New reading material

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G.B. Barlow - http://www.gbbarlow.co.za

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The Double-Slit Experiment

I am in the disastrous position of having a theory and being unable to test it. Therefore I shall just write it up here and hope someone else finds it interesting. If I’m repeating something someone else has already suggested or thoroughly debunked, let me know. Be warned: a healthy interest in physics is mandatory.

One of the simplest experimental demonstrations in physics is also one of the most bizarre. The double-slit experiment has been used to show off the inexplicable dual nature of light since the beginning of the 19^th century. Only at the beginning of the 20^th century, however, was its connection to the even weirder world of quantum physics solidly proven: single photons fired discretely through the apparatus still behave as if they are intefering with a steady stream of other photons, or themselves, and build an interference pattern which by all common sense just shouldn’t be there.

I won’t explain the single-photon experiment in depth, as there are many, many descriptions of this available. (You could start with the Wikipedia link above.) What I would like to present is my own crazy hypothesis on why this experiment does what it does. Simply put:

Conjecture: Photons passing through the double-split apparatus are being interfered with by the paths of photons that have already passed through the apparatus.

Let’s back that one up a bit. Various theories like those dealing with relativity tell us that space and time are inextricably linked. We may have a lot more control over the former than the latter, but until someone manages to dissect time somehow, I’ll bet my car that the “dimension” of time is even more like a dimension of space than we give it credit for, or can yet observe. (If we ever can observe it. I’m skeptical that we’ll ever really manage to see what makes time tick – but I won’t bet on that one too.)

Let’s assume for now that the dimension of time as we know it has a very similar set of spatial laws to the three spatial dimensions we directly experience. In other words, two events that occur in rapid succession could be considered spatially “close together” in our dimension of time. Let’s also assume that, even though we perceive time in a completely different way to how we perceive space, the laws governing the principals of quantum physics are less restricted – more specifically, if a wavefunction (or the particle it describes) extends probabilities into a definable region of space around it, that same wavefunction should also extend some effect a definable distance forwards and backwards through time.

If this extension of wavefunction occurs as described above, one can picture each photon that passes through the experiment leaving a wordline which somehow has an interfering effect on any subsequent photons being fired through, even though they do not coincide in time. It would be as if the photon leaves an afterimage in its path which fades out, but not before another photon passes by to be affected by it.

My conjecture may be nuts, but then, so is the rest of quantum physics.

So how would one test this theory? Well, I have one suggestion. It requires having a single-photon generator handy, so I don’t think I’ll be trying it anytime soon – but regardless:

Experiment: Keep shifting the frame of reference
This theory assumes that the paths of previous occurences of photons somehow stick around. If we remove the effects of the previous photons, we would, in theory, also remove the effects of interference and change the results of the experiment – in short, there would be no evidence of the wave-nature of light anymore and the interference bands would disappear.

How do we do this? Simple. Every time we fire off a photon, we change the apparatus frame of reference – rotate it a few degrees, move it 3 inches to the left, whatever takes your fancy. However it is done, the change should happen every time and should never line up with a previous reference (otherwise we’re back where we started).

Another thought experiment: The flight of the initial photon
If all of the above were true, another interesting result comes from all of this: The very first photon fired would not fly by the same probable paths as its subsequent twins. It would simply strike the detecting paper with no interference to its path whatsoever. Naturally this would be more difficult to prove: You’d have to set up many, many individual double-slits, fire a single photon in each of them, and collate the results. Enough results to determine whether interference bands are being formed. That’s probably a lot of results… and I’ll leave it to someone else to try.

"Outer Space" must be a bar in the Large Magellanic Cloud

There are laws in most countries that make false advertising illegal. My belief is that similar penalties should be placed on people who write "educational" material on subjects they clearly know exactly nothing about. Consider this last line, found on the back of a box of Astro's:

The sun's surface is so dense it takes light (photons) 175,000 years to travel from the surface into outer space in the form of light, heat and energy.

There are so many things wrong with this sentence, I don't think the English language has words to describe its utter wrong-ness. I actually re-read it in disbelief about 15 times just to make sure I hadn't missed half the words somehow.

I mean, it sounds plausible... if you know nothing about physics whatsoever. I suppose the moral is that you shouldn't be learning about complex subjects by reading the back of Astro's boxes.

Bright spark

We've moved now, and naturally I don't want to be paying the next tenant's electricity bill. Thus did I go merrily wend down to the electricity department, fill out a form and hand it in to have my old account terminated.

