...And We Will Have Snow

Ray on Q

Cern was in the computer lab with Ray. He had asked Ray to help him understand the quantum computer connection. Ray started this way:

"We can talk about the Q and resonance glibly as if we understand them, but both are just shorthand for concepts that are about as far from normal understanding as you can get."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? We learn that practically in kindergarten. But Einstein showed us a hundred years ago that what we mean by a straight line has to be redefined if we want to account for gravity. Then twenty or so years later Feynman started talking about sum over histories, and straight line had to be redefined again."

"The gravity thing, like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, almost makes sense. But sum over histories? What's that?"

"It means that if you start at a point, and want to know the path light will take to get to another point, there isn't just one straight line possibility. You have to take into account all the most remotely possible squiggly lines that eventually get there."

"That sounds a little like shaman magic, bending reality for glamours and shapeshifting."

"I suspect it's a lot like that. Maybe exactly like that."

"Okay. Then where does your sum over histories fit in?"

"You take all those squiggly paths as the possible histories of how the light gets to where it goes, and sort of add them all together to find the most probable path."

"Uh, can you explain that a bit?"

Ray appeared thoughtful. "Maybe. It's really all about the resonance thing. People generally think they understand resonance if they can hear the beat note between two guitar strings."

Cern gave a nod of agreement, so Ray continued.

"But they may not know the math that explains it. Feynman took that math to a whole new level."

"In what way? I mean, I know about the beat thing, and even the math idea of the two vibrations going in and out of phase. What's this whole new level?"

"Think about it like this. The simple guitar example is about two strings, with a beat note between them. If you want perfect resonance, you tune the strings until the beat note goes away. When you strum a guitar, the rich sound you get comes from a whole lot of imperfect resonances. The body of the guitar is designed to have its own resonance modes. If you want more resonance, you can add more strings."

"That's the idea behind a twelve string guitar."

"Right. Feynman's idea was to assume the light path was like an infinite number of guitar strings. He knew before he started that most of them would be way out of phase and cancel out."

"Huh?"

"Um, assume there's really only one perfectly straight line. All the rest have some kind of squiggle. But with an infinite number of lines, for every line with a squiggle there's another line with the exactly opposite squiggle, so they are perfectly out of phase and cancel each other out. Nearly all of those possibilities can be ignored. Feynman showed that in real quantum physics you are left with a relative handful of possibilities that you need to consider. Calculate those and you could already predict quantum results more accurately than any experiment had been able to measure. It was a huge breakthrough."

"Okay, that almost makes sense. But what does it mean for us?"

"We were talking about just one straight line, one guitar string. Suppose we wanted to compute the whole string section of a symphony orchestra. That's far more complex, of course, and next to impossible to calculate."

"A shaman doesn't calculate anything. A shaman just sees it."

"And Drake convinced me that what you see is the Q, the realm of the quantum foam that underlies our apparent reality. My computer link through our quantum processor gives us access to that."

"The same access a shaman has?"

"That's what I think."

"So how does that work?"

"That's where the resonance comes in. We ask the Q a question that's posed as, 'what's the best way to get from here to there?' The Q tries it, eliminates all the paths that cancel out, and gives us the top probabilities."

"More than one?"

"That's the peculiar thing about the Q. Even after you eliminate all the paths that cancel each other, you are left with a bunch that are so close to the same that the beat frequency could be on the order of thousands of years, maybe billions. For practical purposes they are so close as to be indistinguishable. Heck, even ones that will be out of phase tomorrow could be practically indistinguishable when you look at them today."

"I guess that's what makes it so hard to predict the weather."

"Or anything else. There's never enough data about possible squiggles. But the Q gives us the best answers we've ever had."

Cern appeared to be pondering that, so Ray decided he'd said enough.