meow wolf (down the quantum rabbit hole)

Stan's Notes

Vicky and I visited Sante Fe while touring some national parks out West and stumbled on a place called Meow Wolf (they have since opened one in Grapevine Texas). We weren’t sure what to expect, but with a name like Meow Wolf how can you not give it a try?

How to describe it….like falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Meow Wolf converted a Walmart-type building into a wonderful new world with many oddly shaped rooms, hidden passageways – all full of strange décor and lighting. It’s like an alternate reality. You begin exploring, enjoying visual surprises at every turn. It’s fun, but also a bit disorienting as your brain tries to categorize these novel impressions.

That is how I felt when I began learning about God’s quantum world – the world of the very small. It is bizarre beyond description – challenging our most deeply and intuitively held assumptions about reality.

Humans have a compulsion to explore – including trying to figure out what stuff the physical world is made of. As mentioned in “Binoculars”, microscopes helped extend our vision into the small – including atoms. As a young student I learned that material stuff is made of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus with protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons. Different types of stuff have different numbers of each. Simple enough!

But ingenious new tools like particle accelerators (pic) have allowed us to look deeper into the world of atoms and even smaller subatomic particles. Soon we hit a very real “threshold” – very much like the magical wardrobe in CS Lewis fantasy – below which we enter a whole new world. Things in the quantum world:
1. Particles dissolve into “waves of probability”
2. Tunnel thru walls
3. Pop in and out of existence
4. Are strangely connected even at long distances

Welcome to the quantum world!

The threshold between the quantum world and our “regular” world is still highly mysterious to scientists but these quantum phenomena have been overwhelmingly verified by repeated experiments – perhaps more so than any other scientific theory in history. Quantum effects are foundational to our whole technology infrastructure –including the functioning of silicon chips in all computers. Quantum entanglement’s bizarre traits are now being used in encryption and a new generation of quantum computers. Quantum matters!!

The iconic experiment that lays bare much of quantum’s weirdness is the “double-slit” experiment. This beautiful experiment has been replicated millions of times with a wide variety of “twists” that just keep getting more bizarre. Check out the video links below for a good intro to the quantum world and overview of the double-slit experiment.

Thank you God for the weirdness of the quantum world.

toodling and noodling, Stan

https://youtu.be/Usu9xZfabPM – good overview. A bit technical at end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1YqgPAtzho – double-slit experiment

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