Reality and blowing your mind.

OK, dear readers, it is time to freak out.  Time to blow our minds.  I'm gonna talk about Tripp and entanglement.  Please note that I have bit the bullet and finally ordered some college texts on this subject, but they have not arrived yet, so I am going to be exposing my current ignorance here.  At this time I am not speaking as an expert.  I admit it.  I'm just letting you see what happens in my noggin when I try to learn stuff.

Why should you care about this?  I have no idea.  If you don't, then skip on down, skip on down.  If you stay, though, you'll hear about a really cool puzzle that just might blow your mind.  I'm serious.  And it is all legal, too.  Safe for work as well.  I promise.

Come with me to Tripp at age ten or so.  I've picked up a layman's book about Einstein and relativity from my Grandpa, a guy who started out very humbly as one of about a dozen farmer kids who was so shy he ended up marrying one of about a dozen farmer kids when he was, like thirty-five and she was like twenty.  My grandpa led a very quiet, shy, humble life, and never got to college.  I don't even know if he finished high school.  Looking back I have no idea how he got that book on relativity, but he did have it, and he gave it to me to read, and that book was perfect for me.  I think my Grandpa was a REALLY smart dude who never reached his potential.  That book explained, in layman's terms, what was going on in Physics from around 1900 to 1930 or so and what Einstein had done with his theories of General and Special Relativity.  That book stopped before quantum mechanics, but that was OK, because it did a great job of filling the gap from Newton through Einstein to Quantum Mechanics.

As an aside, I have started to think that how we teach modern physics might be kinda wacked.  It is interesting to get the historical perspectives, and it does follow a logical path, except it also requires the student to learn a subject and then unlearn at least parts of it to learn the next step, because that is what has happened with Physics - there is a breakthrough in understanding and the geniuses explore that and learn tons about it but then reach a dead end, and it seems as if all of them need to die off before another breakthrough happens, usually from someone who is not encumbered with all the traditional thinking.

Maybe I am full of it, I dunno, but it seems like there is some of that going on.  At the same time there is also unchanging reality, so there is an absolutely objective external reality upon which every experiment and every theory and every hypothesis can be measured.  Thank God.  Seriously.  Because unlike the endless debates that can happen with subjective things like religion, morals, people, politics, societies, etc, in physics there really is one absolute standard for what reality is.  Reality is that standard.

And yes, I take that as a matter of faith, I can't prove it, and I don't want to get into that debate at this time, although it would be a really good topic for another post.

So reality - can you dig it?  Reality is absolute truth.  Can you appreciate how great that is?  I do.  It is so refreshing to have an ultimate arbiter.  Reality is NOT a matter of opinion, and I thank God that there is an absolute reality.  I think this is a wonderful blessing that, in my opinion, too few people notice and appreciate.

Let's put aside that stuff for a minute, put aside the past and seeing how we got here, and I'm asking you, for the next few minutes, to just trust me, knowing that I am giving an imperfect explanation of things that are still very cool and I would dearly love to hear corrected or clarified.  My quest, actually, is to correct my understanding of quantum physics, so I greatly appreciate any input on this topic.  But I think I will end this post and cut to the chase in the next one.