puffy!

But what I am really picturing is something I realized back in school, and I enjoyed thinking about it.

One day it struck me that all my subjects in school were connected by their linked elbows.

I imagined all that we know and study, all that we do and experience as a great globe of some type full of passageways connecting everything. This was probably an obvious realization to come to. But I enjoyed picturing the interconnectedness of it all.

I should probably draw charts, but you all don’t need that.

Today, yesterday now, I watched a program on Chaco Canyon. Thinking of the place involves:

History

Archaeology

Drawing and charting

Astronomy

Photography

Digital publishing

Math

Chemistry

Well, you get it. Pick a subject. Any subject! It's connected to everything else!