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Dear Reader, First off, our hearts and minds are with Artemis II. Track NASA’s Artemis II Mission in Real Time Artemis II YouTube video For this newsletter I want to show how first contact with an alien other might come to be. Recall that towards the end of the newsletter titled "Who are THEY...you ask!" I suggested that, "quantum entanglement / teleportation might just be your thing," so I'd like to pick up on that in this newsletter. I may have sounded a little cheeky in suggesting that and hope I didn't offend anyone, but in the same newsletter I posed the following: "But what if it's not material objects? And that an Alien being or beings, in quantum superposition, and entangled with humans, could reside in our minds?" Or our psyche's. Or even somwhere else! "But how could that be," you ask...and that will be the subject of this newsletter. For most of us, we judge things within what is known as the "Arrow of Time." That is, the human condition, the notion that time (and life) proceeds in a linier way as the flow of a series of events...one moment leading to the next and so on. And why is this? It all ties back to the sun...and the sunrise! We have to realize that our "stationary" position on our rotating planet creates a very complex temporal environment, raising questions like relative motion and time itself. As the day progresses so does our sense of time...and looking back to our origin, that sense is imprinted in our DNA, and that of nearly all creatures on our planet. But does the temporal environment exist only in classical physics? The answer is "yes," to some degree. This is the case with Newtonian mechanics (Newton's laws of motion and gravity where force is concerned), Maxwell's electromagnetism, and thermodynamics and entropy, where processes may be irreversible...like the arrow of time! But there's more to it than that! Getting back to quantum superposition and entanglement, we find several things that do not exist in the classical state. For instance the ability of matter to exist in multiple states or "superposition" at the same time. And where particles are entangled, no matter how far apart! Both providing opportunities unavailable to classical physics, yet able to manifest in modern technology in such applications as quantum optics, the laser, quantum computing, the transistor and semiconductors, and many others that we use everyday, as with our mobile devices. It's all rather dizzying! But let's return to Earth, shall we? The arrow of time. How we got here in the first place? But from where? Oh yes, there's this "thing" called the Block Universe, where at the quantum level, the "future" is just as much a cause for the "present" as is the "past." And there's a whole lot of thought going on round the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, where time is absent. And this is where we come back to the human condition. How the arrow of time came to be imprinted in our DNA by the sun as it rose and set innumerable times, from the first chemical event of our becoming and throughout our evolution as a species. But there's more! Recall in the newsletter captioned, "Aspen Literary Festival...a rational take!" where I talked about our point of being embedded in the fabric of time? That each of us has one. Where the rubber meets the road, if you will, our very own transition from superposition to our observed state within ongoing human culture. The human condition, our very own version of wave function collapse, called existence by some. "But," you ask, "wouldn't those aliens have come about through the same sort of evolution as us?" And I would say, maybe! We can say that if having come from a state of superposition, and like us, come to be on a world in orbit around a sun, then they are subject to their own arrow of time, as are we. But if these aliens manifest in an entirely different state from us, are they in wave function collapse like us? And if they were, then wouldn't the "entanglement" have to be in superposition, not in the observed state of wave function collapse? Rather, in a "block universe," where all times, all possibilities, are written in the block. Block universe! Like some sort of unfathomable Rubik's Cube. That's fine, but I prefer a different term: I call it "The well of all possibility!" A well of infinite depth, infinite volume and infinite fluidity, and of infinite complexity, subject only to eternity, wherein would dwell the "others," the aliens in our midst if only we find ourselves in superposition! But how to get there from here? Yes, here we are, and we hardly got into time travel at all. Maybe next time, but whether you take all this seriously or think of it more like a game we play with ourselves, you might want to read "Hoodwinked: Exploring Our Culture’s Profound Illusions" by Larry Gottlieb, recently reissued with a new cover (and oh dear, having lost all its previous reviews). You can see my old version below with lots of sticky tabs in front of my bookshelf where it normally resides. Real wisdom for navigating this illusion we call life, and the wave function collapse we call the human condition. All for now, but lots more to come on this whole thing of first contact, quantum reality and superposition, on our journey through the fabric of time. You can access all three books of The THING Trilogy at: https://kendallwilliamsauthor.com/ And if you are new to the Newsletter, check out the Newsletter Archive at: https://kendall-williams-author.kit.com/posts Quote from Niels Bohr, quantum physicist: "There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them." And remember, Track NASA’s Artemis II Mission in Real Time Artemis II YouTube video Until next time, be well and safe journeys! Sincerely, Kendall Williams, Author |
The Newsletter comes once a month and while about the books of The THING Trilogy, it's also about this thing called life's journey! Read the Newsletter, share your thoughts, and of course you can unsubscribe anytime.
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