The Uncollapsed Wave Function

A blog documenting the possibilities of the path not chosen. Written by a (still) pre-med, physics and cosmology geek, lover of literature, and philosopher (which is the formal way of saying that I think my views are important).

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That thing about hope.

Why do I hate on hope? I don't think it's evil or whatever, but it breaks your heart, splits it and leaves these hairline fissures so that when disappointment comes along everything you care about seems to fall apart in an incomprehensible jumble.

That's why I learned, when things are not going well and you feel hurt creeping up on you, you don't stick around and hope; you walk away, you move on so that before it can hurt you you already don't care anymore. 

I can never figure out whether this is wise or cowardly. 

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I do this thing.

Is it weird? Lists make me feel better. As if, if I can fit the chaos that is my addled brain onto an nice itemized list, surely facing the world can't be that much worse.

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So what is "the uncollapsed wave function"?

It's part physics, part philosophy, with a touch of Robert Frost for good measure.

The physics part deals with the collapse of the wave function - a concept of quantum mechanics wherein a probability curve including a range of states is collapsed into only one state. An illustration might be something like the following: 

[Forgive the lack of artistic talent.]

It gets pretty complicated and immensely counter-intuitive, but the idea of wave function collapse is that we limit many realities (not possibilities, but realities), or states, into one. This is also the concept behind Schrodinger's cat, wherein the cat is not mysteriously alive "or" dead in the closed box, but BOTH alive and dead - until we open the box, whereupon it becomes one or the other. 

Anyway. Why does this matter (aside from that fact that it's a pretty mind-blowing concept underlying the nature of the most fundamental particles we know of)? 

As I was waiting impatiently to hear back from medical schools, I found there was a baffling and not insignificant part of me that was fearful and sad. I realized eventually that this part of me was mourning the lives I would never get to live out, should I get accepted: the cosmologist/astronaut, the English major and full-time writer, the programmer and entrepreneur, the business kid with the nice clothes and expensive habits... What I feared was the collapse of my own wave function: the limiting of my future from infinite possibilities and potentialities to one path, inevitable and unrelenting as the passage of time and life. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, "it's a tragedy we only get to live one life."

It's ironic and completely stupid, I would agree, that the thing I most want, the path I am gunning for with all my might, could still bring me sadness for the other, perhaps lesser, paths that I never got to romp through. I suppose I am immensely and unhelpfully haunted by "the road not taken", in the style of Mr. Robert Frost.

The point of all this is that I didn't get accepted after all - not yet, anyway. So, despite my becoming a burrito of sadness for half a day, my wave function lives on. This blog, then, is about a journey through the uncollapsed wave function; it's about being stuck in, being free to explore, the place before one solitary path, however wonderful or meandering it may be, must be chosen from the unthinkable countless available.