my own kind of tsunami

Yes, this does feel selfish when people out there are facing some things so much larger... but I am a spoiled rich white kid... even if I get out of my bubble, volunteer at homeless shelters, want to crack the the shell, I'm still me.

Interesting thought (rather personal for this blog, but the other blog has become a bit caustic so here it goes):

So if you are a quantum physicist, you believe that reality actually doesn't have a certain state until you measure it. Schroedinger's quantum cat actually is in a probabilistic haze of life and death; he isn't alive or dead until the box is opened. It isn't simple that we as people standing around outside the box don't *know* whether he is alive or dead inside the box; he actually isn't either until we ourselves somehow make him one or the other by observing his state. It sounds like fantasy, but it's actually physics.

So I am a scientist, I truly am. I know a lot about neuroscience and biology and organic chemistry, and I know more than the average Joe about physics and most other topics in science. But, being the odd one that I am, I am in the anomaly: I believe in God. I believe He is all-powerful. This leads me to do something which most people would probably view as highly strange and irrational; most people, that is, except the quantum physicists, which is perhaps why I don't view it as so irrational because quantum physics doesn't seem so weird to me after all these years of books about it.

Namely, I took the MCAT a little over four weeks ago. As soon as I left that testing center, my score was arguably determined. The computer had already scored my multiple choice questions, and by now some lady named Edna from Atlanta who likes cats or whoever it is has scored my essays. Arguably, this is a fatalistic venture and really there hasn't been anything I could do for the past month of agonizing waiting. And yet, I haven't just been inert. I've been doing what I always do while waiting for test results: praying madly. And why? Because I don't believe the wave has collapsed yet.

See, very small things have this principle that arises from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which is that we can't know their position and momentum simultaneously, and once we measure one we lose the other. The larger something gets, the more it loses its wave-like properties, and the less applicable Heisenberg's principle becomes. Thus although it's technically true that I exist as a probabilistic wave function, it's much more correct to say that I'm laying on my bed right now, mostly stationary. The error is much, much, much ^ trillion smaller for me than for some tiny particle. But for Schroedinger's tiny cat, as long as the box is closed, he exists as a probability wave of all of his possible states of momentum and position (a superposition wave) rather than a single position or momentum. When we open the box, we with our eyes (we actually ourselves, somehow) change things by seeing the cat; isn't that crazy! We change an electron just by observing it! That's insane! Anyway, so that's the quantum theory.

So why can't this apply to my spirituality? My idea is that if God is all-powerful, he probably has a handle on quantum principles. Thus perhaps he can somehow extend them to my test. Then until I view my test with my own eyes, it exists as a probability wave. Edna may have graded the essays; the computer may have graded my test; but in my mind, I have no score. It is still possible, until I see the score, break the uncertainty principle, and collapse the probability wave, for God to change things. And I actually do believe that He could (much to my atheist and agnostic friend's consternation).

It actually has some doctrinal justification too. I mean, according to scripture, we're destined to do something, but we have the choice to do it or not. Thus it must be kind of like a probability wave that we can choose to collapse in some fashion. God must know the probabilities, but we must have the observational powers that collapse the waves.

And you thought people that prayed about things like that were just being stupid. See, there's a rationality to everything.