Quantum Theory, The Urantia Book, and the Absolutes

Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Qld.     

 
 
     Many, many moons ago, when I was a young surfie, my friends and I could be found out to sea somewhere, sitting on our surf boards, waiting for the god of the waves to send us a 'set.' In surfie parlance, a 'set' was a group of big waves that seems to come from nowhere. The god of the waves was called 'Hughie' and was one to whom surfies prayed fervently by using the supplication, "Send them up, Hughie." Further moons later, I learned that the principal cause of a 'set' was the same phenomenon that physicists call 'interference.' This can happen when the peaks of two waves from different sources coincide, adding themselves together to form one big wave. If, however,  the peak of one coincides with the trough of the other, they cancel and the sea becomes flat. Since surfies, in those days, were rarely physicists, sets were considered to be creative acts on the part of deity. Hughie was an Old Testament type of god--wrathful, jealous, and perverse--who exerted his authority by keeping surfies guessing where and when sets would occur.

     Physicists who study matter at the level of the atom are also confronted with bizarre wave phenomena. They never seem to know when the particles they study are going to behave as if they are waves or as if they are particles. What they don't know is that it is Hughie who confuses them. What's more, Hughie deals harshly with physicists because most of them refuse to acknowledge the legitimate powers of Deity. With his typical perversity, he refuses to let them know all about anything--so that they wind up wondering whether they know anything about everything. This they call
indeterminism. For example, Hughie will not let them know the position and speed of an electron at the same moment of time. If they know where it is, they can't know how fast it is going. And vice versa. They call this Hughie factor, the 'Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.'

     Hughie's extraordinary perversity with particle physicists is illustrated in Fig. 1. Electrons have spin, there being a vertical and horizontal component. Do not try and take this too far because their kind of spin is like nothing you have experienced up here in reality. To keep it simple, we will say that left electrons spin left, right electrons spin right, up electrons spin up and down electrons spin down.

     Physicists have little black boxes that can separate the various components of spin. However, if they separate left spin from right (as in step 1, Fig.1), then put the right spin electrons through a box that separates the up and down part of spin, for reasons only known to Hughie, the left-right spin gets randomized. This shows up in step 3, where the down spinning electrons have been put through a black box that measures left-right spin with the result that some now spin left (50%), and the rest spin right.

      By the time this particular experiment was done, particle physicists had come to believe in their own deification. They actually believed that nothing happens anywhere, anytime, except when a particle physicist looks to see what happens. This got them into arguments with normal people like Einstein who said their theory was nutty. A fellow called Schrodinger got into the argument along with his cat. Hypothetically, he put the cat in a box, then devised ways by which it could commit suicide. Schrodinger's cat was supposed to stay dead and alive (at the same time) until a particle physicist took a look in the box. The argument has continued right up to the present time, even though both the cat and Schrodinger have long since departed due to old age. It seems that particle physicists are averse to opening boxes. It appears also that they are deficient in a sense of smell.

      Let's move to step 4, Fig.1. One of the physicists wanted to know what would happen if they did not open one of their boxes. This was to test the idea that if they don't know about it, it doesn't happen. So in step 4, they took all the right spin electrons from step 3 and fed them through an up-down separator (which should also have destroyed the left-right spin). What better way not to know what had happened than to put both streams of the up and down separation back into a mixer box (step 5, Fig.1). They also made certain that nobody took a peek at what was in the mixer. Then they fed the mixture through a left-right spin separator (step 6, Fig.1). (Go to a simplified version of this work.)

     Here Hughie decided to get in the act. He reasoned as follows: "These guys took  right-spinning electrons so they had that as certain knowledge. Then they put them through their up-down separator so they would have upright and downright electrons. Normally that would randomize the left-right spin. But in this case they have not looked to observe the up and down component. So their certain knowledge is back with a bunch of right spinning electrons. O.K. then, let's leave it at that." And that is what Hughie did (step 6, Fig.1). Only right-spinning electrons issued forth.

     Puzzling though it may have been, this result appeared to confirm the god-playing propensities of particle physicists. Things only happen when they observe, not otherwise. So Schrodinger's cat really is dead and alive after all.  But some were not satisfied. So they tried another test.

     Fig. 2 is identical to Fig.1 up to step 4. One physicist wanted to know what would happen if they confused step 5 by only permitting the down electrons to go through to step 6. So they

Home Page    Previous Page    Next Page