February 19, 2021

I might be getting a new freelance opportunity! It's not one I especially need, and I really have to finish editing Sarah Someone, but it would be good experience. Plus it's with a company I've worked for before (although in a different capacity), and I really liked them. They paid on time and seemed collaborative and cool. It's weird but nice when stuff from the past loops forward. (Well, I guess it's usually nice... unless the past thing was bad. Insight over here!) 

I left a note for myself to write about Quantum Mechanics and mystery novels. It felt like a need-to-blog thing. Now I'm less excited but will outline my thoughts on it anyway....

One of the kookiest experiments in physics is also one of the simplest ones. It started way back in the early 1800s when Thomas Young made two thin slits in the curtains of his bedroom window. The sun, streaming through the slits, made an interference pattern -- bands of sunlight and shadow -- on his bedroom wall. This type of pattern is only possible for wave behavior. Young showed the light was a wave. In 1905, Einstein showed that light behaved like discrete particles called photons. If one photon at a time were shot at the double slit experiment, each photon would land at a single spot (like a particle), but after you shot many many single photons, you'd come to see that their placement was according to that original wave interference. Basically, each individual photon was somehow carrying the probability of the wave location. This went on to work with other particles, like electrons. 

Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen buddies concluded that light acted like a wave until it was detected, when it would choose a definite position (and other properties like velocity and direction). The screen represents detection, an observer, and it causes the wave function -- that wavelike probability -- to collapse. The photon dumps all its energy at one spot. The particle exists in all the possibilities of a wave until the last second. 

Okay well, mystery novels. In the beginning you know something has happened -- someone's been murdered usually -- the photon is shot out of the laser. For the whole journey of the book, there are many possible outcomes. Anybody could be the killers; although it does seem that there is a range of probability, of likeliness. The photon goes through both slits. It exists as a smear of energy, everywhere, and interacting with itself, making high and low likelihoods. By the end, the possibilities collapse and one person emerges as the culprit. The photon arrives at the screen in a single spot. Forever in that one position, all other possibilities denied.