Feel lost in time? Is it just a feeling?!

Bermuda Triangle, definitely my most favorite place in the world around 15 years ago! I was so into all those stories of lost ships and air fleets and I was pretty sure I knew why that place would be like that. It should have been the time. Of course there are infinite number of timelines and Bermuda Triangle, because of its electromagnetic properties, is where these timelines get mixed together. So all those ships and people are right now somewhere here but in another time. Isn't that obvious? Not only I had a lot of reasoning for my assumption, I really wanted it to happen to myself as well, to get lost in time. But it didn't and I got to live the same life as all of yours (with a little bit of more trouble in it) so after 15 years I can use it as an introduction in my blog post.

Nowadays I don’t really care about Bermuda Triangle anymore and my most favorite place in the world is somewhere in Scotland but time is still one of my main concerns. 15 years and I never stopped thinking about it. About this feeling that something is wrong. Anytime that I’m looking at my watch or my cellphone, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind: ”what’s this that I’m looking for to know?”

Time is the story of a king who became a slave but never could be a king again so we could make a movie out it! It used to be the most absolute thing. No one dared put a question mark anywhere near time. But Einstein showed that not only time is enslaved by all the massive objects, it’s totally a relative thing. Different observers with different velocities would feel the time differently. The throne was broken and a huge question mark kept fallowing time. What is time?

But question mark was not the only thing following time. there is a little demon that pops out by time whenever we want to mix it with other physical quantities like space or energy. A demon labeled as “i”, the square root of -1, which serves as an imaginary element. For example, in order to write down the space-time coordinates, we need to have x, y, z and i*c*t. C, the speed of light, gives the time the same dimension as space in order to make them compatible with each other. But what about “i”? More generally, what’s an imaginary number? I’ll definitely dedicate a whole post to these creatures one day but very naively speaking, imaginary numbers are the numbers that don’t exist but we need them to describe things that actually do exist. Among all properties of imaginary numbers, I need to mention one. Only odd powers of imaginary numbers are imaginary. Any even power of an imaginary number is indeed a real number.

You probably read the fourth line of the above paragraph in less than 30 seconds. I, on the other hand, spent days and months, just looking at ‘ict’ and thinking about it. In order to have a space-time, not space and time separately, space and time must be compatible with each other. As I just mentioned, the speed of time makes their dimensions compatible. So maybe ‘i’ also has a similar job. It’s making time compatible with space by making it “real”. What if time itself is imaginary and by multiplying it by an ‘i’ we’re turning it into a real quantity to be compatible with the other 3 real quantities that are our 3 spatial dimensions. Something tells me that we’re going to have a long long fight about what’s real and what’s not in future and I’m not going to bother now but I want you to know why I’m assuming time to be imaginary but not space.

A very classical example is displacement, velocity and acceleration. It appears that we have a pretty good understanding of displacement and we can control it. We can choose in which direction we want to move and when we move we feel the displacement. But time doesn't care about us. To us, it's always moving in the same direction with the same paste and we don’t really understand it. What we see is its effect on other things like aging or the color change in fall. Though we think we understand displacement, we don’t feel the constant velocity. If I put you in a dark box, you can’t ever tell me whether you’re moving with a perfectly constant velocity or you’re stationary. Again, we understand constant velocity when we can compare our self with stationary objects or objects possessing different velocities. We all know that constant velocity is the displacement over time. If denominator is imaginary, then velocity is imaginary as well. But if we do the same thing again, this time dividing the velocity by time, both nominator and denominator are imaginary that will lead to a real quantity, acceleration. We always feel the acceleration while driving or in a rollercoaster ride if we can stop screaming.

Now, if you think you’re a little bit ready to accept that time may be an imaginary parameter, it’s the perfect time to ask the question of the day: Is time really imaginary?!

I’m not trying to piss you off but one can easily argue that all I've talked about so far can lead to two different conclusions. Either time is imaginary or we think that time is imaginary. Well of course there’s a third case that I’m wrong entirely but I prefer to ignore that for the sake of ummm, well me. But now let’s take a look at the other very important aspect of this universe, the quantum world.