Me: "I'd like to terminate my electricity supply."
E.D.: "Ok..." [enters account number into PC] "You don't live at 8 P. now."
Me: "Correct. That's why I'm terminating the supply."
E.D.: "I mean, you didn't live here."
Me: "Hey?"
E.D.: "Says here you live at 15 K."
Me: "I haven't lived there for over a year. My account was transferred to 8 P. a year ago."
E.D.: "So you've given me the wrong address to terminate?"
Me: "Um... no. 8 P. is the right address - you have the wrong address on your system."
E.D.: "So you'd like me to transfer your account from 15 K. to 8 P.?"
Me: "No! I don't live there anymore."
E.D.: "Then how can I terminate the account?"

This is not particle physics. Patiently, however, I try it from a different angle.

Me: "I would like my account terminated, no matter where I am. It doesn't actually matter."
E.D.: "In that case, you'll have to tell me which address you'd like terminated."
Me: "Whichever one is active? Either one. Both of them! You choose."
E.D.: "I don't know which one is active unless you tell me."
Me: "You've just told me it's 15 K."
E.D.: "But you said you transferred your account a year ago."

It's turning into the sort of conversation where you thought you knew what was going on, but now you're not so sure.

Me: "Can you not just clear me off the system, no matter what address you have for me?"
E.D.: "Fine. Your address on our system is not the same as where you say you were living -"
Me: "That's what I've been trying to explain to you."
E.D.: "- so could you please change the address on this form to what we have here?"

Please note that the address she is asking me for is currently on her computer screen, and she needs me to write it down in order to enter it into her computer. In other words, it is already filled in. But now I'm so tired of explaining my situation that I carefully write the address onto the form. And yes, she actually deletes the text from her computer in order to type exactly the same details into the same fields.

I thought I was all set once she clicked "Accept", but there was one last detail on my form we hadn't chatted about yet: the forwarding address.

E.D.: "So what is the third address on this form, then?"
Me: "That's where I live now."
E.D.: "So you don't actually live at either 8 P. or 15 K.?"

We've just gone full circle. I give up.

My bad news for today

At the end of this month we will be moving again. That is by no means the bad news, but I'm going to explain one of the many reasons why.

For the past 8 months we have been dealing with the worst rental agency ever to be created. (Spawned? Thought up by committee? I can't see this thing being run out of love for fellow humankind.) All rental agencies get a bad name from their tenants, but having dealt with a few, this one makes the rest sound as uninviting as Santa Claus with a bag of presents. From neverending rudeness to a list of problems that have never been looked at so much as attended to - we'll never allow anyone we know to deal with these people for love, money or free chocolate for life.

Our contract, like most rental contracts, requires us to let our agency into the place to make changes or upgrades from time to time. This is bad enough when the agency clearly has no respect for your personal commitments, nor any interest in making arrangements that actually suit you as a tenant - but the final straw for me is having your personal affairs and belongings treated with no respect once you have actually agreed to let them do what they want to do.

Today I am posting the results of our last little affair as a warning to anyone else who is thinking about renting, or at least renting with our progressive little agency that tries to make rental housing an investment. (Also, I haven't posted pictures much, and it's time I caught up.) We were asked to allow a contracting company to come in for the day and put in built-in cupboards. They started an hour late, which is not uncommon, and ended up leaving much later than we'd like.

But that's not the worst part. Let me introduce our bedroom as it normally looks:



Once our friends had knocked off and hurriedly disappeared off into the sunset, we return to our bedroom now looking like this:




Awesome. All our furniture is left in one corner, our bed is left to die on its side, and all our clothes and bedding are left piled on the table.

This is still not the worst part, though. Look at these groovy pics:


It's a nice, sunny day outside, but these geniuses do all their sawing and cutting in the bedroom.


This is the only item in the room I played with before taking a picture. The left side is how we found it; the right side I wiped with my finger. This is how everything in the whole room looks. I think they must have shredded an adult oak tree in here.


This is a black leather jacket. Or it was.


I know I heard the guy using a broom for a little bit after they'd stopped drilling. Now I know where he was sweeping it.

Ok, so we had to vacuum the room, and everything in it, for about an hour just to clean up the sawdust. Then we discovered another amusing remnant of their visit:



Our resident clever people had drilled right through the bedroom wall into the bathroom. I can appreciate that mistakes like this happen - but why did they subsequently use the loo a couple of times and a) not say a thing about it nor b) even pick up the empty loo roll they discarded on the floor? Do they somehow think we won't notice? "Gawsh, looks like our house got worms."

