Wave particle duality...

Ever since I have started this blog and coerced people to read it, those who know me in real life always come back with this one question, why haven't you written about love yet? My friends know that I have been extremely cynical and scornful of this one human emotion and always try to get me all riled up by dragging me into a conversation dealing with the human need for love, caring and togetherness. By popular demand...

Of course, to keep things simple we will only talk about the love as in the attraction between two adults, a boy and a girl, and leave out all other forms of passion and obsession, of which there are many... some whose foul tongue I will not utter here. Being a PhD student, I like to pretend that I use a scientific approach while trying to understand any new/ unexplained/ mysterious/ obscure phenomena, and love is almost all the above from a cursory observation. So today, I am reporting (well, that is what all research assistants do, pretend to research and then report their findings) the results of my studies about this mysterious phenomenon called love. The intended audience is mainly curious souls like me who could never figure out what all the fuss is about.

Warning: This being a slightly technical paper and because of the nature of the subject, there will be a lot of unfamiliar lingo/jargon like emotions, feelings, caring, sharing etc.

As with any research, one starts out with what is known in research parlance as a literature survey. Stanislaw Lem (1985) gives a very good review of the phenomena in his book Cyberiad - see Love and Tensor Algebra. Erich Seagal (1970) provides a very comprehensive treatise of the physical process in his book, Love Story, a description of which is beyond the scope of this article. However, pathbreaking research into this field was conducted in the early 20th century which lead to the development of the entire branch of physics now known as relativity and quantum theory. No seriously!

For a long time, it was believed that only thing constant was the state of love, once found -- as in found your soulmate. However, there were several inconsistencies observed in experiments which could not be explained using the existing theories. Then in a radical breakthrough, it was proposed that unlike the popular belief, the only thing constant was the rate at which the human mind shifts its stance and everything else, even time and distance, is relative to the observer's frame of reference. For example, when you are dating, in this frame of reference, one feels that the time ticks faster when they are with their significant other. However, once you are married and want to watch a game, even the minute's chat with your wife seems like an eternity.

Another important concept in the phenomenon of love is to understand the wave-particle duality of mind. For example, depending on the circumstances the mind behaves materialistically or emotionally. For example, you buy the lady materialistic presents, particularly diamond rings, and her mind is all excited about you. Such state of excitement is unstable and she radiates a lot of love your way. You see whats going on here, on one side of the equation you have matter (diamond ring) which equals on the other side something abstract as love and feelings. Furthermore, the uncertainity principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the state of your mind and its reaction to a certain event. The very fact that you tried to observe how a person is feeling at a certain moment can change the way they would react to what you have to say. Sort of like the time you killed Schrodinger's cat when you opened the box to pet it, you idiot.

While the above theory explains a lot of inconsistencies previously unexplained by other theories, it does not explain several other inconsistencies (like the ones you are itching to comment about) which were explained by other theories or still remain unexplained, or something like that. More recently, scientists have come up with string theory. According to this theory, people are connected to each other by tiny, invisible strings which vibrate in 11 dimensions, around you, beside you, inside you, outside you and in ways you cannot even imagine. The mode of vibration at any given time dictates the mood of the persons and how they interact with others, specifically how much they are attracted or repelled to the individual in question. Think springs and rubberbands, people you hate are pushed away like springs do and people you are attracted to are pulled towards like rubberbands do.

May be? May be not. What appeals to me is the wild, possibly inaccurate, definitely sweeping assumptions. But hey, I would rather be laughed at a theory than be nailed to a piece of wood, like it happened 2000 years ago when someone suggested how nice it would be for a change if everyone just loved each other and lived in peace (ref: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).