Could Everything we thought of as paranormal , really just be Quantum Mechanics ?

reply to post by gandalphthegrey


As disheartening as this is to bring up, you may want to look into the theory that protons can be in multiple places at one time. If you are referring to what I think you are, superposition, than take a look at recent developments at CERN. After the collision the data collect may have disproven both this and string theory. Its not conclusive yet but things are looking good for the hopeful (that includes me).

reply to post by gandalphthegrey


This may not be the norm for people as interested in conspiracies as I am, but I have always also been interested in the finer workings of the universe. As a result, I am especially vested in physics. In the world of physics, I happen to have a particular interest in Quantum Mechanics (probably the reason I'm replying to this thread), and, at the moment, I'm a university student working towards a degree in the field. I love it, and I've spent the past 8 years getting as deep in it as my mind can handle.

That being said, I don't see QM as an answer to the paranormal. As the people who posted before me have already said, there are a lot of mysterious observations in QM, such as the self-interference of single particles through double-slits to produce interference patterns and the "eerie action-at-a-distance" of quantum entanglement, but here's the thing: QM is a whole lot of math with no real substance. It is an entirely mathematical description of observation, making use of probabilities and uncertainties, but it does not claim to explain the underlying cause that's the reason for the math.
To put it another way, QM is a description of symptoms, it is not a description of the disease. Therefore, despite its unrivaled accuracy, it is very incomplete (as is General Relativity), which means there are a lot of areas that are not understood.
Take double-slit self-interference, for example. The average person will read "one electron goes through two slits and interferes with itself on the other side" and will assume something mysterious (even paranormal) is going on. A QM physicist will do the experiment that shows this phenomenon and will tell the average person that this isn't really all that mysterious...what's going on is this: the electron is a wave, not a solid particle, so of course it interferes with itself...all waves interfere with themselves when they pass through a double-slit. However, what the QM guy will leave out is that this wave-like behavior of the electron (and all other fundamental particles) is based on mathematical descriptions of the observations in the case of the double-slit, and the electron has to be treated as a particle under other circumstances. He will also fail to mention that they have no idea why this "wave-particle duality" exists - it just IS, like mass, charge, and spin. However, nothing just IS, it has to have a cause and a mechanism for being the way it is, so the QM understanding of the fundamental properties of our universe is lacking. It is a very useful description of what we see at these small scales, but it falls apart when you try to go much smaller.

So, what appears to be mysterious and paranormal is actual a result of our ignorance. We don't know everything, and that fact leads to mysterious results.

Of course, mysteries we're all familiar with (like ghosts) are also a result of our ignorance, but that's a different level of ignorance. Double-slit self-interference (being in two places at once) is a result of not knowing why fundamental particles are the way they are. This isn't related to anything that could explain ghosts, or aliens, or any other contemporary mystery.
This also goes for quantum entanglement. QE doesn't scale up...it's a PURELY quantum mechanical phenomenon that has no effect at everyday scales.
And things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (the more precisely you know a particle's position, the less precisely you can know its mass and/or velocity, and vice versa) are another result of our ignorance. I bet, when a working extension of QM comes along to explain the most fundamental properties of the elementary particles, principles like the Heisenberg Uncertainty and the Pauli Exclusion will be a natural result of those properties, rather than abstract principles based on observation (like slit interference) and ignorance (like wave-particle duality).

Point is, the mysteries of QM are different from those of the paranormal/supernatural. I really don't think one can be used to explain the other. But that there is my opinion