Justin DuJardin |O_o| |x_X| |-_-| |o_O|

Well fuck you too, decoherence.

I recently finished reading a really fantastic book by Charles Seife called Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From our Brains to Black Holes that talks about classical and quantum physics in the context of Information Theory.

The badassery of this book aside, that’s not what I’m here to talk about; I’ve got a bone to pick with the  theory of quantum decoherence.  As any good power-nerd reading up on quantum theory I was particularly interested in the wacky things that can happen at the quantum level of things such as  superposed objects, and entangled objects that appear to communicate at faster than the speed of light.

As it turns out quantum decoherence is like being waken up in the middle of a great dream about flying over a city-scape at night, only to realize that your alarm is telling you to get off your ass and embrace the real-world.  It says that I can’t remain unobserved (in a quantum state) for any measurable period of time because I’m so big.  Weak.

To understand my beef with decoherence you need to understand that there is a natural separation between the microscopic quantum world, and the macroscopic classical world that we live in and observe.   There is still debate about what the line is between the classical and quantum worlds,  but quantum decoherence attempts to explain where that line is, and why it is there.   In other words it tries to explain why we see really weird behavior on the quantum level and not in the real-world around us.

The basic idea is that when an object is observed it loses it’s ability to be in a quantum superposed state; because it is no longer possibly in any state, it is now assuredly in the state that you perceive it to be in.   So all I need to do to bounce all over the universe is put myself in a superposed state and remain there unobserved until I can figure out how to choose the new position I would like; pretty simple right?   Well decoherence suggests that we’re being observed all the time by things that we normally wouldn’t consider to be observing us.   For example when an air molecule bounces off of our body because we’re in it’s way, that is nature observing us.   When this happens the air molecule’s natural path is impeded and the information that an object is in the way is transferred to the environment.   This explains why very small things can exhibit quantum superposed states but large things cannot.

Decoherence suggests, to the best of my knowledge,  that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the size of an object and the time that it can remain in a superposed state.

Clearly I need to make myself really small, or really fast.