Within the ever broadening field of quantum mechanics, comes a new revelation: There are no boundaries!
Enjoying lunch with friends, our conversation turned to the limitations of arbitrary lines of demarcation. We have boundaries for geography, race, genders, age, politics, and religion that seem real to us when we’re closely involved—but as soon as we get some distance, it’s harder to explain why we need all of them.
While these lines may seem benign, they can contribute to serious problems. One of my friends explained how she’d conducted a search for an African American computer engineer employee a few years ago. She’d thought finding a black programmer would be fairly straightforward, and was surprised to discover that was not the case. When she finally found and hired a young black man, she asked him why he thought there were so few blacks involved in Information Technology. He replied that African Americans, “just don’t have the required skills.” While this young man clearly believed this to be true, my friends and I were aghast at how such a thing could be. Even if young African Americans are not provided with requisite skills to be accepted to college computer science programs—what belief system is contributing to this situation? At some point there must be an artificial line of demarcation—some point where those fit to learn computer programming skills may proceed onward and upward, and all considered to be “unfit” may not.
Why do we feel such a burning need to draw these boundaries—these artificial lines of demarcation? One of my friends pointed out that we could, as John Lennon invites us to do in the lyrics in his song, Imagine, simply choose to walk through those imaginary boundaries–yet the reason most people don’t do just that has to do with a fear of losing control. He summed it up as,
“We set boundaries because of a need for control.”
All of this was on my mind when I received an email from a thoughtful reader, who wrote:
While QM (Quantum Mechanics) itself gives many observable examples of the fluidity and variability of our realities what is being developed as quantum computing does not. That’s because it has been developed in a “put new wine in old bottles” fashion. It uses binary as base. So in classical computing a bit can be in one of two states 0 OR 1. A qubit can be in one of three states 0 OR 1 OR (0 and 1) – the state of superposition. Of course computers have to be practical so such an approach, limited though it may be, makes sense.
It’s like the cat in the box. The example was given using only alive and dead. But in actuality a superposition can be and usually is more (alive|dead|male|female|tabby|calico|etc) Superposition is the confluence of two or more seemingly discrete states. But our thinking at the moment is strongly binary. Hence our creation of digital as being the foundation for our current approach to computing.
I replied to this email stating I agreed that a bias exists toward viewing the world with a bias toward binary / classical operations. I love the example of Schrodinger’s cat not simply being alive or dead (which is essentially a throwback to binary either/or classical thinking), but rather “alive, sickly, pregnant, old, young, dead, etc.” The way quantum logic was initially described indeed contains classical binary bias, with it’s “von Neumann cut” being an imaginary line by which one supposedly can determine whether to employ Classical or Quantum physics equations.
But what if this arbitrary line of demarcation is just as artificial and man-made as all of our other artificially constructed boundary lines? What if the scientists seeking a Theory of Everything (TOE) one day prove the physical world is ruled by quantum physics laws and equations, and classical physics is just a limited, special case? As far out as that may seem, a growing number of scientists are writing research papers and proposing theories stating just that.
Classical logic is a special case (subset) of quantum logic. Illustration from Cynthia Sue Larson’s paper, Primacy of Quantum Logic in the Natural World.
In my paper Primacy of Quantum Logic in the Natural World, I pointed out that we need true quantum logic, and not classical Boolean logic approaches that can’t ever get to the heart of quantum logic and phenomena. As I explain in my paper, quantum logic and phenomena is the larger set within which classical physics and logic reside, and not the other way around. We thus must pay better attention to the natural world in order to learn to recognize the natural order of quantum logic all around us, including occasional evidence of reality shifts and quantum jumps demonstrating Evidence of Macroscopic Quantum Phenomena.
Quantum computing represents the beginning of a new form of technology, indicating we’re entering the Quantum Age. In order to build quantum computers, we require quantum phenomena occurring on a macroscopic scale, as well as a true understanding of quantum logic. Thanks to the work of researchers in the fields of quantum biology, quantum cognition, and quantum cosmology–such as Johnjoe McFadden, Jerome Busemeyer, and Yasunori Nomura who I’ve interviewed in my blog and my Living the Quantum Dream radio show–we can now start to recognize that Nature is already utilizing quantum logic. The photosynthesis of plants has been proven to be a quantum process happening in a warm, wet, “noisy” biological environment where such things “weren’t supposed to happen,” yet clearly they are.
And fortunately for us, it increasingly seems more and more clear that rather than living in a binary, limited, boundary-constricted world—the natural world is likely much more unrestricted, open, and quantum in every way.
About the author:
Cynthia Sue Larson is a contributing writer for Higher Journeys.com. A best-selling author, researcher, and transformational speaker, Cynthia helps people visualize and access whole new worlds of possibility. Cynthia hosts Living the Quantum Dream on the DreamVisions7 radio network. She has been featured on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, and BBC, and has presented papers at international conferences on science, spirituality, and consciousness.
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