Decoherence

A discussion that began with explaining how lasers work and what "resonance" is in physics ended up revealing something important--about modern society

Today’s substack post is about “decoherence”.

The formal physics definition that is most commonly used today refers to a process of Quantum Mechanics (QM); this formal definition is interesting to me for a number of reasons that I might get into in a future post, but this definition isn’t how I intend to use the word today.

Decoherence (ˌdiːkəʊˈhɪərəns) n: (Atomic Physics) physics the process in which a system's behavior changes from that which can be explained by quantum mechanics to that which can be explained by classical mechanics.

My use of the word “decoherence” here will be a little simpler: I will use it to refer to a system that moves from a “coherent” or “well-ordered” state into an “incoherent”, or more chaotic one.

Curiously, my use of this term is somewhat in opposition to the formal QM definition, as I see things; classical mechanics is more coherent in my view, QM is less so. But I digress…

Before I dive into today’s topic, I wanted to take a little detour. For those who know my signature style of writing here on substack, this is not in the least surprising! A detour that winds its way back to the point of the article, in the end—but only after you reach the end and come back to the beginning to find the clues that I’ve left for you.

One of the reasons that I started writing years ago is because of the repeated encouragement from family, friends, and colleagues. Over the years, I have heard from many people who told me that they valued my unique ability to explain and connect things—to approach a complex subject in a way that either made hard-to-grasp ideas much more coherent and accessible to them by way of analogies, or because I was able to connect things that they hadn’t realized were related in a way that resonated with them.

They praised my ability to first reveal to them that there even were discernable dots in the first place; to then explain what the dots meant; and lastly to take a step further to connect those dots in unexpected ways.

I enjoy it immensely when I can open up a complex subject and expose the key ideas with a laser-like focus, drilling down to the core of the subject matter. To make things more coherent.

A photo from a recent night flight that that shows the symmetry and beauty of mankind’s infinite ability to create and organize our world. See the dots connecting?

“I’ve never thought of it like that before!” is a phrase that I sometimes get in replies and comments, and it encourages me to keep going—because hearing that means that I’ve opened one more mind to new perspectives.

This resonates with me, and this resonance is ultimately what keeps me engaged. It provides both meaning and purpose to my work.

Recently, I was talking with a special woman, Emily, who has lately captured my heart and attention. She is one of several reasons that my focus has been directed elsewhere and I haven’t been writing as much over the past month; the other reasons being my work with True The Vote and with my colleagues from my Pit Crew research team.

This research teamwork has unexpectedly taken me to both Arizona and Ft. Lauderdale Florida within the span of a month, and I hope that we’ll all see the result of that work very soon.

I’m grateful to be able to help Catherine Englebrecht, Gregg Phillips, the others at TTV (people like the whirlwind named Chelsea!) as well as my colleagues—as we do what we can to help TTV uncover evidence of 2020 election anomalies, susceptibilities, and outright fraud in the wake of 2000 Mules and the Pit. My colleagues have done the bulk of the work lately and I’m awed by their dedication and persistence.

Part of our work with TTV is also to do whatever we can to encourage everyone to vote and participate in some manner—whether as a poll volunteer or drop box watcher or whatever you can manage—in the upcoming midterms.

To be prepared to vote like our lives depend on it, which is indeed the case. We can overwhelm the voting booths in November to “Beat the Cheat”—just as we did with Kari Lake’s primary in Arizona a few months back—even as we continue to do work that exposes and unravels the 2020 election fraud.

Even if “they” try to steal the election again, there are now a million more eyes trained on all parts of the system that they used to prefer were kept in the shadows.

We can, and we must, do both.

My new love Emily—whom I visited last week in Michigan on my third flight within the last two months!—knows quite a bit about what makes me “me”, and she has gently encouraged me to get back into the rhythm of writing, because she knows how important it is for me as a creative soul.

Now back to the topic of this article: decoherence.

I was talking to Emily one day about the concept of “resonance”, which has multiple layers of meaning to her. I wanted to share a viewpoint from physics that would help broaden her understanding into new directions.

