The art of observation ...

Rev II on the duality of existence or why do we see a consistent view of reality even though Quantum Mechanics, as seen through the lens of precise experiments, shows, without question, the Alice in Wonderland characteristics of Quantum Mechanics to be anything but deterministic. Well, because everything is entangled and decohered, observation, which collapses the wave function, driven by existence 24/7, allows us to experience reality in consistent fashion.

To whit ...

Quantum decoherence is the loss of quantum coherence, the process in which a system's behaviour changes from that which can be explained by quantum mechanics to that which can be explained by classical mechanics. In quantum mechanics, particles such as electrons are described by a wave function, a mathematical representation of the quantum state of a system; a probabilistic interpretation of the wave function is used to explain various quantum effects. As long as there exists a definite phase relation between different states, the system is said to be coherent. A definite phase relationship is necessary to perform quantum computing on quantum information encoded in quantum states. Coherence is preserved under the laws of quantum physics.

If a quantum system were perfectly isolated, it would maintain coherence indefinitely, but it would be impossible to manipulate or investigate it. If it is not perfectly isolated, for example during a measurement, coherence is shared with the environment and appears to be lost with time; a process called quantum decoherence or environmental decoherence. As a result of this process, quantum behavior is apparently lost, just as energy appears to be lost by friction in classical mechanics.

In classical scattering of a target body by environmental photons, the motion of the target body will not be changed by the scattered photons on the average. In quantum scattering, the interaction between the scattered photons and the superposed target body will cause them to be entangled, thereby delocalizing the phase coherence from the target body to the whole system, rendering the interference pattern unobservable.

When the entanglement of a particle is experimentally created, the wonders of QM become evident.

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion process can split photons into type II photon pairs with mutually perpendicular polarization.

Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics.[1]

Everything is entangled

When two particles interact, their quantum states generally become entangled. Further interaction with other particles spreads the entanglement far and wide. Subsequent local manipulations of separated particles cannot, in the absence of quantum communication, undo the entanglement.

This is why precise experiments show how coherence occurs when depicting some of the wonderful mysteries of Quantum Mechanics while decoherence hides the mysteries of same under the guise of classical. :)

The duality of existence ...

Finally!!!, Quantum View Odessy explains, from the Quantum Mechanics perspective, the analog/digital duality of existence whereby the two endlessly trade places in space/time in constructing the reality we all share, something most eloquently expressed by the Yang & Yin symbol, the greatest "logo" ever designed, showing why duality rules at deep level. :)

The Yin and Yang symbol with white representing Yang and black representing Yin. The symbol is a visual depiction of the intertwined duality of all things in nature, a common theme in w:Taoism. It is believed to be derived from the 14th century Tiandi Zhiran Hetu (Heaven and Earth’s Natural Diagram of the River), Hetu (Diagram of River), Luoshu (Chart of Luo), Xiantian tu (Diagram of Preceding Heaven) and Taijitu (太極圖) (Diagram of the Ultimate Power). Here the diagram is shown against a feather edged grey background to ensure clarity when displayed over black or white.

Stealth mode

Julie Benbassat

One evening, yours truly was sitting on the deck having a beer. Unannounced, a great horned owl, who lives nearby, silently ghosted out of a tree and pounced on a squirrel hiding in the leaf litter below. Upon seizing the prey, she? lifted off effortlessly and flew to an unknown location to enjoy the meal at hand. Stunned at the stealth, slowness of flight and the complete lack of sound exhibited by this amazing creature, this brief glimpse into the wonder of owls will remain with me forever. 

Owls are hard to observe for some of the same reasons we love them. With their inconspicuous presence and almost soundless flight, they point to the value of not standing out in the world but fitting into it.

They wear the look of the land around them to meld into it, a strategy known as crypsis. Masters of camouflage — streaked like grasses; mottled, speckled and striped like tree bark; pale like snow — they baffle the eye of both predators and prey.

