Once upon a time, I wrote a love letter about the analogous aspects of quantum physics and love. I thought it was the single sexiest letter I'd ever written. I'd just remembered it a couple hours ago, and I dug it up.
The girl to whom I was writing wasn't really moved by it. I'm not even sure if she ever bothered to really read it. I suppose my own love for the mechanics of the universe aren't quite analogous to the universal mechanics of love.
Well, it stings to be misunderstood. It leaves me feeling like I'm all alone in my astro-physical world. I'll post the letter here in case anyone comes across it and does understand. It's be nice to hear something other than my own echo when I think about this stuff...
The letter to her is as follows:
"Not quite a love letter, and maybe a little tough to
swallow before lunch, but it's what's in my head...
and that's what you get for dating a crazy person....
As I nodded off last night, with my head full of
quantum mechanics and superstrings, I dreamed of us.
My brain looked at us and our lives and our love,
and held it up to the various quantum mechanical
models.
Bohr's model... where we don't even have a path
we're going down, or even a presence along the way of
the path... where we only exist as potential. As
waves of probability. Only appearing only as our
waveforms collapse upon reaching our destination.
It's possible that we'll live one life, it's
possible that we'll live another... and therefore we
exist in neither and both places until we've touched
down at the end of our journey. And even then, when
we have reached our destination, one would notice that
our footprints led back down both of our potential
paths.
The Feynman model... where instead of being just in
potential existence, we instead live all existences.
Where every possible journey our love could take,
every road we could possible travel, every outcome
that we could reach IS taken and journeyed to and
reached.
Where our love and our existence together lives in
an infinite moment where all outcomes are reached
simultaneously. There, in that moment, opposite paths
start canceling each other out, removing more and more
possible futures from the infinite, until eventually
the only path left is the true course of our lives.
We would make a journey to everywhere and wind up in
exactly the only place that we could ever be.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principal tells us that the
more we know of one aspect of a quanta, the less we
can know of others aspects. Therefore one can never
know everything about a quanta, or an apple, or our
futures... and the more we study one aspect, the
foggier the other attributes become. This is the idea
that thing will become less knowable the longer you
study it.
We're lost in a quantum fog of unknowable
quantities.
Attempting to completely understand our future might
very well blind us to its potential.
There are interpretations of quantum theory that
would tell us that aspects of tyhe universe are of
such an indeterminate state, that they don't even
exist until they are observed -at which point their
quantum waves travel back in time creating their
history to accommodate their observation.
So, perhaps I didn't even exist until you met me.
Maybe I didn't ever write anything until you read my
first words to you.
Maybe when I said that meeting you changed my life,
that I should have said meeting you collapsed my
probability wave so that I manifested withing the
universe.
As absurd as these propositions sound, the foremost
pioneers and paragons of quantum mechanics would tell
you that this may very well be the case.
That we have no history or future or existence until
we somehow share that potential for existence with
another and manifest...
We are just looking at shadows on the walls of a
cave. If we'd only turn our heads, we might see that
things are not as they seem.
This is what I get for reading physics while falling
asleep next to you. Next to my love. Next to this
amazing woman whom I've found to be so important to
me.
We've been brought together by chaos and quantum
fog... meeting one another in a haze of uncertainty
and probability wave forms.
...not exactly a typically romantic letter, but it
hints at the awe and respect I have for our fortune in
having met and fallen in love.
My brain feels like it's full of fog... it feels
like life was a dream. it feels like I've only just
woken up to reality... and this morning, I awoke next
to you... I awoke next to a wide-awake dream.
And I'm happy...
-free"
The girl to whom I was writing wasn't really moved by it. I'm not even sure if she ever bothered to really read it. I suppose my own love for the mechanics of the universe aren't quite analogous to the universal mechanics of love.
Well, it stings to be misunderstood. It leaves me feeling like I'm all alone in my astro-physical world. I'll post the letter here in case anyone comes across it and does understand. It's be nice to hear something other than my own echo when I think about this stuff...
The letter to her is as follows:
"Not quite a love letter, and maybe a little tough to
swallow before lunch, but it's what's in my head...
and that's what you get for dating a crazy person....
As I nodded off last night, with my head full of
quantum mechanics and superstrings, I dreamed of us.
My brain looked at us and our lives and our love,
and held it up to the various quantum mechanical
models.
Bohr's model... where we don't even have a path
we're going down, or even a presence along the way of
the path... where we only exist as potential. As
waves of probability. Only appearing only as our
waveforms collapse upon reaching our destination.
It's possible that we'll live one life, it's
possible that we'll live another... and therefore we
exist in neither and both places until we've touched
down at the end of our journey. And even then, when
we have reached our destination, one would notice that
our footprints led back down both of our potential
paths.
The Feynman model... where instead of being just in
potential existence, we instead live all existences.
Where every possible journey our love could take,
every road we could possible travel, every outcome
that we could reach IS taken and journeyed to and
reached.
Where our love and our existence together lives in
an infinite moment where all outcomes are reached
simultaneously. There, in that moment, opposite paths
start canceling each other out, removing more and more
possible futures from the infinite, until eventually
the only path left is the true course of our lives.
We would make a journey to everywhere and wind up in
exactly the only place that we could ever be.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principal tells us that the
more we know of one aspect of a quanta, the less we
can know of others aspects. Therefore one can never
know everything about a quanta, or an apple, or our
futures... and the more we study one aspect, the
foggier the other attributes become. This is the idea
that thing will become less knowable the longer you
study it.
We're lost in a quantum fog of unknowable
quantities.
Attempting to completely understand our future might
very well blind us to its potential.
There are interpretations of quantum theory that
would tell us that aspects of tyhe universe are of
such an indeterminate state, that they don't even
exist until they are observed -at which point their
quantum waves travel back in time creating their
history to accommodate their observation.
So, perhaps I didn't even exist until you met me.
Maybe I didn't ever write anything until you read my
first words to you.
Maybe when I said that meeting you changed my life,
that I should have said meeting you collapsed my
probability wave so that I manifested withing the
universe.
As absurd as these propositions sound, the foremost
pioneers and paragons of quantum mechanics would tell
you that this may very well be the case.
That we have no history or future or existence until
we somehow share that potential for existence with
another and manifest...
We are just looking at shadows on the walls of a
cave. If we'd only turn our heads, we might see that
things are not as they seem.
This is what I get for reading physics while falling
asleep next to you. Next to my love. Next to this
amazing woman whom I've found to be so important to
me.
We've been brought together by chaos and quantum
fog... meeting one another in a haze of uncertainty
and probability wave forms.
...not exactly a typically romantic letter, but it
hints at the awe and respect I have for our fortune in
having met and fallen in love.
My brain feels like it's full of fog... it feels
like life was a dream. it feels like I've only just
woken up to reality... and this morning, I awoke next
to you... I awoke next to a wide-awake dream.
And I'm happy...
-free"