By Erik Dolson
I just developed a quantum theory of communication. What the hell, I wasn’t going to get any real work done today, anyway.
It started with a miscommunication with my health club. What they wrote last week was not what I read. No fault there, I decided. Even written language is full of ambiguities.
I moved on to thinking that ANY communication depends on context: Sender has an unwritten context and they assume (hope!) that Receiver has the same context. Crudely: they understand the same language. More refined: both use the same definition of the words actually used. More refined yet: there are no unrelated factors interrupting (changing, enhancing, misdirecting) the signal, like fear, stress, etc.
Of course there are. We’re human. And while language is a fantastic tool, words are not “hard” things in themselves, protons or photons creating matter or light. Ambiguity is built in to language / communication, and it is only focused (!) by context.
So I’m standing at the sink brushing my teeth thinking about photons, (what else am I going to do for those two minutes?) and thought, “wait a minute, photons aren’t ‘hard,’ how about the double-slit experiment by Thomas Young in 1801 that showed light was a wave, and later experiments that showed it was both particle and wave?”
I’ve never gotten my head around that one. I could just never figure out how something could be a “wave” without something doing the “waving.” Can’t have waves in the pond without water. Of course, those waves are the product of both force and resistance, but let’s not go there.
But I finally decided that golf was the answer: Tiger Woods doesn’t know exactly where his chip will end up, but at every moment of flight there is a probability (wave function) that it will be at some point moving at some velocity and end up in a cloud pattern around the hole.
Never mind.
But then, as I rinsed my toothbrush and put it away, why do individual photons form the same “wave” pattern in a double-slit experiment, given enough time for them to accumulate? A wave has a frequency which is described as distance over time. An “instant” does not a wave make.
If photons (or protons or electrons or atoms or molecules) are wave functions only vaguely determined before measurement, and words are only vaguely determined in communication, could it be that “meaning” is indeterminate until “measured?”
Is there a Wave Theory of Information? (Oh hell yes, let’s introduce another undefined term here).
By the time I had my sweatshirt on, I wondered if there was a “particle” of information that could be identified. But that particle would be determined by both Sender and Receiver. Its “nature” not defined until measured by both. Damn it.
I gave it a name anyway, derived from “communication bit.” I call it a “commbit.” I haven’t got the slightest idea what it is, where it exists, nor why something without mass and not located in space can have such huge consequences in the physical world, but it does.
Interestingly, at least to me, (I’m sure most readers bailed out many sentences ago) is that Sender and Receiver have to agree on a limit of measurement. Otherwise, there would be an endless regression of examination and explanation of what words meant “what” in the original and each subsequent effort to clarify.
Sort of a Chaos Theory process, leading to a black hole for significance where nothing crosses the event horizon.
Oh, crap. I’ve gone off the deep end, again… It’s time to wash the car.