Seeing that this is a travel blog, and I am an amateur student of quantum physics, these two topics, would seem to go together. At least it's worthy of some consideration for a post.
Ok, I did a post on time travel already:
Now how about another challenge of the quantum realm, the quantum leap.
Some of you might be young enough to remember the television program by that name. Personally, I was never a watcher of the show, but I understood the gist of it. It seemed like the lead actor would jump from one location and time to another. I think randomly and not at will, at least that's what I recall.
I used to hear about a math problem that physics students had to solve. They had to calculate the probability that they could end up on Mars by quantum probability. I never did the calculation as I don't know how, but the probability of that happening is so low that it's essentially zero. But isn't it fascinating that there is any probability at all that that could happen?
But what is the mathematical and physical premise behind a quantum leap? Is it actually possible? The short answer is yes, in the sense it is not an impossibility. But no in the sense that the probability is so low it is not worth considering. For example. If you had a coin and randomly flipped it and it came up heads 1 million consecutive times, how likely is that? It's not impossible but you would never see it in more than a few billion lifetimes of flipping. Now consider doing it a second million times? It is billions upon trillions of times more likely for that to happen then you doing a quantum leap.
But what is a quantum leap? Well, there are small parts of you doing it every second. I remember from my college P-Chem days as a Chemical Engineering student, studying about this for the first time. Quantum Leap is the ability of an electron to change from one orbit to another seemingly instantaneously. Never occupying the space between the orbits. It just simply jumped from one place to another.
I remember that really blew my mind when I first learned this as a college student. Niels Bohr was the first person to discover this over 100 years ago. It took the science world by storm when he presented his idea. Even Einstein couldn't believe it, but he came to believe it over time.
But what about the reality of you as a person doing a quantum Leap. That every subatomic particle in you made the same instantaneous jump at the same time, to the same location? Well for the average person weighing 154 pounds, there are 7 billion billion billion atoms in him/her. That's just the atoms not the subatomic particles that make up the atoms.
So what are the chances that all 7 billion billion billion plus particles all make the same jump at the same time? Well, it makes that coin flipping thing I just talked about sound quite easy to do. But for all intents and purposes, the probability is so low it's not even worth considering. It just would never happen to even one person over the lifetime of our universe. Or even the lifetime of billions of our universe.
It's an interesting science fiction consideration since there is a scientific path for this to occur. But although science says it can happen, math says forget about it!
Although it's possible you could wake up on Mars tomorrow, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it!
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This is an Interesting philosophical concept. Very heavy thought process. Interesting reading