Michael Moss Billy Stein performed Pyramid on August 3, 2012 at the WestbethMusicWorks First Fridays Concert Series. Moss Stein released their duo CD, INTERVALS, August 26, 2013, available at CDBaby and iTunes.
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Ok, this idea sounds meshugah to one of the physicists I spoke with at the end of a salon entitled “Refining Einstein.” It was part of the World Science Festival, 2013. I volunteer every year and get to hear smart people talk about Einstein and quantum physics. This year the salon participants decided to avoid the quantum physics part and devoted their attention to defining and refining the geometry of time. Which is ok if you didn’t know that they were supposed to relate time to both the macro and micro, to Einsteinian spacetime and to quantum mechanics.
One of the questions from the audience wondered whether or not the absolute zero of time wouldn’t be the big bang at its inception when time did not yet exist. In other words, time originated with space. That makes sense since time and space are so intimately related that the geometer of space absolutely defines time and time cannot be separated from space. Gravity is the great force here as mass and energy warp spacetime, slowing and accelerating time itself. In fact, gravity became the 800 pound gorilla in the room of the salon and time and space were inseparably linked with the effect mass and energy have on spacetime.
But what happens to gravity in the quantum world where mass/energy does not have much effect on subatomic particles? Gravity is comparatively weak in spacetime; in quantum levels there is no valid theory of gravity. Quantum loop gravity theory is one effort to define gravity on the quantum level but is as yet less than authoritative. The distances are so short and the energy so high that compared to the weak force, the strong force, and random events gravity is still enigmatic.
Time and gravity are structural elements but neither have clear roles when the issues of singularity or entanglement come up. The numbers in the mathematical equations reach for infinity at the center of a black hole—a singularity—relative to time, space, and are thus undefined. If your equation results in infinity, the result is invalid. This is not the way to go about working this out.
My insight: entanglement, defined as two particles so involved with each other that action or measurement of one changes the other instantaneously no matter how far apart they are states that no time is spent communicating through spacetime. This “spooky action at a distance” (Einstein) has a real claim on reality. Just don’t ask me what reality is. Entanglement reflects a state of no-time. The absolute zero of time which I choose to ascribe to the state at the period of origin, named by Fred Hoyle as the big bang, is also timeless. My question: at both the singularity, and in entanglement, time n’existe pas. Therefore is there not some relationship?
The physicist I spoke with adamantly denied a relationship between singularity no-time and entanglement no-time. He did not want to go into it. Nonetheless, I can’t stop thinking about it.
My thinking spread out, like an electron wave. What if photons and other massless particles that travel at light-speed and therefore do not “experience” time are aspects of this phenomenon of entanglement and singularity? Really, the way I understand it, gravity slows down time, and at the singularity time stops. There might be a connection. Some would say that all particles are entangled because all energy and mass emerged from the singularity of the big bang. I am not about to say we are all one, though that would explain a lot, such as the existence of the mind and our ability to communicate with others instantaneously, experiences anecdotally verified but not yet experimentally validated. We could branch out into the concept of synchronicity, a bildung co-created by analyst Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli. No, I want to correlate the science of quantum mechanics with the science of spacetime. I do not believe my question is without meaning, order, or even relativity.
Time for me is special. I love time. As a musician I consider time to be the skeleton upon which the flesh of music is hung. I know that the brain sets up sympathetic vibrations of action potential among a group of listeners to music that captures and unites a crowd. Time for me is the essence of music, and even when musicians say they are ignoring time when they play freely, without time, I think time is implied. You can hear time in the energy. Time slows down at lower energy levels of expression and speeds up at higher levels of energy. Playing sometimes feels like I’m riding a wave that moves faster than the speed of thought. I surf the wave of time as notes pop out of the quantum foam of superposition of notes. I am very familiar with time as both a construct of creativity and as a value in physics. I am fascinated with time. And no time.
