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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Strange Attractors : Page 1, 2 And all this wild, imaginative science I've talked about so far is yesterday's newspapers in the science world. There is even more magic and unknowability to reality the more we look into it, and this magic seems to point back to Blake's revisionary view of things. Feynman diagrams show us how colliding particles can produce photons of light, though neither loses anything of itself in the exchange; the light simply creates itself. Quantum particles, in need of a particle temporarily, can just create one out of nothing, borrow it to serve its present purposes and throw it back into the void. Even more fun is the quantum ideal of sum-over-history. Light, you see, is neither particle nor wave. It is both, to the point where even a single photon of light interferes with itself when it passes through a grating. "Both" may not be the correct word, for some say that a light photon travels in every possible direction imaginable in a moment. Where it ends up is merely the end product of it moving to every conceivable point in the universe and adding up all those directions into the "straight line" we perceive, and that final tally of histories takes place only when there is an observation to be made to say where the fuck that photon went. Take the ever-famous Schrödinger's cat hypothetical experiment. Schrödinger, trying to pooh-pooh this sum-over-history ideal, proposed the cat experiment, and instead it has only solidified the creative, revisionary stance of science. There is a photon of light to be shot down a tube that forks into two paths. One path will leave unharmed a kitty, but the other will subject it to lethal gases to end its feline perception of existence. The test will be done automatically, without observation. According to sum-over-history, one could only conclude that until the result of the experiment is observed, the cat both lives and sticks out its tongue in asphyxiation horror, for the single photon of light has traveled down both directions (and every other direction conceivable), and only until its final progress is charted will the histories be totaled and determined. To Schrödinger, this was malarkey. Like Newton, he believed that the universe happens without us, and our observation of it merely confirms what has already happened. But what he confirmed in his hypothetical experiment was the importance of the self, the now-observer, to finalize the science of the universe. Blake knew that it was his observation, his artistic self, that created the universe...that the rules applied only as he created them. Shamans did not change the universe, only their disciples' perception of it. If you have tamed the thunder and the lightning, and if you have appeased the ground under your feet, you have created in that moment a universe that is safer and doesn't hold such a grudge against you. It doesn't matter if it is true - your truth is out of orbit from another's, but in your present tense, all is well, and your atoms would agree with you. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Richard Weems teaches in Philadelphia and eats a lot of Thai food nowadays. The tattoo count is up to five. He will be teaching fiction once again at the Cape May Poetry & Prose Getaway this January. He suspects William Blake may finally be gaining ground on Sir Isaac Newton.
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