Things from old nightmares

Decoherence is an attempt to explain and understand the second phase of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics deals with the most microcosmic components of the universe, and Phase One of it is the phase in which all these particles that make up the cosmos are hovering between possibilities, between varying stages of entropy. Phase Two is the phase in which the particles are already measured, detected, seen, largely by human intelligence and the tools at its disposal, at which point the particles break the entropy and decide what existence or reality to take.

It’s quite philosophical. If there is no one there to see the particle, it is ambiguous, undecided, ghostly, hovering between millions of possibilities and alternate universes, but the moment someone appears with a measuring tool or a detector, the particle immediately casts its own history irrevocably.

However, this does not render irrelevant all the other possibilities that the particle did not eventually decide to go by. The quandary of quantum mechanics now is to how to account for all those possibilities that are lost once a particle is seen and witnessed and measured and placed in space and time, because all these possibilities are somehow part and parcel of the history that the particle cast itself into upon being detected, just that they have been overlooked before in the race to make sense of the particle’s end-point. Thus Decoherence, an exploration of the various explanations that may account for these lost possibilities, to not ignore them, to give them some form of cognizance or honor, or at the very least, reason them into either irrelevance or oblivion.

As this is the nature of the physical world, so it is the nature of human reality. It's not fixed at all. Even when history happens, there is always an arbitrariness floating around, hints of possible outcomes, of futures not chosen, of what-could-have-beens. The world is a combination of things both lost and found, layers upon layers of wishes, wants, desires, failures, gropings, an ocean of opportunity rendered secret by just an eye, by just one human decision made. And yet, even as a destiny is cast, all other possible destinies, though rendered irrelevant, still linger in the consciosuness like unsolved equations, like a square root unextracted, like an algebraic value not rendered in its simplest form.

I still think of the possibilities that my life could have had had I never met certain people, or taken certain paths. Like things from old nightmares they come to me in visions when I am awake. Like when a man appears with the ability to see me for who I am, and I decide who I want to be. I cast myself into a state, breaking my entropy. But I feel that it is simply beyond me to analyze how all those other lost possibilities could have had an impact on this route that I have chosen to take, this man that I have chosen over all the other men in the world. I am no physicist; I cannot decohere. I am perfectly content to just have love, which is, by the way, also a kind of history and just as irrevocable.