Head Wrapping

Have you ever tried to understand something, but you just couldn’t quite understand it? Maybe you hadn’t had enough caffeine yet that particular day, or there were too many squirrels playing outside your window, but the facts as they were presented did not make sense to you.

It happened to me with math. In high school, as a junior, I took Algebra II, where we studied (among other concepts), how to graph equations, and that took us into the realm of sin and co-sin, tangent and co-tangent. As a senior, I took Trigonometry, which dealt with polar graph and other stuff. Then I started college, taking Calculus I, and were back to sin and co-sin, but there wasn’t any refresher week to wake up those memories, we just shot off in a whole new direction, and I simply could not wrap my head around any of it.

It happened again today when I thought I would look up ‘quantum entanglement’ and see if I could try to simplify it enough to write a quick blog. The results?

My tummy hurts.

I’m also hungry for cake, and maybe an explanation for that will come in a little bit.

The first article I read was going to ‘simplify’ the concept of  entanglement, and I think it tried too hard. It wanted me to imagine I had 2 cakes. (Hence my hunger for cake.) The cakes were either round or square, either red or blue. In a normal state, you could look at one cake, see its shape and color, but you wouldn’t know anything about the other cake. Let’s say you have a red round cake. The other cake could be red or blue, round or square. You wouldn’t know.

Ahh, but IF the cakes were entangled, you could know that if the first cake was round, the 2nd cake would also be round. But you wouldn’t know anything about the color of either cake, because in the realm of quantum physics, you can’t know everything. Apparently.

Then he moved into round and red being good but square and blue was evil... and I was totally lost. Cake is evil? Never! I don’t care how bad it is for me.

The 2nd article I tried to read was even worse. Not because it tried too hard to simplify the concept, but because it didn’t seem to simplify at all. Or maybe my head was spinning, trying to get a grip on the idea of evil blue square cakes.

So I’ve retreated from the battle, so to speak. I kind of half-way understand the idea of entanglement, but I just can’t wrap my head around the entire concept. I’ve been here, more or less this exact spot, for a number of years. Someday, if I last long enough, I’ll go out and look for another simplified explanation of entanglement.

When I do, I’ll make sure I’ve had enough caffeine, and I’ll close the curtains to keep the squirrels from distracting me.