Leakage

When I decided to go back to college in my early 30’s I remember being committed to taking in as much of the information from my classes as I could. After all, I was paying for my education out of pocket this time around. High School was a blur to me and I promptly, almost purposefully, forgot everything I learned as soon as I threw my mortarboard in the air. But, this time around I was determined to learn.

Which is why I have this vivid memory of my Physics professor smacking a table on a Zoom call and telling the class why our perception of that small act of violence was in direct contradiction to what quantum physics would have us believe. He then proceeded to tell us that he doesn’t understand quantum physics, that no one does, and that if anyone ever tells us they understand it that we should tell them they are full of shit.

That was it. That was about as much of an introduction I got to the subject and it wasn’t until I read Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland that I came to understand, at a high level, what quantum physics actually was: a predictive theory of probabilities and the study of the principles that govern those probabilities. The contradictions my professor tried to point out by smacking a table were the assumptions of classical physics we hold, most of which are deterministic.

Fast-forward to yesterday when I read this article and it broke my brain.

Quantum tunneling, wherein particles pass through energy barriers without the energy required to do so because of their associated wave-function, essentially means that some particles of an object can potentially appear on the other side of a barrier regardless of their total energy at that point in time. No interaction of the particle and the barrier is even required.

Apparently the hypothesis is that in the early days of the universe, tunneling that occurred through high-energy barriers could have caused quantum fluctuations that may have caused gravitational collapse thus resulting in primordial black holes.

I am sitting here imagining particles entering primordial black holes, being flung out the other end, and somehow ending up, through various processes on their way here, creating amino acids that ended up on Earth and thus aiding in creating life here. We’re talking about leakage all the way down, my friends. Particle leakage through energy barriers, particle leakage across various corners of the universe, and those particles falling (or otherwise leaking through the atmosphere) onto Earth and into the water.

Those of you who know me know I hate a double-truth, and the double-truth right now is that I am both fascinated and terrified at this concept. I’m not sure I’ll ever watch Ant-Man the same way ever again.