A Personal Journey Through Four Quanta

Pravir Malik
5 min readOct 31, 2022

--

Adapted from canva.com

Quanta can be thought of as the outcome of a process in which information gathered in some layer antecedent to the physical is projected or manifested in the physical as a complete whole. Being so, it is possible that quanta can express themselves at any level of granularity or layer of matter, life, or mind.

In a Cosmology of Light musing — the 49th to be exact — Directory of Photons, I elaborate the fundamental idea of different kinds of photons, aka quanta of light, that manifest as known wholes — including quantum particles, atoms, and molecular plans in cells — amongst many other wholes.

We have come to associate quanta with minisculely-bound phenomena at the edge of invisibility, and quantum theory traces its origins to Max Planck’s mathematical explanation of leaps as opposed to continuity in the variation of colors of light as a black body is heated, and Einstein’s insight that it is the frequency and not the intensity of light, modulated as it were by Planck’s mathematical constant — that in fact came to be known as Planck’s constant — that is associated with the energy of light, for which both got Nobel Prizes.

But here, I reinforce that it is not just at the Planck range of distances that quanta can express themselves: anyone who has gone through an almost automatic and intense process by which meta-information of some sort gathers itself and does not let up until what needs to be expressed can express itself, will know what I am talking about when I refer to quanta being able to express themselves at different levels of granularity.

There was a repeated experience related to quanta I would have as a child that I spoke about in a TEDx talk a couple of years ago.

I would see myself in a slowly falling drop of water, and in that drop, I would see myself in another slowly falling drop of water, which would repeat itself recursively. Being five or six years old, that is how I expressed things, but the drop of water can also be thought of as quanta — as a whole that expresses itself in a medium of constancy, aka light — so that meta-information based variability can express itself and build in a foundation of unified stability.

There have been several instances in the last 10 years where I have experienced such phenomena of being seized by quantum wanting to express itself. In retrospect, these quantum were instrumental in suggesting an alternative paradigm for quantum computing.

When I wrote the first six-book Cosmology of Light series, as explained in An Author’s Memoir from Management and Fractals to Light, I felt “I was walking a very thin, tight, time-bound edge. There was no choice for me but to finish this set as rapidly as possible, and I had to let go of any laziness and doubt in doing so. There was also a very clear sense of the names of each book at the very beginning of the writing of the first one, the content and the bounds of each book, and the sense of how one inevitably led to the next.”

This was an instance of being seized by a quantum that accelerated a mathematical treatise of the power of Light.

But also, as I explain in the same memoir, I was seized by another type of quantum when writing the second 4-book Applications in Cosmology of Light series: “There was a clear sense of what each book would be about and how the previous would be necessary to the next. There were gaps in the mathematics that I did not fully understand how to close, but once I embarked on the journey, I followed a process of thinking about a problem before I went to sleep, and the next morning when I awoke, it was usually with an answer. This second set was much more daunting, and I had to learn not to focus on the ‘dauntingness’ at all in order to complete it. I remember the sense of euphoria I had in April of 2020 when I finally completed that fourth book in this series and the tenth articulating a Cosmology of Light. The euphoria lasted for days.”

This second quantum applied the mathematics developed in the first six books to four contemporary areas — quantum computing, genetics, AI, and transhumanism.

A third related quantum seized me in which I began to take key ideas from the ten books and serialize them mathematically in related IEEE conference papers. The process has lasted a few years, and only two weeks ago when I published my ideas on enhancing Feynman’s quantum computational positioning, a capstone paper following a series of quantum-related papers — ranging from algorithms of life, an oscillating universe that operates as a quantum system, development of complex systems, light-based nano cyborgs, quantum-computational bases of genetics, limits of AI, to non-probabilistic reinterpretations of key Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Euler equations — did I feel that what I needed to do was complete: the third quantum had released the meta-information contained within it.

Synchronistically I received the following plaque from IEEE following the acceptance and presentation of the Feynman paper just a couple of weeks ago, also signaling the completion of the third quantum process.

Recently I have been seized by an urge to implement the different paradigm of quantum computation that surfaced as a result of the other three quanta. This urge might be nothing more than the residual aftermath of the other three quanta, or it could be a legitimate fourth quantum focusing on a necessary non-probabilistic type redirection required now that the Quantum Industry has been put on the map through billions of dollars of both hardware and software investment.

https://qiquantum.com/

The latter — the fourth quantum possibility — would certainly be more enduring. Time will tell.

Index to Cosmology of Light Links

--

--

Pravir Malik
Pravir Malik

Written by Pravir Malik

A view of the world through light and fractals

No responses yet