We are the Universe

What is reality and why is the Universe the way it is?

Einstein said : “God doesn’t throw the dice” 

Now we can say : “If there would be a God , he would own the entire casino!”

You need a lot of imagination to try to understand reality.

Heisenberg said : “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

The double slit experiment and how it blows our minds!

I will explain it as simple as possible and integrate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Feynman’s sum over histories.

The double slit experiment was first done in 1801 by Thomas Young.  Afterwards it has been done many times, actually it is the experiment that has been performed the most in the scientific world.

The double slit experiment:

When we shoot a beam of light through a double slit ( 2 openings), it forms a pattern on the screen behind the openings.  We call this pattern an interference pattern. The light beam behaves like a wave. When the light goes through the slits, there are 2 different waves coming out of both openings. You can compare it with when you throw 2 pebbles in a lake at some distances from each other. You will see the waves, (ripples) of both impacts of the pebbles with the water come together. On the places where the troughs (bottoms) and the peaks (tops) of the waves come together, you see the waves disappear. Where the troughs or the peaks come together and add up they will increase. This is why there is an interference pattern on the screen behind the slits, because the waves interfere with each other and form bands on the screen. Where the troughs and peaks come together you see nothing as they cancel each other out Where the troughs or peaks add up, you will see bands where many light particles will be found.

The light beam is made out of many particles we call photons and they behave like waves. We call this the wave/particle duality.

The crazy thing about the double slit experiment is, that when we have two slits open and we send individual particles (photons)1 by 1, through one of the open slits. There will form an interference pattern on the screen. That means that the particles interfere with themselves and in a way know the second slit is open.

If 1 slit is open they form a band on the screen. When both slits are open they form not 2 bands as we would expect. Because don’t forget we shoot 1 particle at a time! 

What we see is an interference model (wavelike) on the screen. That means that the particles take every possible path when they go through 1 slit or the other. That means they are on multiple places at the same time!

They even interfere with themselves. Impossible you would say, but this is reality on the quantum scale, very different then everyday life. If we would make a comparison of what happens in the quantum world and translate it to our world, then we could have the following situation:

Imagine you sit in a nice restaurant somewhere in Italy with a nice view on lake Como and the surrounding mountains. You really would like to have a picture of yourself with the beautiful panorama. All the waiters are very busy and you don’t know who to ask to take your picture. So you stand up and walk 10 yards from your table, then you turn around and say “cheese” and you take a picture of yourself.

This is reality in the Quantum physics! It is incomprehensible for our brains. 

Feynman once said : ” I can say with certainty that nobody understands quantum physics”

Many people are trying to understand and describe reality.

A promising theory is M-theory. M-theory is composed of many different theories that all explain reality.

They are very different, but when they describe the same area they agree.

It is like different maps of the world and where they overlap we see the same results.

For M-theory to work there should be 10 dimensions and the time dimension, so 11 in total.

They also calculated that there could be 10 to the 500 different Universes.

Every Universe would be formed and determined in it’s beginning when it was the scale of 1 Planck. The quantum fluctuation on that time would define the specific set of rules for that Universe.

Feynman calls this the sum over histories or the sum over probabilities.

This phenomena only works on a quantum scale, but in the beginning of the big bang the Universe was in a quantum scale, like a Planck unit. There a quantum fluctuation could have great implications for the future of that Universe.

We can say we life in a Universe that was defined by a quantum fluctuation, one out of many possibilities. According to the calculations of M-theory there are

(10 to the 500) possible Universes.

Joeri De Mey

12/23/21