Are quantum events the cause of death?(Kevin Hughes) The Quantum World is weird, and counterintuitive, but the math of it is quite well understood. We in our normal macro world cannot spin in two directions at once, (go ahead, try it)in the Quantum world, well, it is not only possible, but routine.

Right now, at this very moment, inside every atom in your body quantum events are happening. Some where in your body the Quantum World is doing its thing, spinning in two directions at once, violating the rules of Newtonian Mechanics with gay abandon. At the Quantum level particles are waves, and waves are particles, until you look at them and they “collapse” into a single state.

It is those kinds of things: being in two places at once, quantum tunneling, particle wave duality, superposition (where everything is possible, and all states exist at the same time), that make folks believe you have to be crazy to understand the Quantum world.

You wouldn’t think that velocity would have anything to do with us being here, or quantum tunneling being the reason the sunlight hits earth- for if quantum tunneling did not exist, well the sun would not fuse hydrogen into helium, and again, we wouldn’t be here to discover things we can’t understand.

So now, let me offer a different explanation for “death” which is a state of being that “collapses” our life at the macro level.

No one really knows why we die. Oh sure, they know the signs: if you are not breathing, your heart is not beating, and your brain waves are flat- you are dead. Certifiably dead. In fact, most countries do give you a certificate, or at least give it to your relatives. By the way, I think of that certificate as a graduation diploma and not the dreaded end of it all. Read on.

Some Scientist think that aging is a disease, one caused by either to many free radicals: charged particles that are usually balanced in the body but as you grow older they get out of balance. Another popular line of research thinks it is the shortened telomeres (Which act kind of like a zipper, but as they get shorter, they can’t be pulled apart anymore) at the end of a chromosome that cause us to age and die. We simply stop being able to replicate our DNA.

I have a different theory. I think ( add a drum roll, please) death is caused by quantum effects piling up over time- and at a certain point, they “collapse” the macro body of “matter” in our physical reality, and we change states. We go back to the Quantum Foam from which we came. So, let us back up and see how this might work.

When a particle moves in a Classic Newtonian manner- it moves either left, or right on a straight line. If you know the starting point, and the direction it is moving, you can figure out its velocity. If it moves four units on a line in a second, its velocity is four units a second. Knowing that, you can predict where it will be in ten seconds. Or knowing the seconds it moved, you can predict where it will be either to the left or right of its starting position.

At the Quantum Level, well, a particle (which could be a wave until you look at it) can move in several directions, where it is, and its velocity (actually momentum, but who cares?lol) well those are uncertain. Because they are both uncertain if you know one, you can’t know the other. Until you measure one, or the other, they are both true. In other words, you can tell where a particle is, but not how fast it is going, if you know how fast it is going, you can’t tell where it is. Because in the Quantum World, everything is possible, and all things are just measured by probability. A greater chance of it being here, rather than there, but it could be both, or neither, and anything in between.

Okay, so now, we know enough for me to keep going. Einstein says that as we go towards the speed of light the faster we go the more massive things get. It is why we can’t get to the speed of light, because we become so massive, we can’t develop enough power to push the heavy thing faster. All kind of relatives effects take place at or near the speed of light. Time gets messed up (relative to your frame of reference), mass gets messed up, and gravity goes wild.

Okay, what does this have to do with us dying?

Remember that line with a particle moving along it? Okay, if that same line was drawn using Quantum Mechanics, it would still be a straight line, and the particle (or wave) would move left or right, but also around it. Instead of moving on the X axis, it moves on and X,Y, Z direction with no axis. ( I know, hurts your head doesn’t it?) Picture a ribbon wound around a stick. Instead of being just moving left and right, it would also be closer to the stick at some points, and further away at others..so it is moving in three directions around the stick with some parts rotating clockwise, others counter clockwise, some rotating backwards, and some not rotating at all but moving along like a point. (I told you this stuff was weird)

And that ribbon can be wrapped tightly, or loosely, or any combination of those states. As the particle moves: were it is, or how fast it might be going isn’t a definite point, but a probability. And once you nail down its position (the wave collapses) you lose all the information about the the other states. If you find X, well, Y and Z are gone forever.

Now, remember back to when we said that death might be caused by free radicals getting out of balance? The pluses and minuses do not cancel out each other exactly?

Well, what if all those probabilities that didn’t come true, pile up? What if all the things we could have done, could have been, or might have happened to us, got to be to much to carry around and we stopped. No more momentum. Death.

And here is why I think that might just be true. Remember what happens when you try to get a massive object like a rocket ship up to the speed of light? You can’t. It becomes to massive to “push”.

Well, at the Quantum level, the very tiny things move very fast, in fact, at the speed of light (or in some weird ways, faster) but, and it is a big but, when you scale up from say four units a second for a quantum particle to eight units a second, the momentum changes, and the mass gets “slower”. The old inverse square law comes into play.

An electron is way more massive than the quarks that make it up, and an Atom…holy crap. As we scale up in huge chunks, from four to sixteen to 256… and on an on, by the time we get to our macro world, we are so slow and massive, we don’t notice the Quantum Effects anymore. But they are still there, grinding away at their tiny level.

Eventually, all those probabilities that could have been (and might have been) build up to the point that the macro level can’t support all of them anymore, and we die. But not really. For all that happens is that the macro size body in the world of slow moving matter- stops, releasing all of its possibilities back into the Quantum world. No longer needing to sustain the strain of holding matter together at the atomic, molecular, and cellular level. We are free again. Free to be anything, anyone, at any time, or in any place…until we look for ourselves.

If we do that, we collapse the wave, and maybe, that is birth.

Or, Heaven.


Smiles, Kevin

---