In physics and engineering, resonance refers to a condition in which waves of one kind or another—sound waves, electromagnetic waves, water waves, or vibrating matter—bounce back and forth inside a bounding volume. The waves interact with the boundaries that contain them and with other waves in such a way as to make them all add to and amplify each other.

They positively reinforce one another.

Pianos, violins, guitars, reed instruments like saxophones, flutes and clarinets and brass instruments—in fact, almost all musical instruments—rely on resonance to enrich and amplify the sounds they make when played.

Because of the frequency of the waves (or more precisely, the wavelengths) resonance-inducing waves fit neatly into the space or volume in exactly a whole number of multiples of the underlying wavelength; with the result that the peaks of the waves “bouncing back” from the walls of a container or ends of a string perfectly overlap with the peaks of new waves coming in, and thus they add energy to those “new” waves being sent in.

In electronics, resonance is “the condition in which an electric circuit or device produces the largest possible response to an applied oscillating signal, especially when its inductive and its capacitive reactance are balanced.”

This is essentially the same idea as musical instrument resonance, but the waves here are electromagnetic waves instead of sound waves. The operation of your cell phone, car radio, television…all depends critically on the concept of resonant circuits; the antennas in these devices are specifically designed and tuned so as to induce resonance of carrier waves in the antenna and receiver circuits—carrier waves being those that convey signals from source antennas to your devices.

Another example of “resonance” that might be more familiar to some people is a child pumping a swing. If you’ve ever tried to make a child’s swing move while empty, you’ve noticed that the effect doesn’t last very long; the swing’s motion damps down quickly and after a few cycles, the swing wobbles chaotically as it becomes stationary again.

But if a child is seated in the swing and has learned how to move her legs out and then back at just the right time, with just the right motion, she can make the swing (and herself) move ever higher as she adds momentum at just the right moment so as to add to the kinetic energy of the “oscillating” child/swing system.

Julia on the bestest tree swing of all time.

This, too, is a form of “resonance”.

Another example of resonance that we became familiar with as kids was blowing into a bottle. As you blow air across the open mouth of a bottle, you create ripples of air (small waves) and these waves sometimes fit perfectly into the shape of the bottle’s neck or body so that the oscillating air waves (which is how sound is carried) are amplified and resonant.

The “tone” of the sound from the bottle is unique and is characteristic of the particular wavelength that causes resonance; filling the bottle partially with water changes the volume and shape of the inside of the bottle, and thus makes other sound frequencies (different wavelengths) more resonant, changing the pitch of the sound that you hear when resonance occurs.

As I was writing this post, I stopped for lunch and encountered another example of resonance: microwave ovens rely on it, too.

The circuitry in the oven produces electromagnetic “microwaves” whose frequency (as they bounce around in the specially shaped cavity of the oven) matches the natural vibrating frequency of the molecules of water in food; just like the child on a swing, the microwave waves “boost” the naturally vibrating water molecules into ever greater motion through resonance, and this extra movement of the water molecules “heats” the water in the food (because heat is ultimately just particles of matter moving more rapidly.) A microwave oven resonantly heats water.

Laser light is another example of resonance, and this was one of the topics I was talking about with Emily—her reaction to this topic is what led me to thinking about “decoherence”, and later making a connection to something she had shared with me.

A laser works because there is a cavity with a partial mirror on one end and a full mirror on the other. Light waves travel back and forth in the material inside the laser (the material used inside determines the color of the laser light) and as the light waves bounce off the mirrors and interact with the material inside the cavity, they induce resonance by “optical pumping.”

Like the child on the swing adding energy at just the right time, the light waves in the laser—as they bounce back and forth, and as they are “pumped” by an energy source—add energy to the beam. An energy source in the laser (a battery or power source) stimulates the production of “new” photons and light waves to replenish the energy that is carried out of the system when the laser light “beams” out of the lens.

A property of laser light—once it’s emitted from the inside of the laser— is that it is extremely pure (laser light is typically almost a single frequency, which we perceive as a single color—ruby red, green, blue etc.) and the light emitted is highly “coherent”.

Coherent means that the light waves in laser light “all line up” neatly in some sense; all the individual waves point in a uniform direction, they wiggle in the same “plane” (they have the same polarization, to use a technical term) and the peaks and valley of the light wave are in “synchrony” with each other.

