Quantum Insomnia
In a dawn of particles
You’re all alone in your room. It’s one of those nights when time just doesn’t move. Your insomnia has a firm grip on you, challenging you and keeping you awake. All your problems are swirling around in your mind. At night, any problem seems like a big deal. And you keep thinking about every single problem. And they become like giants stepping on your brain.
But tomorrow you have to leave. You have a flight to California and you have to close your eyes to rest. Many people count on you at work, but you can’t rest. The pressure increases, and you chew your breath.
And she didn’t stay with you tonight. If she were, you could hug her to feel good and more motivated to overcome the insomnia. But she’s not here, and you’re alone. The room is pitch black, so dark that you can’t even see your hands when you raise them. You’re stuck in a floating darkness; a cosmic darkness within a container of sidereal silence.
No light. No sound. No way out of your insomnia.
Dawn sparkle
And you’re sweating.
Eventually you get out of bed and lie on the floor, feeling the coldness of the tiles beneath you, as if the floor were the marble of an ancient crypt. At least you’re not sweating anymore, but the insomnia doesn’t go away. You toss and turn. The floor is not the most comfortable place to spend the night. But you lie on your back and stare at the ceiling, where an old chandelier hangs. Your wife’s grandmother’s crystal old chandelier, to be precise. You’d risked falling or shorting out the whole building to hang it. But you succeeded and made your wife happy. You hate this chandelier. And you miss your wife to death.
You stand there staring at the chandelier’s crystal drops until a slight change in the darkness makes you realize that something is about to happen. Chandelier crystals begin glowing like stars in the heart of a black hole. If you suffer from insomnia, this is the moment when you feel the truest and purest relief a man can feel, for you know that the night is ending and you can see your way out of the prison of the darkest hours.
Where colors are born
You look down at your bare feet. There it is: The dawn. Slowly, the darkness begins to give way to a pale, soft light. Rays of light begin to filter all around. The room fills with hues that seem to belong to another world. Perhaps you’re in an superposition. You’re in two worlds at once. So, you remember that what you observe are not just colors, but waves and particles, interactions of photons with atoms in the air and on surfaces. For a moment, you feel you’re inside a painting by an impressionist artist; or in a quantum physicist’s mad mind. Colors are not just colors, but the visible signs of probabilities, of the ceaseless dance of subatomic particles. Every photon, every little packet of energy, travels through space as a wave, but when it hits a surface it becomes a particle. And it is here, in the interaction between the subatomic world and the visible reality, that colors are born.
Energetic blue
You get excited.
Pure emotion.
Otherworldly emotion.
Subatomic emotion.
You are inside an everyday quantum phenomenon. You can see it. You can understand it. You participate in the event as if you too were an element in the system. The first glow of dawn is a deep blue, like the sea at dusk. But you know that this blue is the result of photons interacting with molecules in the air, a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. The shorter, more energetic blue light waves are scattered in all directions, filling the room with a hue that seems almost otherworldly.
Quantum feelings
Then you begin to imagine a photon, a single particle of light. This photon travels through space as a wave, with a specific wavelength that determines its color. When it hits an air molecule, such as nitrogen or oxygen, the wave is scattered. Shorter waves, such as blue, are scattered more effectively than longer waves, such as red. That’s why you’re surrounded by this strange, deep, but bright blue. But then the light grows, and the blue begins to mix with the red and orange, creating a kaleidoscope of colors dancing on the walls. The red, longer and less energetic, moves directly toward you, filling the air with a warm amber hue. You smile. You know it is the effect of Mie scattering, a phenomenon that occurs when there is dust in suspension around you. It makes you smile because you think your wife is always trying to remove as much dust as she can, but if she left it alone, the dust would give her unique quantum feelings.
Light interactions
You decide that when you return from your business trip to California, you will explain to your wife that the phenomenon of Mie scattering is like a cosmic game of pool. When photons hit larger particles in the air, such as dust grains, they are deflected in a more complex way than simple Rayleigh scattering. As a result, colors tend to blend, creating the warm, soft tones of sunset or sunrise. And your wife loves sunsets over the lake. You think you might invite her to dinner when you get back, to make up for forgetting your anniversary.
Then you lift your back off the floor and sit up. Your back is cold, but you feel fine. Around you, yellow begins to appear, mixing with red and orange to create a brilliant golden dawn. Each shade, each change in hue, is a sign of the quantum nature of light: It can behave as both a wave and a particle. This duality underlies the behavior of the colors you see. When light interacts with objects such as air molecules or surfaces, it undergoes interference and diffraction, phenomena that produce the beautiful hues you see at sunrise or sunset. And that allows you to get romantic with your wife.
As a personal quantum dawn
Yeah. When you get back from California, you’ll take her to dinner. You and her. Meanwhile, you sit on the bed and lie down. The night has been long, very long, and insomnia has kept you awake. You know you have to get up, or you’ll miss the plane. But your eyes are heavy. Very heavy.
The plane takes off on time. But you’re not on the plane.
You’re asleep in your bed, dreaming of your wife smiling at you.
And she’s beautiful, like a quantum dawn.
More Readings
Mie Scattering from a 3D Dielectric Sphere.
Thanks for reading!
Beautiful. A scientific and romantic piece.
I love the physics of light. "Chew your breath" a powerful image and line.
After reading this, it's time to go lie down with my wife (though it's dark).
Great writing Michael!
Love this. Problems do seem bigger in the dark making the dawn such a welcome relief. You have painted a scene we have all shared one way or another. Nicely done Michael.