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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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 | Here is another cat drawing copied from James Hartle's explicatory quantum diagrams (see previous post). He used a cubist-like rendering similar to this one on the left (only better drawn, those are supposed to be parts of a cat) to describe how in classical phsyics we expect parts to add up to a whole, and they do, while in quantum phsyics we must take all the parts as entities unto themselves, as they may be mutually exclusive, though still all necessary for a complete description. This sparked a discussion between myself and GH on the car-ride home about patterns, the relationship between Cubism and quantum theory, and the various perceptual, emotional, and conceptual challenges that face the task of knowing something absolutely. This is a leap, but to me these topics relate to the ongoing discussions here and elsewhere about art criticism. If indeed there is a loss of a perceptible hierarchy and voice of authority in criticsm (which I've yet to be convinced is the case), it is replaced with a messy but fertile plurality in which we gather information from mulitple sources, letting go of the idea that we are reading the "right" voice or even the primary source, but rather picking up whatever information and stimulation we need to move ahead with our projects. Losses of authorship = Gains in perspective. |
This is my latest, and my favourite, drawing of Schroedinger's cat. It's copied from a hand-drawn graphic shown during a lecture by quantum cosmologist James Hartle that I just attended this afternoon at the grand opening of The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. (Thanks to friend GH for taking me!) Hartle's thing is a single, manageable equation that describes the wave function of the entire universe. Extreme. I couldn't tell exactly if he has this equation, or if he is working towards having this equation. His lecture was excellent, however, especially because of his use of very, very cool magic-marker graphs and diagrams that he shuffled on and off the overhead projector with professorial aplomb. No cookie-cutter power point presentation for this guy! Check out some of his more advanced level artwork here. I couldn't resist stealing this one below. I believe the little stick figure is busy conducting the double split experiment which is foundational to quantum theory and which still befuddles me despite the fact that I've been led through it many many times. I believe the gist is this: fire a beam of light at an opaque surface with two little holes in it. Photons will go through the tiny holes and make a random seeming dot pattern on the surface behind. Fire enough photons, however, and you invariably get an interference pattern, like a bunch of waves. Photons are behaving like particles and like waves at the same time. Now the spooky part: if you try to measure which hole the photon goes through, it will go through the hole you test for. ...I can describe it...sort of...but I don't get it.
There aren't any cat drawings on the website, so you'll have to be content with my little rendition above. I think Hartle rolled out the felines today cause they're crowd-pleasers, and the lecture was aimed at a general, walk-in audience like me. I find Schroedinger's cat is easier to grasp than the double split experiment, even though the latter is a bonafide, empirical experiment conducted in reality and the former is just a mental model. You all know the story: the cat is in the box and an atom in the box might decay and if it does it will release a hammer which will smash open the bottle of cyanide and the cat will then die. Or the atom won't decay and the cat will live. You don't look in the box and so you don't know. The cat is alive/dead, a state called a superposition. Says Hartle: "Quantum reality consists of complementary views, mutually exclusive, but equally necessary for a complete description."
I believe his drawing below also includes some familiar astrological bodies, being the earth and sun, and all that stuff is in a box, like maybe the cat-box, and there is an eye that can't see into it. Meaning....uh....I have no idea...but based on what he said today, something about how all of reality can be represented by a master wave function. Unfortunately the web lecture seems to be offline.
Keven Stevens (in Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive world of Frank Zappa) quoting Greil Marcus (in Mystery Train):
"...The Puritans came here with a utopian vision they could not maintain; their idea was to do God's work, and they knew that if they failed, it would mean that their work had been the devil's. As they panicked at their failures, the devil was all they saw...America is a trap: that its promises and dreams, all mixed up as love and politics and landscape, are too much to live up to and too much to escape." The American political landscape, embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts, is deeply rooted in this Puritan heritage. Yet America's best music, movies, and paintings have always been an attempt to escape it.
Robert Matas, writing in todays Globe and Mail about doctor assisted suicide in Oregon, quotes oncologist Kenneth Stevens, who opposes the practice:
Most people do it because they are tired of living or as an autonomy issue: They want to control death. They feel they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do.