Mark Megahan
Benoit Mandelbrot, discoverer of fractals, may have provided the key to quantum chaos which lets Irwin Schrödinger’s famously indeterminate cat out of the box. Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues that “chaos theory shows that quantum uncertainty is in fact down to our own ignorance, not reality itself.”
Mandelbrot and strange holes in reality
Albert Einstein refused to cheerfully accept that random chance is a part of reality. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he famously declared. Irwin Schrödinger agreed and came up with his famous cat as a thought experiment to point out the absurdity of “nonsensical cats which are half alive and half dead.”
Benoit Mandelbrot discovered a whole new branch of mathematics based around “fractals.” Weird but highly ordered self-referential systems which maintain their patterns at all levels of scale. If the geometry of reality turns out to be fractal in nature, it removes the problem paradox.
Current consensus is that “uncertainty is indeed an inherent feature of quantum systems, not a reflection of our own lack of knowledge.” Professor Palmer disputes that completely. His approach could end up leading to the long sought “unified field theory.” That’s the so called “theory of everything” and the holy grail of physics.
Starting at the beginning, chaos theory teaches that a small uncertainty about initial conditions in a system “grow and grow until they completely destroy the accuracy of any forecast.” That’s why weather is so hard to predict. Mandelbrot was on a quest to eliminate noise from phone signals. He failed at that but created a whole new field of study to explain why he was doomed to fail, before he started.
Every since Werner Heisenberg declared that uncertainty rules the quantum world, because the act of taking a measurement affects the state, causing it to collapse into one possibility or another from the random chaos, physicists have taken his word for it. That means that “reality is in itself inherently uncertain.”
Palmer looked really close and decided that “this orthodox view rests on a rarely questioned assumption.” One Mandelbrot and his freaky fractals can shed light on.
The uncertainty is ours
Along with his cat, Schrödinger came up with the concept of particle entanglement. It was that “spooky action at a distance” which disturbed Einstein so much. “Two particles can be emitted from a source, such that the properties of the two particles – e.g., their angular momenta (also known as spins) are correlated.”
Physicist John Bell showed that, under seemingly reasonable assumptions, these correlations, suitably combined, are limited in size. In practice they can get really huge so that proves somebody is wrong somewhere. Scientists use that to support the idea that reality is fundamentally uncertain. They didn’t consider Mandelbrot’s fractal based geometry.
Bell’s Theorem relies on the assumption that “certain hypothetical alternative spin measurements – ones that might conceivably have been performed on the entangled particles but weren’t – are allowed by the laws of quantum physics.” What if they aren’t. “If these counterfactual worlds turn out to be inconsistent with the laws of physics, then our intuitive ideas about causality will also turn out to be wrong.”
Ed Lorenz was a weather man who loved the work of Mandelbrot. He noticed when studying the butterfly effect that “if you start his simple chaotic system from any initial state and let the state evolve, you will eventually see the state trace out a remarkable fractal geometry. A fractal geometry is one which has a structure which is never lost, no matter how far you zoom into the geometry.”
The important part are the “gaps which never disappear as you keep zooming. This is quite different to classical Euclidean geometry, like the surface of a sphere, which looks flat and boring if you zoom into it enough.” That is a key feature of every Mandelbrot type fractal. What really blows the minds of contemporary physicists is that they have to drop their beloved concept of “reductionism.” Breaking things down into smaller and smaller parts doesn’t work. Not when they are in a system where scale is irrelevant.
Instead, “to make any sense out of it, we have to think big, very big indeed. We have to suppose that the whole universe, and literally everything there is in it, is collectively a chaotic system evolving precisely on some cosmic fractal geometry.” Holism gives scientists nightmares. One thing is certain, Schrödinger’s cat likes Palmer’s notion. Every time you open the box it will still be a cat. Probably a hungry one, wanting brushed after dinner.
