Response to The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives
Image from Wikipedia
The key idea of the beginning of this article, that the mathematical models used in physics are simply projections or “maps” of physical phenomena draws together two ideas that I have had before. As such, I found the article particularly interesting to read.
In my seventh grade geography class I was introduced to the Mercator projection and its inherent distortions. I tucked that information into the back of my mind, but didn’t think on it very often. Now in college, I am taking entry level physics classes and have had a limited dealing with different physical models that describe the world accurately enough to perform calculations, but are of course simplifications of the real events taking place. This idea has always intrigued me: that one is able to glean useable results from the world by essentially assuming false information. If it were not for this article, I would have never seen the connection between these two realizations from my past. Granted, I was largely lost in the article’s further explication of this metaphor in regards to quantum mechanics, but it was still interesting to witness the incredibly complex mathematics that have been developed to explain the world given the inherent limitation of never actually being able to describe anything with complete certainty. In a way, this is a metaphor for the stories of reality that each human tells themselves in order to describe an experience that they have no way of fully understanding. They can never view it at the “full scale”, be that the full scale of time, the complete sensations of everything living on the planet (to say nothing of knowing the complete definition of life), or even just the complete set of events that each individual action will set into motion. This last idea is explored wonderfully in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, in which a form of math so advanced is produced that a man is able to accurately predict the tides of history based on the actions of the masses.
Image from Collider
Since I am intrigued by the illustrations and the general concepts of the latter half of this article, I decided to do some basic research into some of the mathematical terms with which I was unfamiliar. In reading about unitary evolution operators, qubits, and Bloch spheres, I came across a whole host of other terms with which I am unfamiliar. These, of course, also impede my understanding. I was able to see the connection between the metaphor of the “non-locality” of a three-dimensional ball projected onto a two-dimensional surface and the “non-locality” of quantum mechanics being “mapped” into systems that are less complex. One of the results of this, at least in my brief understanding, is quantum entanglement. This allows electrons to somehow communicate instantaneously across vast distances. If these systems, particularly the Bloch sphere “map” (at top of post), are also distorted in some way from reality, it begs the question: how much more complicated is the world beyond even what we can conceive of?