I had a brainstorm the other day on how we might someday be able to walk through a door.  And I don't mean from a metaphysical standpoint, I mean really physically walk through the door.  If you think about it, there really should be a way to make it happen.  After all, our bodies and the door are almost 100% empty space.  I would argue that Programmed Reality says it is completely empty space, but that topic will have to be for another post.

An electron, in Newtonian mechanics, can be stuck on one side of an impenetrable barrier.  In QM, however, its wave function can be partly on one side of a barrier and partly on the other side at the same time, which allows for the possibility of “tunneling,” a common effect in semiconductors.  In fact, were it not for the wave function nature of QM, transistors, and therefore cell phones, computers, satellites, and all other sorts of modern technologies would not even exist!

Interestingly, this theory does not only apply to subatomic particles, but also to macroscopic objects like me, you, and Donald Trump’s hair.  Since our bodies are composed of particles, each of which are just wave functions, your body is simply the superposition of these zillions of wave functions, thereby creating its own “macroscopic” wave function.  Theoretically, for this reason, you have a finite probability of passing through a wooden door, much like the electron tunneling effect.  But, don’t try it.  Because, when you sum up all of your constituent particles’ wave functions, there is a mathematical tendency for the probabilities of large-scale anomalous quantum effects to be extremely small.  It is analogous to flipping pennies.  The odds that a single penny comes up heads (electron passes through the barrier) is 50-50, but the odds that 1000 pennies all come up heads (you pass through the door) is 2^^1000 (equivalent to a 1 followed by 301 zeros, an impossible to imagine large number) to 1.  And you have a helluva lot more than 1000 subatomic particles in your body.

But what if those particles in our bodies and/or the door were made to be coherent?  That is, in our penny analogy, all pennies behave the same behavior.  Impossible?  Not so fast, Einstein.  LASERs are a great example of coherence, where all photons are of the same frequency and are in phase.  Aren't particles of matter just a different form of particle from the photons and could they be organized to be coherent as well?

Turns out that is exactly the case and it is known as Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling.  U of Illinois researchers have demonstrated such an effect with electrons (real matter) in a nanowire.  Superconductors, superfluidity, Bose–Einstein condensates are examples of properties that seem to defy conventional physics by having their constituents occupy coherent states.  Macroscopic Quantum Coherence is a predicted property, yet to be observed in the laboratory, but probably inevitable, whereby all atoms in the piece of matter observing that property are in-phase and are described by a single quantum wavefunction.  Well, that wavefunction allows for the possibility of matter being anywhere, or "tunneling" through a thin enough membrane of material.  Let's say that, not unlike a laser, we could get all of the atoms in our bodies to be coherent.  Might it not be possible to "tunnel" through a thin membrane of coherent material?  

Effectively, we would have walked through a door!

Yes, I know that all of the different atoms in our bodies might not be made to be coherent with each other.  Then again, think about radio waves of different frequencies.  In general, they can't be in phase with each other, except at one particular point.  Fourier analysis of a waveform with a discontinuity, like a step function or a delta function, has, at the point of the discontinuity, all frequencies in phase.  Could there ultimately be a way to accomplish that with the mere several dozen atomic frequencies present in our bodies (And who cares if that stray bit of Uranium in your spleen is left behind on the other side of the door.  Would you really miss it?)  So maybe the trick is to pulse the coherence into your body just as you walk through the door.

Then there is the problem of how to get each planar sliver of your body to have the same tunneling capability sequentially.  Like, so you don't end up with a door stuck in your chest, all Jeff Goldblum-like.  Seems to me that maybe it's just a matter of applying continuous pulses of coherence into your body as you walk through the door.  For each planar sliver, one of the pulses will eventually make you progress to the next sliver.  Just hope the machine doesn't break down midway through.

So, there you have it.  One, ultra high frequency multi-atomic coherence pulser.  And you're walking through walls.  

Tags: tunneling, quantum coherence, quantum mechanics, entanglement, nanowire, superfluidity, bose_einstein condensate, wavefunction, laser, macroscopic quantum tunneling, macroscopic quantum coherence
Categories: Future Tech | Nanotech | Physics | Quantum Mechanics | Science