The physicist asked me why I asked the absurd question: is there a correlation between the absolute zero of time and quantum entanglement? I could not believe I had to explain: there must be an overarching construct relating the non-existence of time with both the singularity and with entanglement. Isn’t it obvious?
Now that I think about it, might there not be some form of equivalence between the speed of light and no-time? Time n’existe pas at the speed of light. Photons do not age. And photons, once emitted from quantum interactions, do not accelerate. They are always going at the maximum speed allowed. I have always been fascinated by that fact. A photon is emitted, and no time exists, and it travels at 386K miles per hour. It is as miraculous and ridiculous as quantum entanglement. The double slit experiment with its interference waves of particles is just as mysterious. How can there not be some kind of equivalence?
Now, you might think that I am just blowing smoke because I do not refer to mathematical constructs. You are correct. Smoke is ineffable, exhibits a chaotic lack of form, and appears at the higher end of entropy. That is, smoke has no form because it is the end product of other interactions. It has high entropy. It has low meaning content. And I am out there blowing smoke, making meaningless statements born of pure intuition. I do not wish to resort to the obvious—tell me why it can’t be true?—argument. Who cares? It’s just that I trust my intuition. This question comes from a deep understanding of time and what you can do in space with time. All I need is Einstein’s brain to construct a true gedankenexperiment. Yes, I know I am Einstein’s distant cousin, but I don’t have his mind. I do, however, have a small bit if his attitude and focus, though at an exponentially dimmer wattage. “What if?” the absolute zero of time and entanglement mean something bigger? I’d like to know.
Hi–AGAIN. The collaborative band ZONE, featuring myself on tenor, soprano, flute, and clarinets, Mel Nusbaum on keys, Billy Stein on guitar, Robert Edwards on electric bass, Lou Selmi on drums, and Yogui on congas and percussion, performs Friday, June 7, 2013 in the Community Room at Westbeth.
Where: Westbeth Community Room, 55 Bethune Street
When: Friday, June 7, 8 PM
Tickets: $10
We’re adding a couple of players to last year’s band–guitarist Billy Stein and Yogui on congas/percussion. Since then Billy and I have recorded a cd that we will release early next fall. I’ve been playing with these guys going into our 4th year and you can really hear it. Plus, Lou just purchased Elvin Jones’ personal drum kit and is so excited he has energized the entire band. Hope to share a glass of wine with ya.
Tonight, Chazen Sabrina Lipton, the GRS choir and GRS band plus a ringer–myself–will celebrate Yom Haatsmaut (Israeli Independence Day). I love working with Sabrina…a wonderful spirit and a beautiful voice. Let us pray that music is truly the healing force of the universe.
Billy Stein and myself–going into the studio Friday night and Saturday afternoon (Feb. 22/23, 2013). Systems Two–best studio–lusting to record on Coltrane’s ribbon mic.
Practice. Putting life and soul into notes on a page. Taking ideas from my body and consciousness and storing them in cache of creative moves to make in unexpected moments of inspiration.
Two fractured ribs: got hit by a snowboarder two weeks ago and wiped out at Hunter Mt. Skiied a couple more hours–fool! Thought it was just bruised. Then made a gig a week later with Billy and storyteller Regina Ress at famous Provincetown Playhouse in the Village. She released CD “New York and Me” with myself making “musical comments.”
Still in pain but still breathin’. Discovered I have two sets of muscles–one to expand my rib cage which hurts, and one to play on which involves pushing out air. Turns out music is not only the healing force of the universe, it is the healing force of my body. Still playing.
Regina Ress, a wonderful storyteller, and I will be appearing at the Provincetown Playhouse in the Village Friday, Feb. 15 at 8 PM. Located at 133 MacDougal, corner of Bleecker, follow link below for tickets. We are celebrating the release of Regina’s CD, New York and Me. I provide music in between each story. I will be working with guitarist Billy Stein. We really look forward to seeing you in this special performance at such an historical theater (watch out for the ghosts of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Paul Robeson).