Laser light is therefore highly organized, focused, synchronized, coherent, and pure.

Ordinary room light or sunlight, by contrast, is a blend of many, many different frequencies of light (colors) and the light waves move more chaotically as they scatter off of things in random directions in our environment.

The light in your office, for instance, originates in a bulb that creates light and then scatters it in all directions, and as this light bounces off the ceilings and walls, the “room light” is what allows you to see objects in the room.

Laser light, by contrast, is emitted from a tiny pin-prick in a small lens and it is then very narrowly focused into a tight beam.

The reflected scattering of light (normal light or laser light) that makes its way back to our eyes is what allows us to “see” an object (at least, an object that isn’t “glowing” on its own as a light source) and the preferentially greater reflection of certain frequencies of light is what gives objects their perceived “color”.

That is, a plant isn’t “green” because it is glowing green—instead, it is green because it is reflecting green light back to you, which means that it is absorbing or scattering other “colors” of light.

You see a ‘green plant’ because it is bouncing primarily green light back toward you.

As I was talking about lasers, Emily said “I don’t like the look of laser light. There is something disturbing and harsh about it.” What I told her—and this is what led to the next connection that ultimately ties this article together—is that what looks harsh about laser light is when it hits a surface and begins to scatter.

When it decoheres.

The narrow, sharp beam of a laser produces a specular, grainy looking pattern that looks “unnatural” because the light from the laser is all one color. A red laser illuminating a plant, for instance, won’t make that plant look its “natural green” color, because the laser light doesn’t have any green light in it to reflect back to you!

It also looks sharp and harsh because in some sense the “symmetry” of the coherent, organized laser light is broken more noticeably by the object that it is scattering off of, enhancing its flaws and sharpening its shadows.

What we dislike about laser light isn’t its purity or coherence; quite the opposite. Instead, what bothers us is when we perceive its “decoherence”—the moment when it scatters off of objects harshly, and its beauty and symmetry is broken.

Decoherence—the sharp transition from an ordered state to a more chaotic one—is what bothers us about laser light. The breakdown of order initially produced by resonance.

Decoherence of laser light: source

Now we come to the interesting connection, which is what linked “lasers” to “modern society” when I was listening to Emily relate a story from her recent past. I say “recent” to point out that this incident happened in our post-COVID world.

She was driving a school bus of older children. They had all climbed aboard the bus after school in a particular frame of mind and settled glumly into their seats.

At first, they were mostly following social norms; they were relatively quiet, respectful of each other, watching and listening and a few were conversing good-naturedly with each other.

But then, as Emily drove the bus onward and crossed some threshold in time and space, something about the “harmony” of the kids on the bus abruptly changed. Emily didn’t know what the precise moment or trigger was; but first one, and then many of the kids on the bus began yelling and shouting. It wasn’t even clear that they were necessarily shouting at each other; it was just pandemonium, an unexpected eruption of pure chaos.

She followed protocol and pulled the bus over to try to regain control; but it’s difficult to do that when you’re a petite woman bus driver and there are more than sixty older 5th and 6th grade kids angrily shouting at each other—and to no one in particular.

It was pure chaos.

To “regain control” in a situation like that means you need to have some idea of what it was that triggered it all, to try to reel that trigger element in and unwind the chaos. Eventually she got one child to regain composure, and then another, and finally they all slumped back into their seats, maybe having vented and exhausted some sort of strong negative energy.

What she experienced in that moment was “decoherence” of social norms: a breakdown in the way people normally treat each other with respect, and interact in a resonant, positive, and emotionally stable or uplifting way.

Whatever it was that ‘triggered’ this decoherence in social behavior, many of us would agree that the tendency toward societal decoherence has increased in the last few years. It has been amplified by something.

A necessary component that would normally have provided positive resonance between people is either missing or has instead been purposefully replaced by something else that produces negative energy and chaos instead.

We all need to look carefully at the whole spectrum of societal changes that have happened (or have been forced upon us) over many decades—but in particular, since 2019—and reflect more purposefully and deeply on how it is that we can detect and begin to reverse the decoherence—and then re-establish a wholesome resonance of positive and uplifting energy in our societies. Not just in the U.S.; but all over the world.