A Zen moment comes to mind regarding owls as they seamlessly fit into reality on their own terms, similar to how a Zen Archer becomes the arrow as an act of meditation in action. 

A Japanese archer with targets. Ink on paper, 1878.

In closing ...

Owls are cryptic not just in sight but also in sound. Many species move through the world in secret silence, the better to hear and hunt their prey. Most birds make a lot of noise when they fly. Not owls. A mouse or vole scuttling along the ground never hears what’s coming.

The quiet flight of owls is an act of biomechanical stealth that still challenges science. Only recently have biologists and engineers begun to sort out the details and to use what they’ve learned to design quieter things, among them wind turbines, fans, trains and airplanes.

Silence is golden ... :)

Beyond stupid ...

This photo in the indictment shows boxes of records in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on Dec. 7, 2021.Source: Justice Department

You don't do this because ... if you have top secret clearance to view and handle documents, you don't want any of this material in your possession in any way, shape or fashion. Back in the day, yours truly had top secret clearance as an Army officer charged with handling sensative communications between the states and an unmentioned country. Without question, all relevant files remained in location, totally separate from said officer as you want this material as far away as possible from you in order to not be indicted like Agent Orange. Beyond stupid applies, especially when seeing just how slovenly these files were handled. Astounding says it all.

End of rant for now.

Trump Tried to Hide Documents, Share Secrets, Indictment Alleges

The federal indictment lays out the relentless efforts Trump used to hide government documents from authorities at his Mar-a-Lago home. It alleges the former president engaged in a conspiracy with a close aide to resist returning classified materials, even after receiving a subpoena requiring him to do so.

From this perspective, one cannot make this up.

Although being an atheist to the max, I pray to god Trump never becomes president yet again.

Rinse & Repeat :)

 Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine

Yours truly loves quantum mechanics and the two laws of thermodynamics, at lay level of course, as complexity and operating limits apply to the vagaries of reality including black holes, notions one and all brilliantly described in a wonderful Quanta Magazine article provocatively titled In New Paradox, Black Holes Appear to Evade Heat Death.

To whit ...

Heat death held a morbid fascination for Victorian-era physicists. It was an early example of how everyday physics connects to the grandest themes in cosmology. Drop ice cubes into a glass of water, and you create a situation that is out of equilibrium. The ice melts, the liquid chills, and the system reaches a common temperature. Although motion does not cease — water molecules continue to reshuffle themselves — it loses any sense of progress, and the overall distribution of molecular speeds doesn’t change. 

The 19th-century founders of thermodynamics realized that the same goes for the universe as a whole. Once the stars all burn out, whatever is left — gas, dust, stellar corpses, radiation — will come to equilibrium. “The universe from that time forward would be condemned to a state of eternal rest,” Hermann von Helmholtz wrote in 1854. Modern cosmology has not altered this basic picture.

Unless you look closer as quantum jitters apply in the guise of superposition and entanglement.

When an ice cube melts and attains equilibrium with the liquid, physicists usually say the evolution of the system has ended. But it hasn’t — there is life after heat death. Weird and wonderful things continue to happen at the quantum level. “If you really look into a quantum system, the particle distribution might have equilibrated, and the energy distribution might have equilibrated, but there’s still so much more going on beyond that,” said Xie Chen, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

The black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy as originally seen in 2017 (left) and after recent data processing by a machine learning algorithm (right).

Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), 

D. Psaltis (Georgia Tech), T. Lauer (NSF’s NOIRLab), and F. Ozel (Georgia Tech)

Rinse & Repeat applies :)

Not letting the lack of a rigorous proof stop them, Susskind and Brown suggested in 2018 that the steady growth of complexity qualifies as a new law of nature, the second law of quantum complexity — a quantum analogue of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics holds that closed systems increase in entropy until they reach thermal equilibrium, the state of maximal entropy. According to Susskind and Brown, the same happens with complexity. A system increases in complexity for eons after it reaches thermal equilibrium. But it does eventually plateau, reaching “complexity equilibrium.” At that point, a quantum system has explored every possible state it is capable of and will finally lose any sense of progress.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle to the rescue. :)

We cannot know the exact momentum and position of a particle simultaneously.

