April 26, 2026 ·
Today I learnt via a Wolfram livestream more about quantum chemistry and biology, subjects that I vaguely knew existed but hadn't thought about much. A few weeks ago I wrote about doing some quantum tinkers which were about cryptography, meaning prime numbers and their factorials essentially. But today's lesson was different, about Hydrogen atoms and molecules, multiple paths of history and the one we find ourselves in via measurements, and whether quantum discreteness has any affect on biological systems. Spins the brain a bit.
My main head-turning takeaway was that the heliocentric astronomical model is only an estimation of what's happening at the atomic level. The visual I learnt at school growing up was some kind of nucleus situation inside which there's a proton and what not, and electrons spin around the thing like earth spins around the sun, and moon around the earth, and so on. Turns out, that's not what's really going on at the atomic level at all. Of course, I had heard about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and imagined some kind of tiny cloud, and had heard Schrödinger's cat references here and there; but I didn't have a visualization of it as clear until now. It's a bit mind shattering to realize that models shown to me growing up in classrooms now have better representations. Makes me have more sympathy for flat earthers or something like that when done to my own set of assumptions.
Something I also find interesting is how in Wolfram's physics project, multiple paths of history and the future are an assumed, very matter-of-fact idea; while David Deutsch is very stop-and-smell-the-roses about the whole multiple universes thing it seems like. I wrote about this some before while exploring ontology, but I find comparing notes with both of them a very fruitful exercise. Deutsch excels at explaining and differentiating interpretations of quantum physics, insisting that only the Everettian one, or EQM, makes sense as it doesn't point to a supernatural explanation. Wolfram meanwhile takes an approach where he doesn't pause at this part, and marches forward explaining how a Hydrogen molecule may be reinterpreted and visualized in this new context of quantum mechanics. They both seem to be agreeing on multiple universes. Good stuff.
Alchemist in his Workshop by David Teniers here.
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