I shall be showing all of this to our loving rental agency. I will, of course, post any results or lack thereof.

My good news for today

It's been a while since I've put finger to keyboard here, so I will reintroduce myself to my blog with a good post and a bad post. That way I will not upset my blog too much, nor the delicate constitutions of my readers. (Who have probably given up on me now and are having a great time somewhere else.)

Anyone who reads this probably already knows the good news. Big deal - you've read this far, you can't stop now. So: We're engaged! Woo! As of last Monday I can scratch out 'boyfriend' and write in 'fiancé' instead. Well, if any sort of form actually asked for that sort of thing...

Chocolates they should make

I have it on excellent authority that these would sell very well...

Car pics

Took longer than I expected to get round to posting these. Well so what - here they are.


I think it is stylish, no?


Grrrrrrrrrrrr.......


Gotta have a cute bum. Well, a bum. Ok, a large bum. A bum with an important label on it, really. Seems lots of guys in little white golfs don't know that "2.0T" beats "1.4i" every time. Silly.

And it also has a cupholder. Complete!

Vroom vroom

Yay!! My new car is here! Drove it around last night for a bit... so much fun.

I'll post some pics later.

Qui e ora

So much has changed since my last post here that I'm probably going to forget half of it before typing it all out. Isn't it fun to have so much excitement in such a short period? Well... maybe. I've certainly had more than enough to keep me busy around here, and if I don't start getting it out of my head and into a blog really soon, my poor readers will start to feel left out. (Won't they? Hello?... Anyone there...? Pfft.)

We moved. H and I are now staying together in a fairly large flat close to where I was staying previously. The place looks like it's been around since the wheel was invented and will probably be the last thing still standing if the sun explodes. It's also bright pink, but thankfully only on the outside. This place doesn't appear to be infested with drug dealers - we just have to weed out the occasional audacious cockroach. I have a parking bay well removed from other cars (think: less errant door-dings) and we actually have neighbours who say hello every now and then. So far so good.

We installed ADSL with very little hassle. After the intense ragging our little telephone monopoly has gotten over recent years, I'd expected to have to fight to the death to get our line installed (or at least until ADSL was suddenly made obselete by another yet-to-appear technology). We applied, they pitched up 3 weeks later, and here I am using it right now. One point to them. I shall withhold further praise, however, until I have received my very first phonebill. This is an experience I haven't, uh, experienced yet. I look forward to the small things, you know... I just hope it is a small thing, otherwise I'm gonna cap our phone usage at 3 minutes per month. We'll see.

My new car arrives in March! Yay! Ok, moving on.

(March! only 6 weeks more to wait! Come oooooooOOONNNnnnnUGH!)

Let's rewind a bit. We got the keys to the new flat two weeks early, so I had a somewhat leisurely move. I also managed to throw away so much useless stuff before I moved that the combined weight of G's Things probably halved. Feels great. I am definitely not a hoarder, though I do still manage to find things and wonder e.g. where the hell I ever got that from or how it ended up inside a cardboard box under 6 copies of Car and an unused pair of computer speakers. It is a mystery.

Christmas was awesome. We had a big lunch at my parents' place (with my gran down from Jhb), then a big lunch the following day at H's mom's place.

Our new years party was an experiment in getting my friends and H's friends in the same house for a few hours and seeing how they got on. It worked rather well, so we conducted a second interview (if you will) and invited the double-lot around to our new place for a flat-warming. That worked even better: There was much chip-eating and merriment, we now own lots more plants, and two of our friends have become more-than-just-friendly-interested in each other. That's what I call a successful evening!

(March! I'm waaaaaaiiiiiiiting...)

My attempts at teaching myself Italian have finally started paying off. It's so cool when you can suddenly start understanding a page of foreign text. Apprendimento è gran divertimento, and don't you forget it. I can highly recommend the following method of practising a written language: Go to the language of your choice on a site like Wikipedia (in this case, http://it.wikipedia.org) and hit "Random page" ("Una voce a caso"). See how much you can understand (with dictionary help as necessary), then move on. It works wonders if you have learned the very basics first. Parlo attualmente un po' d'italiano, though my pronunciation probably sucks. Anyone out there wishing to help me out?

I feel like everything in my life is starting to move forward a bit. I don't really know how to quantify that, but I don't have to, do I. I am all too aware that analysis is often the death of simply enjoying a situation.