Then the system reaches complexity equilibrium, where complexity hits a ceiling. Although the system continues to change, it can no longer be said to evolve — it has no sense of directedness, but wanders among equal states of maximal complexity.

The last stage is called recurrence, where the system stumbles back into its original simple condition. For this to happen by accident is highly improbable. But eternity is a long time, so it ultimately does happen, after a period of time that is not merely exponential, but an exponential of an exponential. The whole process then repeats.

Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash

Mise-en-scène

 Learning something new never disappoints, something yours truly discoverd when reading about the concept of Mise-en-scène and how it applies, in this case, to the art of film. :)

Mise-en-scène is every element that’s in the shot — visual and auditory

Mise-en-scène includes framing, lighting, set design, blocking and sound

The sum of your mise-en-scène amounts to your artistic style as a filmmaker

Possibly the vaguest definition of anything ever comes from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his opinion on the case of “Jacobellis v Ohio.” He was unable to define what would make a movie obscene and thus not protected under the First Amendment. He wrote: “I know it when I see it.” This shoulder-shrugging definition has kept lawyers and artists pushing the limits. Nobody has known the exact dimensions of obscenity for nearly 50 years. 

Mise-en-scène is similarly undefined. Only a few years later, film studies professor Brian Henderson said in his essay, “The Long Take,” that mise-en-scène is “cinema’s grand undefined term.” He begins by listing directors who are masters at it. He included masters like Murnau and Orson Welles. However, he went on to write “one does not lightly venture a definition of mise-en-scène… of which each person, when examined, reveals a different sense and meaning…”

The distinctive mise-en-scène of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

(Germany, 1920) features jagged architecture.

To yours truly, Kubrick, Wells and Lean come to mind when thinking on how mise-en-scène applies in the making of truly great cinema.

If true ...

By Bettmann/Getty Images

The UFO issue ramps up big time with two legitimate whistleblowers reporting that extraterrestrial tech exists, thus proving the fact we're not alone, something rather disruptive if their take proves to be true. 

To whit ...

A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time.

Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record.

The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.

The task force was established to investigate what were once called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, and are now officially called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. The task force was led by the Department of the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. It has since been reorganized and expanded into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigations of objects operating underwater.

Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures,” he said.

This file video grab image shows part of an unclassified video taken by US navy pilots showing interactions with ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’. Photograph: DoD/AFP

Why this story has legs ...

The story was written by Ralph Blumenthal, who spent more than 45 years on staff at The New York Times, and Leslie Kean, an investigative science journalist known for her writing on UFOs. The two are best known for authoring—alongside the Times’ Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper—the explosive 2017 UFO report, in which the journalists revealed a defunct secret Pentagon program—initially funded at the request of former Senate majority leader Harry Reid—to investigate “unidentified flying objects.” (The A1 story was accompanied with a sidebar written by the three authors and titled: “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen.’”) On Monday, Saagar Enjeti, a political pundit and cohost of the Breaking Points podcast, proclaimed that Blumenthal and Kean’s latest report was “the biggest story in the UFO world since the 2017 NYT expose."

And finally ...

The US has been urged to disclose evidence of UFOs after a whistleblower former intelligence official said the government has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.

The former intelligence official David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency, has alleged that the US has craft of non-human origin.

Most UFOs – like the Chinese spy balloon – can be explained away. But what about the other 2%?

Information on these vehicles is being illegally withheld from Congress, Grusch told the Debrief. Grusch said when he turned over classified information about the vehicles to Congress he suffered retaliation from government officials. He left the government in April after a 14-year career in US intelligence.

Jonathan Grey, a current US intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (Nasic), confirmed the existence of “exotic materials” to the Debrief, adding: “We are not alone.”

