My Weird Obsession with Quantum Physics

“I have to stay clean.  If I don’t, I’ll never see my kids again.”

She’d come a long way but she wasn’t out of the woods yet.  And she knew it.

Some days I think I should just go back to treating high blood pressure.  It’s easier.

Do you unravel the beginning?  Or do you start with the present?

There’s conflicting theories.  I take it case by case.  There’s always more to the story.  The beginning, the end, the middle parts.  A sad and beautiful narrative.

I treat addiction and help foster children.  I see both sides of the coin.

Traumatic childhood events create PTSD parents.  Sometimes the cycle continues and sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t want to give excuses here.  Just a framework.  A way to look at things to try and find the inner parts.  The truth as we know it.

Often it doesn’t feel like it, but there can be life after addiction.  A good life.  But it’s a narrow path and few seem to find it.

I have seen enough kids growing up without parents to know that one more day in their life of hell is one day too many.

Here’s a truth from the foster system:  a messiah complex won’t help these kids.  But you can give them a good home and hope their parents get help.  Maybe they will and maybe they won’t.  But at least you did something.

Sorry.  I got off on a tangent there.  Let’s talk quantum physics.

In my church, they put me in the basement.  It’s where the kids and the misfits meet.  (I say this tongue in cheek, so go easy.)   But there we were, sitting around and talking.  My friends and I.  Discussing mysticism, theology, history, and quantum physics.

I brought up the idea of quantum entanglement.  It’s not something I had ever thought about before.  At least not that I remember.  But I had been doing some reading on it at home (yeah I know I’m weird).

That very night I took my daughters to see A Wrinkle in Time and……BAM……it’s all about quantum entanglement.

I know what you’re thinking.  It’s just a coincidence.  And maybe it was.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Ok, so no one cares.  But what is quantum entanglement?

It’s a phenomenon that exists when particles interact in ways so that they can’t be measured or described without each other.  And here’s the weird thing……This occurs even when these particles are separated by large distances.

In other words: A connection exists.

I know what you’re thinking.  You want to know what Einstein had to say about all this.  Well…..he called it “spooky”.

I posted a picture on Facebook recently of unicorns.  A commenter asked: Is a two-headed unicorn still a unicorn?

If two objects are so entangled, you must start to wonder….are they two objects, or just one object separated from itself?

And what happens when one particle falls into a black hole?  What happens to the other?

The mystic in me looks for spiritual worm holes and destinies beyond fate’s control.  The scientist in me looks for the math and the hard facts.  We rage against the dying of the light.  Against the machine.  Against the gods of thunder and awe.  We search for other worlds.  Outside and within.

Our vulnerabilities bow to our vulgarities.  And life goes on.  Because there’s work to do.  Books to read. Stories to write.  Kids to raise.  People to help.

Maybe we are all connected.  Indescribable except in our state as a whole.

Maybe our thoughts are just energy flowing back and forth.  Waves in a cosmic sea.

I’m sitting here, resting on a quantum field electron cloud.  Energy: potential and kinetic.  What makes me makes you.  Our connection realized only by our minds.

This mystic entanglement.  A blind man’s approach to spiritual cataract surgery.  A metaphysical wrestling match. 

There is nothing left to discover except the majority of the universe.  The dark matter.  The emptiness.

Hawking’s radiation, inertia, gravity, the firewall.

We sit at the edge of a black hole.

What happens next is anyone’s guess.

And we sing.

We’re in this together”

—Nine Inch Nails