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and modern existential and mythic realities! What’s more, both mythic and scientific realities appear to be equally entangled and superposed in the existential experience of ambiguity and uncertainty affirmed, once more, by Socrates’s fabled maxim: “all I know is that I do not know anything” or “solo sé que no sé nada.” I would call this mythic-scientific entanglement “a mythic quantum mechanics”!
As a result, to posit that either the state of goodness or either the state of evil only exists, as classical mechanics would have it, is meaningless. In this, Quantum Mechanics’ notion of a random, uncertain reality seems right because it does reflect humanity’s mythic and living experience, which becomes in time manifested in its mythic and literary reality. Both myth and Quantum Mechanics assert that we are trapped in Plato’s cavern, or the Minotaur’s labyrinth (without Ariadne’s golden cord to rescue us!!). Caverns and labyrinths whose walls are infinitely high and whose potential well (a metaphor!) is narrow and deep, Dante’s hell perhaps, and unless we were that particle that manages to surmount its well, or Icarus, or that rebellious prisoner that escaped the shadows of uncertainty and saw the light and the pure Forms as many sages saw it, as Wordsworth saw it, “what is truly real” remains only the providence of philosopher-prophet Plato’s eternal and unchanging forms or of a pantheistic God. If Spinoza’s god, or the “mysterium tremendum” of Otto, then God’s mind folds and unfolds the universe at His will, and His eternal breath (another metaphor!) causes it to expand and eventually to collapse, just as our breaths expanded and shrunk balloons in class to demonstrate the expansion and crunch of the universe!
2.3: Now explain what is meant by a ”quantum state”. Explain this first for a single quantum system; you should compare and contrast this with the notion of a ”classical state” for a physical system. Then explain what extra features enter when one is discussing the state of a pair of entangled systems.
Classical State / Classical Mechanics
Quantum State
The world of Newtonian physics and of fields (EM, Gravity)
The world of superposition, entanglement, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
The world is in ONE DEFINITE STATE ONLY.
i.e. A coin is in one state only: either heads or tails.
One state is more fundamental than the other. “Classical Reality”
The world is in A SUPERPOSITION OF OTHER STATES.
i.e. A coin is in both states simultaneously: heads and tails.
No state is more fundamental than the other. “Quantum Democracy Reality” Only the joint state of the two positions is physically real.
If we add 2 Quantum Statesàwe get a third one!
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