Interestingly enough, you’d never be able to find time in quantum formalism alone. ‘t’ always comes with an ‘i’, our dear imaginary friend. In the simplest case, the time evolution of any wavefunction appears to be in the form of exp(it). Also the very significant difference of the quantum world with our classical world is the time symmetry. Simply, quantum particles don’t care about time and can freely move forward or backward in it, something that’s not possible for us poor classical creatures. Time reversal suggests that time for quantum world is as real as space and it’s just us who sees time as an imaginary parameter. This indeed may explain some of the bizarre quantum behaviors such as the time need for quantum tunneling. Imagine yourself, standing in front of a rigid wall and keep hitting it with a tennis ball. Of course no matter how many times you repeat this, the ball will be bounced back to you. But what are the odds for the ball to pass through the wall without making a hole or any damage on it? The probability of such a phenomena is so small that if you stop eating, sleeping or going to the bathroom and keep hitting the wall with a rate of one hit per second, it will still take you more than the age of universe to see the ball ‘tunnel’ through the wall. But in a quantum world, a phenomena like this is not only quite possible, it’s happening all the time. This is what we know as the ‘quantum tunneling’ effect. But more interestingly than the tunneling itself, is the time that would take the particle to tunnel through. Theoretically, this time is absolutely zero for us, as soon as the ball disappears on one side of the wall, it appears on the other side. This would physically be possible if quantum particles could have access to a timeline perpendicular to ours so what a moment appears for us may be a lifetime for them. That’s also another role of ‘i’. keep in mind that on a complex plane, the real and imaginary coordinates are perpendicular to each other.

This is it for this post but it’s not it for the time! In the next post I’m going to continue by looking into some important questions. I’ll try to explain why it should be like this, what the difference between us and quantum particles is and why we should feel the time differently. Then we go over the most general question, whether time even exists or it’s an emergent of a more fundamental thing.

Maybe it’s a good time to say something out of the box. I’m not here to convince you believe anything. As a matter of fact I don’t really care what you believe in. That’s why you haven’t seen any reference link or things like that so far. I’m here to give you some ideas, to challenge you. There’s a huge chance that all or a portion of what I’m saying is wrong, it’s up to you to figure it out by reading, researching and more importantly thinking. 

To be continued...

Quantum Nonlinearity and the ISIS Crisis

I’m a quantum mechanic. I know some languages more or less but my most favorite one is the Atom’s. Of course they talk. All of them, atoms, photons, all elementary particles. You just need to listen carefully. They’re also very polite and respectful. If you ask nicely, they’ll do anything for you and by that I mean anything, things you can’t even imagine. What we do is that we try to design and implement quantum tech prototypes. Things that will turn into future technologies one day but at the moment they only exist in labs where we use them as our very own universes to understand the universe we’re within. My experiment will be a quantum memory and a quantum repeater (amplifiers for a new age of quantum communication) one day. But now it’s my universe. And you know what the good thing about having a universe is? They’re all the same. Like fractals, if you could stay out of our universe and start zooming in, you’d keep seeing the same patterns over and over, smaller and smaller. So my universe that’s made out of 1000000000000 identical atoms and some photon pulses behaves the same as the big universe. It’s just a matter of understanding, a matter of finding symmetries and similarities. Practically, you could expand the idea and say, well in this case then humans and societies should also resemble a universe. As a matter of fact, if you stand over my table in the lab and look carefully, you’ll see a lot of similarities between my quantum universe prototype and a universe made of nearly 7000000000 identical humans, latter known as the planet earth.

These complex mixtures of hormones and neuro-electrical transmitters, aka humans, seem entirely different from one another until you go just 5 floors up and look down at them. In that slightly bigger picture, we’re all particles, interacting with each other governed by certain rules and reinforcements. Me, on the other hand, have my lasers using which I can reinforce my desired rules on my atoms through weak and strong pulses with different frequencies. That’s actually how I talk to them. My different electromagnetic pulses will cause them to have some certain interactions with each other and photons and avoid other unwanted ones. So you can somehow say that photons are my cops.