LIVING A QUANTUM LIFE
My wife, Judy, and I were having dinner with our friends Billy Stein and his wife Daniella tonight and over a wonderful steamed whole fish Billy asked me to explain to Daniella what I was trying to say when I used the rainbow metaphor which I published in the last two posts. Rainbows, expanding on my understanding, do not and do exist at the same time. They are not three dimensional, you cannot touch one, and are not concrete, plus no rainbow is the same for you as it is for me, I said. Water droplets prismatically reflect back to the viewer photons of varying wavelengths so we see ROYGBIV in one order, and VIBGYOR in the second order of rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet). The sun must be directly behind us and the rainbow appears directly in front of us; therefore my head being in a different place from yours, we cannot see the same rainbow, even though we can share it, making believe we are seeing the same one.
I went on to say the metaphor hit me when I was reading The Sun’s Heartbeat (Bob Berman, Little, Brown, 2011) and Berman described rainbows. The rainbow exists in spacetime, yet photons exist in quantum reality. We are connected on the quantum level in more than one way, something I find pleasing and satisfying (see earlier posts in M2-Theory.com). But, while I may be in the same light cone you are in and we converse within that context, or continuum, we cannot be experiencing things in the same way. I think we carry around our own frame, look at things from a slightly different place, in a different spacetime from each other—everything being relative. That I can talk to you depends more than upon sound waves and syntactical structures within our forebrains, Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. My heretical and unproven hypothesis suggests quantum entanglement accounts for some of our ability to understand one another—again something I develop more fully elsewhere (MIND AND MATTER, MIND AND LOGIC, MIND AND ACAUSAL MEANINGFUL “COINCIDENCE”: IS MIND A QUANTUM PERCEPTION OF A BRAIN SITUATED IN SPACETIME?).
I was starting to reach a wall so I thought it might help if I brought in another wackadoodle idea of mine, that quantum superposition helps artists make artistic decisions faster than thought. Given that we share a light cone—an area of spacetime that is defined as the distance between two objects that light can travel within, and are entangled—an indefinable distance in which subatomic particles that are entangled interact instantly, whether within or without the light cone, and given the concept of quantum superposition in which multiple possible events may occur but have not, e.g., Schrödinger’s cat, I can show how I as a musician can play the next note using a decision process that moves faster than thought. This counts as a big idea.
Any artist faces choices. Poets must choose the next word, artists the next brush stroke, sculptors the next chisel point, musicians the next note, composers the next notes, dancers the next move, and so forth. Not done in a vacuum, preceding notes—for the musician, to stay within a medium with which I am most comfortable but which translates into other mediums and art forms—do not causally predict notes that follow. Yes, there are parameters; there is a structure of a tune, a history of how notes have been used within tonal structures, a history of what other musicians played on those tunes, and even histories of what the musicians you are playing with now have done with you. At any point while improvising, I get to play a range of notes. Think of all of them in potentia, potential notes that are in a state of quantum superposition. The notes up till now allow more than one note of differential duration and power to be played, or as I prefer to think, for the wave to collapse. Collapsing waves are mathematical metaphors which are useful and descriptive. If the music is a wave, then the wave collapses on further notes by all the musicians in the context of where the wave comes from, its propulsivity, direction, depth and energy.
I choose a note. The wave collapses. An entire universe comes into being. An infinity of universes opens up of notes in superposition. It is as if the notes just happen. I cannot think that fast. If I stop to think I become paralyzed—it just has to happen. You’ve got to learn to let it go. Faster than thought, it is.
A brief example may be found in my Youtube video on an earlier post in this blog (Stein/Moss “Riverside After Dark”).
Daniella got it. Billy caught it. Judy was it. That is what it is like when we are in the zone. The highest levels of creativity occur in that zone of faster than thought, superluminal, entangled connectivity. We are individuals connected in, entangled in an elliptically called creative process.
