Marriage is always seemed a little bit problematic to me. The idea that a government gets to
decide whether or not you are married according to a given set of laws. Or a religious authority
gets to do so. I was thinking about this as I was in the process of getting married. And
thinking about the fact that honestly as much as that paperwork would matter to the government
it wouldn't really matter much to me or to my future wife.
I wanted to find a way to get married that was deeper, that was more universal than whatever sort of legal framework
could be thrown my way by the United States government. I wanted to instead be married
by a law of nature. That is possible today, perhaps for the first time because of advances
in quantum physics. You wouldn't think it, quantum physics tends to be either highly
theoretical or a system that is used for instance in cryptography. However quantum entanglement,
one of the essentials systems that comes out of quantum mechanics, is one that has the
potential I believe to serve as a way in which marriage can be based on a truly universal
foundation.
Quantum entanglement involves two more particles becoming effectively one in the same even
if they are separated across the universe from each other. When they are entangled anything
that happens to one instantaneously happens to the other as if it had been done to the
second particle. That quality seems an awful lot like what marriage is about, this way
in which you can lead separate lives and yet you still are somehow bound and whatever comes
the way of one person in a relationship also applies to the other. So I set about building
an apparatus that would allow my wife and I and others as well to become think entangled,
to become married in a way that no governmental authority, no religious authority could say
that it was not allowed that it was inappropriate. That gay marriage for instance would not be
an issue that a government could regulate. That any sort of relationship at all, if it
was meaningful to you, could become fully manifest as an entangled relationship as a
marriage at the basis of all reality. The apparatus was very simple. I used a special
sort of crystal which was able to take sunlight, photons, and to bombard two people standing
below the apparatus with those photos in a way that they themselves became entangled
by the entanglement of the photons. So that while it would not necessarily be all of them,
while it would not necessarily withstand all time and space, they could partake in this
process of entanglement. And they could then take away from it what they wanted to take
away. That is to say that any quantum system is extremely delicate. Entitled is no exception.
Any management that you make has the effect of collapsing the system. In other words two
particles that are entangled, if you check to see if they are entangled will become disentangled.
And so likewise two people who are married by the process of quantum entanglement should
they question that bond and start to interrogate it will become disentangled as well. So in
a sense the entanglement operates both literally and metaphorically. Literally because I'm
using real equipment that is used for entitlement for purposes of encryption for instance, to
entangle people and people are becoming genuinely entangled by the process but it is also I
think more importantly the knowledge that that process has taken place. And the way
in which that makes those people behave that is what makes for an entitlement so special
as a form of marriage; the fact that it really has to be taken on faith ultimately because
the quantum mechanics demands it and relationships are that way too. Relationships are delicate
in the sense that quantum systems are. So I think that we can actually learn from subatomic
particles how to behave toward each other in a caring long-term relationship. I think
that the metaphor that is inherent in language and in the common understanding of a quantum
process can be something that we can apply quite literally and highly productively in
our everyday lives. You might say that metaphors are just metaphors
like a poem how important can it be? How seriously can you take something that was meant for
the enjoyment that you might get reading a book? To what extent can you really make use
of it? I think that metaphor actually is something that can be used incredibly productively by
taking it literally. Not by taking it literally and leaving it at that but recognizing the
metaphor for what it is and finding what happens if you apply it literally in your life. So
that in the case of quantum physics, because quantum physics is so weird, because quantum
particles behave in ways that are so totally foreign to the way in which we live, to our
experience of the world, much of the discussion of quantum physics happens metaphorically.
And the metaphors can be mined I think and can be applied I believe in ways that lead
through their literal application to different ways in which we can relate to each other
in the world. That is to say that quantum particles relate to each other in ways that
are entirely different from those with which we are familiar, from those which we relate
with each other on an everyday basis. And the way in which we relate to each other on
an everyday basis doesn't always work so well. We fight, we have problems communicating,
we go to war. So might it be possible taking the quantum realm, the metaphors that are
used to explain how quantum particles interact and applying those metaphors literally in
our lives that we may realign the way in which we live that makes us somehow unlike how we
were before. And that repositioning, while it need not be absolutely or permanent, at
least can be something that we can try out, can be another way in which we can consider
our relationship with others and through that process give us more perspective on the myriad
possibilities as far as society where there are seven billion of us for how that society
can interact and interrelate.