Quantum Cosmology


                                                                                           --Aleister Crowley,

                                                                                            THE BOOK OF THE LAW

      What it says in this case is that the precision with which you can measure the energy of any system, such as a piece of empty space, is limited by the duration of the measurement; the shorter the time, the greater the imprecision.  And this indeterminacy can never be resolved simply by more accurate measuring instruments; it is inherent in the system itself.  Over a short enough time the system can assume just about any energy--and it does.  In a world ruled by quantum mechanics, the energy of the system in any fleeting instant can be seen only as a wavelike function.

       As a consequence, the vacuum of empty space is not empty; it is pervaded by fluctuating fields of energy that, when large enough, manifest themselve as particles--individual photons, for example, or particle pairs consisting of an ordinary electron or quark and its anti-matter twin, which burst into existence and then annihilate.

       In the pre-inflation era, the size of the universe tends to zero, and the strength of the gravitational field and the energy density of matter tend to infinity.  That is, the universe appears to have emerged from a singularity, a region of infinite curvature and energy density at which the known laws of physics break down.

       Near a singularity, space-time becomes highly curved; its volume shrinks to very small dimensions.  Under such circumstances, one must appeal to the theory of the very small—that is, to quantum theory.  In quantum mechanics, motion is not deterministic, but probabilistic.  A quantity called the wave function encodes the probabilistic information about such variables as position, momentum and energy.

       Though it is still considered an extravagant claim, the fundamental assertion of quantum cosmology is that quantum mechanics applies to the entire universe at all times and to everything in it.  In a theory of the universe, of which the observer is a part, there should be no fundamental division between observer and observed.  The wave function of the entire universe can't collapse each time an observation is made.

       Certain regions, such as those close to classical singularities, exist in which no prediction is possible.  There the notions of space and time quite simply do not exist.  There is just a "quantum fuzz," still describable by known laws of quantum physics but not by classical laws. [It may be subject to the laws of quantum chaos].  Inflation is assumed as one of the quantum initial conditions.


gimmie some Terence . . .