My table is a mess. Within several feet square you can find any sort of interaction. For a prototype like this to work, one has to prepare, manipulate, interact, filter and measure so many photons and particles and I love all these different societies with their very own responsibilities except one of them. A place in the middle of the table, where all the photons and particles meet each other at the same time. The space-time overlap of all these pulses and atomic clouds will generate a ‘quantum nonlinear’ environment. A region where everything seems so chaotic at the beginning but within a closer look one can see that the interactions are so entangled that any changes will effect everything else. One can’t even predict the result of their modifications easily. They just have to see if those modifications and extra enforcement can change anything any better and usually the answer is no, things just get worse as you try to make them better. That region of the table, my friends, always reminds me of the Middle East.

Lucky you, I’m a Middle Eastern which automatically makes me an expert on all Middle East crises so if I say I have a little Middle East right on my table, you better damn believe me! Just like that part of my table where all the pulses and atoms meet, Middle East is where all our huge ideologies face one another. Islam, Christianity, Judaism and so many other religions that I barely even can pronounce their names correctly have been coexisting there literally forever. And all these religions have their own ‘branches’ that in some cases are not only entirely different but contradict and are against each other. For the case of Islam, one can easily name more than 70 of these branches. No matter which point of view you pick, Middle East is where everything meets everything else and it’s the nonlinear region of this planet, a region where doing something sometimes have a result, sometimes have no result, sometimes have an entirely different result and sometimes you die.

On my table, I’m facing some issues, more specifically some inevitable noises that have roots in the nonlinear region. Those pulses that are supposed to enforce a path on atoms, are themselves generating these background noises through some unwanted interactions. What can I do? I add more pulses using different types of lasers to avoid those interactions but as you can immediately guess, it’s always a failure (well you can call these extra pulses the NATO if you like to, no pushes). No matter what I do, there will be always some unwanted interactions because that’s how everything is. The whole life is a package deal of good and bad things. You can’t pick nor can you avoid them. Everywhere you look, you only see a blend of bright and dark, nice and ugly, fun and frustrating and you just have to deal with it.

Now an extremely very super important thing is that I always try to detune my laser pulses. I avoid the frequencies with which photons could have very strong interactions with atoms. In a better language, I ask my cops to keep their distance from my citizens in my universe. Otherwise the negative side effects will go beyond some noise and make my experiment not working at all. These strong side effects are our well known extremists in Middle East, the most recent one of which, ISIS. Even though I couldn't yet find a solution for my noise (that hell I hope I do one day), I know how to avoid crises. When I’m detuning my laser pulses, in fact I’m giving my atoms a chance not to obey the path I want them to. I could force them to do what I wanted but instead I forced my agents (photons) to give the atoms a relatively small statistical chance of disobedience. And it came out that reducing the pressure on the atoms works and we see what we wanted to which in this case is quantum storage.

Was I implying something in the above paragraph about Middle East? Not really. No seriously, I don’t have any solution for all those crises in Middle East. I wish I had, but I don't. All I know is that no matter how unpleasant that region on my table is for me, my whole experiment critically depends on it. As a matter of fact, I can physically remove that nonlinear part out of my experiment but then I’d never ever see any storage of quantum information. Also, that region is the region from which I’m learning so many things about quantum physics. The same is true about the Middle East as well. Most of the things we value now a days have roots in Middle East. From the civilization itself, human rights and religions to things like currency or even wine. It’s troublesome for sure, but if someone outside of this universe had simply taken that region off the map, we wouldn't see or ever have most of the things we have now a days.

It’s interesting to see how we all are humans but under different circumstances react so differently. How many of you can imagine who you’d be if you were born in the Middle East? Would you become a Kurdish mother with a gun in one hand and a baby in the other one, defending your land or you’d join the so called Islamic government and chop people’s head off? Do you even think you could choose which one you wanted to be or it all depends on the overlapping of all those forces, trying to push you to a certain path?