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?