So I shall simply enjoy the situation. Bye for now.

The holiday with the tree 'n' lights 'n' stuff

To any strange soul who may be reading blogs at a time like this -

Merry Christmas, have a lovely week and I hope you all gave someone something nice.

2006: Anno d'Amore

Counting only the people I know personally, this year has seen:

• 4 couples getting engaged;
• 2 couples getting married;
• 1 couple getting pregnant;
• a whole bunch of uncoupled-people becoming couples.

These past 12 months have been like dexedrine for romance. I wonder if astrologists have anything to say on the matter... not that I'd believe them anyway.

And hey, there's still 21 days left in the year. Is anyone else going to hook up within the next 3 weeks and bugger up my carefully counted totals above? I rather hope so - I want to see just how outrageous this year can really get.

The rude awakening

This morning at about 5:15, we were woken up by the sound of a car hooter being irritably bumped outside in the parking lot. Over about 30 seconds it went from light "we're waiting for you" beeps, quickly changed to long hoots then finally stayed on permanently as if the driver had fallen asleep on their steering wheel. H groggily got up, peered past the curtain and said: "Omigod it's on fire."

Sure enough, out in the parking area near the balcony, what was once a Jeep Wrangler had turned into a flaming orange ball the size of a set of rugby posts. It was quite a shocking sight. We don't know how long it had been burning, but the eventual short-circuiting of the hooter woke up everyone else as well, and after a couple of minutes there was a lot of shouting and a collection of rather ineffectual hosepipes being aimed at the flaring car. One silly chap walked up to the car and tossed a bucket of water on it - not too bright, standing right next to a car that is furiously popping, banging and flaring in every direction, enough to shatter the window of the car next to it. Moments later the flames were explosively doubled in strength as the fuel tank lit, causing a 10-foot diagonal flare that lasted maybe 20 seconds. That car was going to burn and burn well, no matter what.

30 minutes later the flames had subdued enough for a lone fireman to erase the rest of the flames with a garden hose. What was left of the car was pitiful: A stripped metal carcass with one perfectly preserved licence plate. It was like looking at a skeleton wearing a brand new pair of shoes. I can't imagine what the owner must have felt like, looking at that - seeing something so familiar turn into something so strange.

I will not surmise whether this was arson or not. I will however refresh the happiness I have knowing I shall be moving away from this block of flats in the very near future. And I would not give up my locked garage for all the open parking in the world.

Automotive change of heart

My faithful followers are all too aware of my interest in the impending purchase of a new car. I've had this on the cards (road) since January. That's a long time to wait for anything. After placing an order for said car, which was destined to arrive here in August, I was barely containing myself as the months inched by. I was really excited. Gareth was soon to be zipping about in a cool new car, no doubt.

So naturally the car dealership* thoroughly messed it up for me.

First I find out that the arrival of the car in SA has been delayed by three months. Fine... but why did I read this on a local news site and not hear it directly from the dealership? A trip to the dealership and a strained conversation with a rather snotty salesman tells me that the saleslady I'd been dealing with went on maternity leave. Does she not have someone handling her clients for her? Wouldn't you expect some kind of notification that the large sum of money you were going to pay the dealership won't be needed for a further three months? Oh and by the way, the car has now been delayed indefinitely and might possibly arrive here in May.

No worries. I decide I'll look at some alternatives in the meantime. However, to be fair, I decide I'm also going to look at an alternative car produced by the same company which is currently available in SA. And I will also do this through a different dealer, since the snottiness of salesdork above rather made my teeth grind all by themselves.

I pay them a visit. They say: "Sure, we'll find one for you and let you know as soon as you can come and testdrive it." (These are extremely popular cars.) A week later, my friendly salesman phones and tells me: "Any time you'd like to come in. We've got it here ready for you."

So I pitched up at the dealership at the organised time. He, on the other hand, didn't. At that point I decided I'd never deal with this car company again.

Thankfully for my sanity I was exploring other cars too, and I have since placed an order for another car. It's a lovely car, it's available, I've testdriven it, my order will arrive in March, and the saleslady I've been dealing with has been almost too attentive by contrast. (Having clients who feel that they are being looked after is a good thing. Isn't that obvious?!?)

I even have a moral to my story, folks... Just the teeniest tiniest bit of extra effort on a salesperson's part can mean the difference between making a big sale the following week, and pissing off the client so much that they never deal with the entire company ever again. That's a big difference.

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* No names mentioned, but it ends with W and starts with V.