Visualising Superposition and Entangled Pairs.

Dunno about you but quantum theory makes my head spin.

Sometimes it helps to get the old imagination working, and try to visualize things.

On Superposition:

Superposition seems like magic, but it's not really. Anyway, the first bugbear is the 'seems like nonsense' problem of something being everywhere at the same time, effectively at least.

Don't know about you, but when I was a kid we didn't have all the toys we have these days, but we did have bits of string. One thing you could do with a bit of otherwise mundane string, was to whirl it so fast it became a blur. [You can try this at home kids] In fact, it became a magic shield.

Whooo.

And if you attempted to push a finger through the blurring magic string-shield, no matter where within the area of the 'circle' its revolutions formed in the air, your finger always encountered the string. Basically, because the string, though in reality occupying only a fraction of that area at any one moment in time, was moving so fast, so much faster than your finger, that the probability of your finger meeting the string were nearly absolutely certain.

ie. effectively, with string of infinite strength and infinite lightness, whirled with sufficient speed would become a true 'solid' disc.

Now, think of a hydrogen atom, with a single electron orbiting, and then think of the "string-shield-theory" above, but applied in 3D. Et voila, a single point manages to be everywhere at once, forming an impeneratable shell.

This also puts a limit on the physical size of an atom. If you imagine the 'shell' of the atom [and imagine an electron to be some hyper-fast spider trailing a thread as it rushes around]looks like one of those lampshades made out of string dipped in resin:

Though the string is extremely thin - the thickness equal to the useful repulsive diameter of an electron's electromagnetic field to be precise.

Now, unravel that string and measure the distance, if that distance is suffieciently shorter than the distance something moving at the speed of light could cover very, very, very quickly, then a single electron could successfully form a shell around that total orbital distance.

God I love this stuff. :)

The same principle, scaled up though reduced in speed, applies to things like balloons. Even though the actual density of the matter within the balloon is very little, it's moving very fast, and in doing so hits the inner surface of the balloon effectively everywhere at once, fast enough that any elastic contraction during a localised non-impact phase is minimal.

Heating the air inside increases the frequency/momentum of these impacts, expanding the circumference of the balloon until an equilibrium between the elastic strength of the balloon material [which contracts the surface of the balloon in the intervals between collisions] and the extra momentum is achieved, and a new 'stable' state is found.

On Entangled Pairs.

The way I understand the whole thing is by visualizing a coin spinning on a table. Spinning so fast you can't actually make out the faces - the heads or the tails.

Now, I have to hand a super-dooper lazer cutter - so fast and so powerful that it can slice the coin into two separate discs half the thickness of the 'mother' coin so quickly that though the two halves spin away some distance from each other on the table, they still remain spinning so fast that you cannot see which half bears the tail, and which the head.

These two can be called 'entangled'.

ie. we don't know which is which, but we do know if one of them is one thing, the other must be the other.

Now, I reach out and pick up the nearest disc. It's tails. I instantly know that the other is heads, not 'should be' not 'must be' I simply and absolutely know. Well, either that or the universe runs on magic bean power and collapses into a golden goose egg every twenty squintrillion years.

That's is kinda the situation with quantum entanglement. Except in quantum, the two half discs really *could* be either heads or tails, and until you look, they really are both heads and tails.

The instantaneous bit comes not at the moment of my perception "Ah - this one is tails therefore the other must be heads" but slightly before my slow-as-mud mind makes that distinction. You see, because the disc I examine's state is not determined until its probability field is collapsed by my act of observation into one of two equally stable states - a head state, or a tail state - neither is the other's, however far away that other might be - a millimeter or a light year, in principle it doesn't matter.

So, when I collapse the one in my hand's field, somehow that information as to its assumption of a particular stable state jumps the gap - however wide - between the two, and the other far away one collapses too into the opposing stable state.

And that is the faster-than-light info-teleportation bit.

Freaky.

...Continued...