The AtomoTeam.
Purpose: The creation of the Club!
Next up is the AtomoTeam: You might be surprised to find out who this team represents in these metaphoric “Teams for Life.”
I am now going to take myself out of my comfort zone and attempt to explain the unexplainable, without mentioning the P word – physics!
The AtomoTeam players may be the smallest in terms of size, but, they are definitely the most important in the game of life. This is the team that plays for the atom – the unit of matter which everything is made of.
Understand how this team works and you probably understand life itself.
AtomoTeam players all have mysterious sounding names like; quarks, neutrino, muon, tau, lepton and of course Higgs Bosun. A cosmopolitan team from weird and wonderful places, we just know instinctively they are going to be capable of producing a little bit of magic.
It is important to remember however, the AtomoTeam is really only a mathematical theory, often referred to as the standard model, or the “theory of almost everything.” It still leaves some things unexplained, like gravity, and why do Villa fans still think they are a big club?!
Perhaps, you may have heard of the Large Hydron Collider (LHC), built across the border of France and Switzerland, at a cost of £8 Billion. 100m underground and 27km in circumference, it is essentially a proton banger racetrack, in which the players are driven round at enormous speeds, capable of doing 11000 circuits of the track in 1 second and then made to collide into each other.
The resulting debris is analysed to see what comes out of the wreckage.
Out of one of the wreckages on the 4th July 2012, the scientists at the LHC discovered/observed their first new player for the AtomoTeam, almost certainly Mr Higgs Bosun himself, the Maradona of the subatomic world, with his “hand of god” powers to give mass to everything.
Now, this is where the “magic” begins.
The AtomoTeam players are said to possess 3 very special skills:
Tunnelling, Entanglement & Superposition.
1. Tunnelling.
To understand this you need to be aware that every fundamental AtomoTeam player can take the form of both a particle and a wave.
Imagine you are in the Stadium of Life, high up in the stand, and you want to get on the pitch. You and I would have to walk down the steps and climb over the barriers to do that, not the AtomoTeam player.They just walk on through the tunnel as quick as you like, past the barriers right onto the pitch!
The very latest experiments carried out at the university of Innsbruck in Austria, demonstrated that AtomoTeam players could move through as many as five potential barriers, providing of course they worked together.
They took atoms from a cloud of Cesium gas, cooled to almost as cold as you can get (absolute zero) and got them to successfully tunnel through multiple barriers. It appears by combining together, using their wave-like properties and playing as a team, they were able to generate enough energy and movement to pass through upto five barriers.
Having other players around, as we all know, is a help not a hindrance, even in the subatomic world.
Recently, biologists have been getting in on the Quantum game: Hypothesising that the sense of smell and how we detect odours involves some tunnelling skills.
Take the stink bomb for instance, with the distinct odour of rotten eggs.
It used to be thought smell depended on the structure of the molecule, in keeping with the lock and key theory, that to produce a certain smell you needed a specific key to fit in and open the lock for each unique aroma.
But, the keys for the rotten eggs all had different shapes, and even shapes almost identical to each other had vastly different smells, so something else besides structure and shape had to be responsible for the smell.
So, they started to look at vibrations, which are indeed unique for each molecule and smell, and came up with the idea that smell is actually due to the vibration of bonds, rather than the shape of the molecule.
If a molecule’s odour came from its vibrations (or phonons) then this could cause an electron (an AtomoTeam player) in a nasal receptor to tunnel between energy states and pass on a signal to the brain.
A bit like a season ticket swipe card you use at the turnstiles to get in – the card is read and as if by magic, the green light comes on and hey presto the doors open!
2. Entanglement.
The phenomenon of non-locality or as Einstein famously referred to it;
“the spooky action at a distance.”
I prefer to liken it to the perfect dynamic strike force – each knowing instinctively where their strike partner is on the field of play due to some kind of telepathic connection between the two. Only in this instance, time and distance are irrelevant because the information between the two can travel faster than the speed of light.
Let me introduce you to Baggie Bird, only now he’s turned into a Swindon Town, Bristol City or Cheltenham supporter – The Robin(s).
The European Robin, requires a light of a certain wavelength before it can orientate itself ready for migration. It doesn’t use a compass for navigation, somehow the Robin uses the magnetic field of the earth, which it is able to “see” for guidance.
It is thought, a single molecule in the Robin’s eye becomes entangled with another in the earth’s magnetic field, allowing it to “see” its way when flying. No matter how far apart the entangled pair become they each seem to know the position of the other and can pass on information between themselves, faster than speed of light.
However, if you subject them to a very weak radio wave at a precise frequency, the communication signal is impaired and the bird gets completely lost. The implication taken from this is that all it takes for communication to breakdown is a single electron player to become unpaired from its entangled partner.
In other words the players no longer know where each other is.
This might be a good time to mention the: “Love Study.”
It was set up to test the effects of “compassionate intention” on people with a serious illness like cancer. The study took loving couples, in which one was suffering from cancer, and trained the healthy partner to practice “compassionate intention,” which they defined as – directing selfless love to another.
They then looked at, under double-blind controlled conditions (the gold standard for any study), short term measurable physiological changes in those who were ill. A total of 36 couples participated in the study: 12 in the trained group, 10 in a “wait” group, and 14 in the control group.
What they found was the skin conductance of the receivers (cancer sufferers) in the trained group would significantly increase at the time their partners were showing compassionate intention towards them, even though they were unaware the intention was taking place.
They hypothesised that some form of Quantum Entanglement was occurring, that some of the electrons between the couples were connected in some way and could detect their partner no matter where they were in the world.
To draw any firm conclusions from such a small study would of course be foolhardy, though it certainly offers avenues for interesting future research.
3. Superposition.
Is the phenomena by which players are able to take up every different position on the field of play at the same time. So, they can be; a goalkeeper, a defender, a midfielder and a striker, all at once and it is only when they are being watched or observed they adopt any one particular position.
Presumably, the one they think the spectator wants to see or expects.
So, an electron player exists in all its theoretically possible states or configurations, until it too is observed.
Naturally, this has given rise to the theory of multiverses, that there are parallel as yet undiscovered worlds at play. And in case you think this is fanciful – it really is most experts best guess at how the universe is constructed.
Recently, scientists at the University of California, produced the first experiment in which a visible object was shown to demonstrate quantum superposition, when they observed a very tiny, but, visible strip of metal oscillating and not oscillating at the same time.
Superposition has so far been demonstrated in molecules containing around 5000 protons, neutrons and electrons.
Now, take the largest source of energy on this planet – photosynthesis – (the process by which plants and some bacteria harvest energy from the sun to build the molecules they need to grow).
It appears Superposition is at play here too!
The super efficient energy transfer of photosynthesis is thought to be facilitated by the vibrational movements of chromophores, which appear to bounce up and down like a child on a space hopper, creating little pockets of energy, each simultaneously testing all the different paths to their chosen destination, before finally settling on the most efficient one.
So, what is the relevance of these superstar players, with their magical skills playing around on the Field of Higgs, in the Stadium of Life?
Well, non of us knows for sure, but, it would appear they are the team that gets things started, kicks the game off as it were, right from the Big Bang whistle.
Who blew the whistle? – Let’s not get started on that one!
You see, the AtomoTeam is non other than the fans, that happy band of souls who gather together every few weeks to breathe life into the game. Without fans there would be no teams, with no teams there would be no games.
They spur their side on from afar, play every position on the pitch, whilst watching the match in the stands and enter the ground through the quantum turnstiles of hope and anticipation.
Goal Scored: No mention of the P word!⚽⚽⚽