Collapsing the Wave function is a photographic work in progress, started by myself about ten years ago. The inspiration behind the set owes its legacy to much of the groundwork behind my degree work at the University of Brighton. For my degree show I assembled a piece of work called 'Uncertainty'. It was a response to much of the popular science and philosophy books that I was reading and a first step in trying to visualise some of the questions I had about the world around me.
The scientific influence that came from the reading revolved around the mysterious and befuddling world of quantum physics and the assertion that at the base of all that we see, hear and touch is a seething, microscopic world that writhes in a world of things and none-things. Where existence and non-existence occurs at the same time. Its a realm where all bets are on and off at the same time.
Confusing? You bet! Even Richard Feynman, one of the proponents of this complicated physics, said that anyone who claimed they understood quantum physics obviously didn't understand quantum physics. The work is being uploaded to my Flickr account on my Collapsing the Wavefunction Work page and I'll continue to add more blogs entries updating and refining the reasons and inspiration for the work
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Explaining the Unexplainable
Drawn by my eager desire, wishing to see the great manifestation of the various strange shapes made by formative nature, I wandered some way among gloomy rocks, coming to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood for some time, stupified and incomprehending such a thing…Suddenly two things arose in me, fear and desire; fear of the menacing darkness of the cavern; desire to see if there was any marvellous thing within - Leonardo Da VinciI've lost count of the times I've attempted to explain the reasons behind this idea for a collection of photographs. The quantum world upon reading about it for the first time was rather unsettling and reassuring for me and this has remained with me ten years on. The comparison between its unfathomable nature and the mysteries and puzzles of learning how I should live was, and still is unavoidable. So how do I, yet again, attempt to explain? As a start; what is a wavefunction and how does it collapse? What is it?
When an external agency measures the observable associated with the eigenbasis then the state of the wave function changes from |? > to just one of the | ? > s with Born probability | ?i | 2. This is called collapse because all the other terms in the expansion of the wave function have vanished or collapsed into nothing. If a more general measurement is made to detect if the system is in a state |?>then the system makes a "jump" or quantum leap from the original state |? > to the final state |?> with probability of |<?|?>|2. Quantum leaps and wave function collapse are therefore opposite sides of the same coin.Mmmm..???? When I copied over that quote above there was a lot of scientific notation but that has been replaced by question marks! Not that it makes a difference for me as I didn't really understand it and would wager that most people who read this blog wouldn't either. For those who want more just take a look at the wikipeadia page: Wavefunction Collapse
A scientist was once awarded a Nobel prize for showing that light, the stuff that rebounds and bounces around our universe at a colossal 300, 000 Km per second, illuminating and helping to prevent us from walking into things, was made up of little tiny particles - little lumps of stuff. A while later another scientist was awarded a Nobel prize for showing that it was made of vibrating waves of energy.
Both were right, and the result was the wavicle - a wave-particle duality! It was soon shown that the particles - called atoms - that made up the hard stuff around us such as tables and goldfish and bananas were also wavicles. Enter Einstein and his E=mC2. Matter is energy and energy is matter. At its root the world we see around us is not as stable as you would think and is hard to pin down into measurements. Get a ruler out to measure this strange world and the very act of measuring effects the results. Try and record the position of one of these wavicles and you lose the chance of finding out how fast it was going. Find out how fast it was going and you fail to figure out if it was heading straight for one of your nostrils. This was a major hurdle to the scientists; they wanted to be able to make measurements so they could predict what was going to happen.
Finding a Meaning
Light is the paint of the photographer. It hurtles through our world at its breakneck speed and, if chance allows, flies through a lens, to embed and record itself in the light sensitive emulsion of photographic film or the sensor in a digital camera. I think it was this that first steered me to those ebooks on science. I remember studying how light behaves and how it was channeled by a lens to make a recordable image. In photagraphy there is a term: Circle of Confusion. It refers to the focusing of a lens. A technical description can be found here Circle of Confusion on wikipeadia.Imagine looking up into a starry sky. Find the brightest star and look at it through the lens of a well focused pair of binoculars. its a perfect white point on an empty black canvas. The point has no height, and no width. If, however, you de focus slightly it changes into a small blurry circle - that is known as the circle of confusion. If that circle of confusion is small enough, it will still look like a point.
The ability for the lens to channel light, to gather those circles of confusion and arrange them so as to offer some kind of pattern on which a meaning or interpretation could be gleaned, interests me. What also interests is the comparison between the act of making a photograph - the moment at which the wavicles of light are 'frozen' - and the idea of wavefunction collapse. The two acts - both of them measurements - rock my boat.
The wavefuntion measurement is a collection of predictions - a set of probabilities. The wavicle is a hard thing to visualize - its a kind of fuzzy ball with no deffinate edge to it. Measure it as a wave and you lose its particulate character. Measure its particulate character and the waviness vanishes. To measure it in a way that encompasses its wavicliness scientists potray it as a collection of probabilities, and this is roughly what a wavefunction is. All these probabilities occure at the same time until a direct measurement is made, and when this act of measurement happens those probabilities collapse into one deffinate understandable event. Its what happens when the rays of light enter the camera to record an images - the wavicles of light collapse onto the image at the moment they are measured.
UPDATE 6th December 2018 - Continued at Collapsing the Wavefunction