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes

Technofossils

The sun is shrouded as it sets behind the Statue of Liberty in a hazy sky caused by smoke drifting into the Northeast of the U.S. from wildfires in Canada on May 22, 2023, in New York City. 

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

The BRT guesstimate of relative normalcy regarding the impact of climate change on civilization is approximately three years, after witch, with phase transitions being exponential and not linear as GW increases, the wheels begin to fall off as the runaway 2023 wildfires in Canada is but a harbinger of things to come as man moves further into the 6th great extinction event known as the Anthropocene.

The Trinity test in July 1945 has been proposed as the start of the Anthropocene.

Wildfire smoke swept across the Northeast, Midwest and South — even stretching as far west as New Mexico — on Tuesday and Wednesday, carrying with it dangerous levels of air pollution. High levels of PM2.5, the smallest level of particulate matter that is tiny enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream, caused air quality to plummet in many states, leading schools to cancel outdoor activities and cities to issue health alerts warning residents to close windows and avoid going outside.

This has led some parts of the U.S. to experience some of the worst air quality levels in the world. Briefly on Tuesday, air pollution tracking company IQAir said that New York City’s air quality was the second worst in the world, with an air quality index above 200, which is categorized as “very unhealthy”. A healthy air quality index, by contrast, is between 0 and 50.

Technofossils

The detritius of the Anthropocene ... is everywhere.

70 million & counting ...

North Canyon, an ancient tributary.

The 70 million-year-old Grand Canyon, carved out by the once mighty Colorado River, will remain intact but the river that made will not as its slowly dying, due to GW, the ongoing extinction event driven by injecting excess CO2 into the atmosphere, a process identical to how 5 previous extinction events occurred including The Great Dying, whereby 95% of marine life and 70% of land perished approximately 251.9 million years ago.

Marine extinction intensity during the Phanerozoic

Plot of extinction intensity (percentage of marine genera that are present in each interval of time but do not exist in the following interval) vs time in the past.[1] Geological periods are annotated (by abbreviation and colour) above. The Permian–Triassic extinction event is the most significant event for marine genera, with just over 50% (according to this source) perishing.

The immense walls form a kind of cocoon, sealing you off from the modern world, with its cell signal and light pollution and disappointments. They draw your eyes relentlessly upward, as in a cathedral.

You might think you are seeing all the way to the top. But up and above are more walls, and above them even more, out of sight except for the occasional glimpse. For the canyon is not just deep. It is broad, too — 18 miles, rim to rim, at its widest. This is no mere cathedral of stone. It is a kingdom: sprawling, self-contained, an alternate reality existing magnificently outside of our own.

And yet, the Grand Canyon remains yoked to the present in one key respect. The Colorado River, whose wild energy incised the canyon over millions of years, is in crisis.

Beyond tragic comes to mind here.

Musica universalis

 Music of the spheres lives whenever black holes merge, proving Einstein to be right yet again.

When two black holes slam together, they don’t make a sound. And yet, this is what we hear if we listen closely.

[CLIP: Black hole “chirp”]

Let’s listen again. 

[CLIP: Black hole “chirp”]

That “chirp” is what we heard from two black holes that slammed together about a billion light-years from Earth. The tone rises as they spiral closer together, and abruptly stops when they merge.

But sound can’t travel through the vacuum of space. So what exactly are we hearing?

Each of these black holes weighs as much as several stars; hefty enough that as they pass through space they make waves— gravitational waves, specifically.   

These waves are undulations in the fabric of spacetime that fan outwards at the speed of light, like ripples on a cosmic pond. 

Albert Einstein predicted this phenomenon in 1916, based on his theory of general relativity, but was skeptical that gravitational waves could ever be detected.

Even the strong ones from colliding black holes produce ripples roughly a thousandth the size of a proton.

It took almost a century for scientists to prove him wrong. 

Harmony of the World from Ebenezer Sibly's Astrology (1806)

The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies – the Sun, Moon, and planets – as a form of music. The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later developed by 16th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler.