From a human perspective, quantum physics may seem illogical. The microscopic study of particles and their behavior feels almost magical and certainly doesn’t feel unintuitive. Many people prefer to leave intellectual quantum psychics theories and research for researchers to understand.
However, the impossible quantum reality might be more intuitive than many think.
First of all, what is intuition?
Intuition is the innate human ability to sense or know something about the world without any previous exposure or formal learning. In language, people use many words to refer to intuition. Instinct. Gut-feeling. As the opposite of conscious reason, intuition doesn’t seem reliable. However, the truth is that humans are born with biological instincts that help them navigate the world from a young age. Even in adulthood, intuition becomes a combination of picking up subconscious knowledge in interaction with the environment.
Generally, discussions about intuition seem to pit it against rationality and logic. The divide is most apparent when it comes to quantum physics, a supposedly rational scientific field that feels like it defies all logic. When it comes to theories about particles, which no one can see and superposition, and wave function, it just doesn’t make any intuitive sense. It’s difficult for humans to grasp how a particle/wave can be in multiple probabilities of states during coherence. Yet when decoherence theory comes in – when particles can no longer interfere with one another, and thus the state of being in multiple probable states collapses into one. This, humans can understand very well.
What does this mean about intuition?
Firstly, decoherence – in simpler words that might sacrifice the theory’s true complexity – is when a particle can’t be in more than one state at once. In other words, when scientists observe it, the particle is now in one state, a place, and one form. In a way, it has chosen one “reality,” the one we are seeing, and there are no other probable realities because upon observing it, the result is concrete.
Why does this phenomenon happen?
The environment is what causes decoherence to take place. When particles interact with the environment, we observe decoherence. Coincidentally, human intuition also largely depends on the environment. The unique ability of a person to instinctively know something is due to messages from his or her environment.
Consequently, decoherence results in quantum physics’s most intuitive processes because it creates the reality that we can observe and measure. Ironic, isn’t it? Talk about quantum intuition.
Article originally published on https://michellebeltran.net/