Ever since the Greeks gazed into the heavens, philosophers, scientists, poets and other minds sought to give taste and sense to human lives by wondering if they can predict things. After all, we all have done it, wondering about the future, dreaming and meditating about idyllic lives, destiny perhaps, why not? In the history of humanity this culminated in ultra-deep physics that ultimately gave birth to the famous and brilliant Albert Einstein and others like Max Plank in the 1900s where certainty was dominant yet here we are with the cutting edge minds defying the very foundation of certainty and reality as we know it: the moon may not be quite here when we do not look at it…
Yes, this is the majesty of quantum mechanics, well maybe not applied to the macroscopic moon, as Einstein said: “I would like to think that the moon is here even when I don’t look at it.” However, when we descend to a very small scale, space-time becomes fuzzy and bubbly; we find that nothing can be determined with certainty and matter itself relies on probabilistic events with particles and anti-particles popping into existence from the vacuum of space and vanishing elegantly as soon as they appear. Not only the vacuum but also atoms and more specifically a subatomic particle called the electron spinning around the nucleus may be seen as having a probability to be found here, not there, but no more! Nothing is absolutely certain like in the Newtonian world which clearly casts doubt on the very foundation of reality.
Moreover, all the science books children carry say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and they are all wrong. Einstein himself may be wrong because information in the quantum realm can travel instantaneously and hence faster than the speed of light. The cutting edge experiments suggest that information can travel faster than the speed of light: two atoms linked together, separated by perhaps infinite distance are entangled, they communicate with each other in a sense that if something happens to the first atom it directly alters the state of the other one, a” spooky action at distance” (A.E.) And if this violation is not enough, the dazzling laws of quantum mechanics show us that everything in the universe has wave-like and particle-like properties. How about that?
In addition, it seems like certainty is a result of a collapse of a superposition of state defined by QM, where consciousness, human mind, observation determine reality. A cat in a box that may be dead for a reason or alive is in fact at the same time in both states and when the observation is made reality turns into one option or the other as if it was the invisible hand of God that governs what we see.
In fact the whole universe has a wave function that keeps on collapsing and splits into two parallel universes like the cell mitosis; it’s the multiverse where universes proliferate; just look at how life and consciousness are closely intertwined with the universe. Consequently, great people confirmed again and again all those strange properties of QM and practical applications arose: quantum computers, relying on quibits, in a superposition of states that harness QM. Quantum computers most likely hold the key to unlocking national secrets and give a new definition to info war by, for example, finding the two huge prime numbers; the passwords when multiplied give a certain answer, a task that drives actual supercomputers trying indefinitely without success. Feeling mind boggled? Great! A Nobel Prize awaits your breakthrough…