Lead us to the new age, chosen one

Ancient time, modern times. Prehistory, contemporary history. We have many different names for different times. These classifications are usually overlapping, subject of debate and sometimes not all that scientific. They however make our perspective towards our past more meaningful. Efforts made today will lead to brighter future in contrast to what world used be.

Innovations are usually considered to be the fuel for advancing into a new age and at first glance it really seems to be that way. Watt's steam engine triggered industrial revolution, advances in metallurgy led to iron age and so on. Any more detailed analysis will fall flat any fantasy of sudden intuitive leap in development of the history of mankind.

Watt's steam engine was an improvement to Tomas Newcomens engine which wasn't the first steam engine around either. Iron age has been scaled between 1200 BC - 700 AD varying in different locations(1). But then again, iron was acquired from meteorites already couple of thousand years before 1200 BC and smelting technologies slowly evolved without any certain dramatic event. Some even suggest that the shortage of tin used in bronze alloy forced bronze smiths to seek alternative natural resources thus leading mankind to another era because simply it needed to happen.

Past is history. But when does time stop being the present? Picture taken in 2009 at a dock.

Let's skip to time being

What about now? Where do we stand now? Information age? Well I'm writing my thoughts to be published in the world wide web. That has certainly changed since industrial age. If I lived in the 19th century I could only hand out these silly thoughts in leaflets on the streets in Finland. There is however not a single innovation that would make the difference between industrial and information age. And there won't be a single magical event that will make the difference between this information time and the next one. More important will probably be the social aspect. The new age will already be there when it's wanted and needed, whatever it will be called. Maybe a quantum age? Yeah, I vote for quantum age.

There innovations for new age are already here. LASER for example is device based on a quantum phenomena. It has revolutionized communications but it has not revolutionized the way we common people look at the world or ourselves. Scientist have also performed magical things like teleportation in laboratories. These are particularly those kind of examples that cannot be explained using previous classical ideas, suggesting that there is a need for a turn of a page. Perhaps when man discovers practical ways to exploit entanglement and superposition in computing, historians will mark a point for new era.

I cannot predict the future but eventually we are forced to accept that our description of the physical world has not been complete. And that is the point we start to look at the past as if it was a "different" era than we presently live. I cannot but wish to live long enough to experience that exiting turn up, which will occur indistinguishably. There is already proven theoretical basis for the turn up in quantum mechanics, but perhaps it still lacks a proper practical interpretation for it. 

Never mind the balls, here's entanglement

To me, greatest coincidence ever occurred is this planet we live on. For some reason life happened, creatures emerged and evolved. Along came humans, us. Ironically world produced a creature which is able to study reasons for it's own existence. Were we put here to find out why we were put here? That question may be closer to theology than science but I think that as long as you don't stop asking questions your soul is doing just fine. Luckily world has almost infinite amount of riddles for a curious mind.

Liverpool rules the waves, powerful advantage indeed.

I'm not sure what I was thinking of that sculpture at the time I took the picture above but now it resembles particles with entangled spin to me. Spin is a property of a individual particle that can be described as a angular momentum. But not like the angular momentum as in common sense world. When you spin me Round Like a Record (Another accidental quantum physics reference pointing to Liverpool) I could have one well defined angle while spinning around my hypothetical axle. Same doesn't go with the quantum world.

In the quantum world spin is a weird mathematical phenomena which raises more questions than it answers to. Spin can have only certain quantized values times ħ. Particles that have spin number half-integer are considered drastically different than those which have integer as spin number. Those particles that have half-integer are called fermions and those integer ones are called bosons. It's hard to describe or even imagine what does it means in practical terms but the important bit is that fermions (e.g. electrons) can't be in same quantum state and bosons (e.g. photons) can.

So for example electron has a spin of 1/2ħ which means that if we draw electron spinning around it's axel, that axel could point either up or down (much like those two balls in the picture). If these balls were close together they would interact and become entangled. This entanglement would cause the other ball to spin up and other down, since same quantum state would not be possible. Also no other balls could join in the party because there are only two possible orientations and they have been taken like seats. This is actually the reason why there is electron orbitals around an atom. When first two electron occupy space around nucleus, they get entangled and reserve all the two possible quantum states. If other electrons also wish to join in they will have to go further away from the nucleus to avoid the quantum state of those two which were there first.

Bosons can get entangled too, and spin is not the only property that can get entangled. But the most unimaginable thing about entanglement is that when you separate particles they still stay entangled. That may not sound that much of a big deal at the first thought but it can basically permit a way to communicate faster than light travels. Just send one photon from space station to polarizer in France and other to moon (cheap and easy), you would instantly know in which angle polarizer is on the moon by looking at the polarization results in France. So information on the moon was acquired faster than the light would travel from moon. And since nothing travels faster than light, we have this thing called dilemma.