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Locked down but not out in Italy

Singing from the balconies! One nice thing about this crisis ... solidarity! “Guess you’re not living like a tourist anymore,” was the funny, truthful and somewhat gut-wrenching message of a friend the day the lockdown in Italy began. Today is day 6. My beloved Italia has been hit hard with the COVID19 epidemic. With the second largest elderly population in the world, the epidemic has meant a disproportionate amount of deaths in the country. So though I haven’t been worried about contracting it myself, this isn’t about me or someone like me who, if contracted it would probably have a sucky couple of weeks and then recover. It is about if someone like me contracted it and then spread it to a person with a complicated health history or an elderly person with a weakened immune system. Eerily orderly: Lines for the grocery store, each person one meter apart In a country with no concept (and no physical room really) for personal space, and in a city with reproachable hygie

Quantum Entanglement



Having finished "Physics of the Impossible," a very theoretical and lofty science, over-my-head type of book, I still came away being fascinated that (though the book makes no allusions to this whatsoever and might actually resent this type of thinking), the more theoretical and complicated science gets, the more it seems to resemble religion.

Quantum entanglement for example, a by-product of Albert Einstein's quantum theory, is "the concept that particles vibrating in coherence have some kind of deep connection linking them together."

The author, Michio Kaku, phrases it this way:

"This means, in some sense, that what happens to us automatically affects things instanteously in distant corners of the universe, since our wave functions were probably entangled at the beginning of time. In some sense there is a wave of entanglement that connects distant corners of the universe, including us." (p.60-61)

In essence, we are all entangled in one another, and in that way we are one in the same, because, in this theory, we have the same wave functions. So really this is the scientific backing for "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or even the Buddhist idea of sentience, that all things should be respected. If everything is interconnected, wouldn't it make sense to treat everything: people, nature, animals with respect because we are all part of the same essence?

If I were scientifically and/or mathematically minded, I think this would have been my area of focus. Sadly, I am not smart enough to understand more than what I wrote here on this blog post... But contemplating quantum entanglement and our inter-connectedness is my new thing of the day.

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