For myself I feel like I am surfing a wave. The wave is complex and alive—can I shape my way through it by becoming the wave and simultaneously finding my individual arc through it, around it, till I come back to shore (the shores of consciousness)? That would be living the quantum life.
Dreams are like rainbows—they are not objects, have no existence in spacetime except for in our unconscious, but are consciously experienced. Unlike rainbows, they express something. In a previous post I suggest rainbows are subjective melds of spacetime and quantum physics. What are dreams relative to this melding? How are reality and dreamtime superpositioned?
C.G. Jung once described dreams as potential. Jung would not embark on a project until a dream revealed to him the pathway and made available the energy to accomplish his goal. Building upon that, dreams provide the potential energy and the symbol; ego functions to bring dreams into the spacetime. If a dream is a metaphor for what is possible, it is a metaphor for superposition.
Like a rainbow, superposition is quantum possibility in a broader spectrum. We perceive the visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum even if there are more wavelengths we cannot perceive. They are out there but we are not sensitive to them. Dreams are like the things we cannot perceive but they are out there nonetheless. How can I make my dreams come true?
I tell my patients to put into some artistic form what their dreams tell them. It does not matter to me if they paint them, play them, work with clay, poetry, movies, movement. Just bringing them into this world crosses the threshold between quantum and relative reality. It is like bringing a rainbow into the world.
When I look at a rainbow, only I see it. No, you see your own rainbow. The physics of rainbows stipulates the center of a rainbow is the point opposite the sun, from your perspective. Sunlight reflects off water droplets and rainbows are not concrete objects. They cast no shadows and are not three-or other-dimensional.
My ego, body-based, differs from yours. My reality is not identical with the reality of anyone else. My history, my experience, my memory, none of it matches up exactly with those of anybody else. Like the rainbow, I carry around my own continuum, light-cone, universe.
We live in both a macro and a subatomic universe. The macro universe is ruled by Einstein, the subatomic universe by quantum law. I submit we, each of us, reflect the alternate universe hypothesis so hot in today’s discussion among many physicists. Each second, or rather, in the nanosecond of our reality, the existential point, we ride waves of energy, are carried places, surf the waves, move. No one is sitting still. At our stillest, in deep meditation, waves break on the beach of existence. In satori we join with a quantum oneness. Everything is one. One holographic joining—a shared universe. This experience of oneness is personal but feels universal. The paradox of oneness and otherness is resolved.
If so, also resolved is the question of individual and total. The total we are a part of we see as we see a rainbow. Totality forms itself around our corporality. We see it, experience it, from a singular perspective, yet it is Total. We move through the Totality, sharing it, of it, and still a part of us remains apart from your Totality.
I carry my alternate universe around with me. The quantum physicists who profess the concepts of what is referred to as string theory find unlimited, infinite numbers of quantum universes. It is not simple—the gold standard of physics theories. It is not elegant, and it is not pretty. Simple would be melding Einstein and Bohr by living both in a shared and in a multiple world. Everything would not only be relative, apart, and separate, but shared, responsive to action, and purposive.
Quantum theory describes superposition, a state of unqualification, potential, a wave that does not crash, Schrödinger’s cat neither dead or alive. I live my life like that. But not only do I wait for the wave to coalesce so I see which way it is breaking, I can make the wave emerge by making a move. What I am saying is that the move does not have to be limited to our familiar 4-dimensional universe.
I will be making further efforts in the near future to merge the three pillars of existence—psychology, quantum physics, and relativity physics.
Wonderful storyteller Regina Ress and I collaborated on her CD, New York and Me, to be released in the very near future, i.e., before our engagement at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal St. in Greenwich Village on February 15, 2013. Regina recorded her New York City stories for seven years at WFUV, the Fordham University public radio station. When she decided she had enough material, she called me up to musically support the project. I provide musical interludes between stories that elucidate the inner workings of a New York state of mind. I’ll let you know when it comes out!
m2theory 