When ChatGPT first launched there was a panic in some parts of academia about how it could be used to write essays, and academic papers, and therefore con the processes of assessment. At the time I proposed some ways of addressing that, by inviting more attention to personal experiences in the process of sensemaking and evaluation [0]. As AI has improved, I became aware it could break down the barriers of intellectual disciplines to newcomers. In addition, it could help bridge and even integrate different schools of thought, which are often separated by their respective jargons. So today I played with it on a topic I had a casual interest in over 20 years ago – quantum physics. Back then I read about the ‘double slits’ experiment, where photons of light are directed at a barrier with two slits with a detector screen behind. Instead of two bands of light, an interference pattern appears on the screen, as if the photons had travelled together as a wave. However, when observed midway by a detector, those photons cumulatively create two bands of light, not an interference pattern. It was theorised as demonstrating quantum superposition and the observer effect in collapsing possibilities into physical reality. At the time I thought that superposition could be temporal not just spatial, but did not find anyone writing about that. Perhaps my hunch was because I’d recently read Hagen’s ‘Buddhism Plain and Simple’ [1], and was reflecting on how a fundamental unity of existence must involve time as well as space. But I had just started working at the UN and wasn’t going to deviate from my vocation on the environment, so dropped my interest. Last week I was reminded of the topic when I read there are new explanations about how time does not operate in a unidirectional past-present-future manner at the quantum scale [2]. I don’t know any practising theoretical physicists at the moment, so an AI chatbot helped me have a bit of fun in revisiting my idea about the temporal superposition of photons. The full chat follows below [3]. It was interesting how I needed to accept some of the suggestions but not others in order to progress the initial idea. It was also a salutary reminder that, after I concluded the chat, I used ‘old fashioned’ web search and found a discussion of temporal superposition theory last year [4], with similarities that had been overlooked by the AI. That is a reminder of the need for discernment during an AI chat and cross-referencing with other information. Ultimately, there is a need for experts in the field to check whether there are any major oversights or misunderstandings. Therefore, a word of warning: I am not a physicist, so take these ideas with a bucket of salt. I’ll leave the comments open, in case there’s a quantum physicist seeing this post. If you aren’t bothered with this topic, skip it, as more normal stuff comes from me soon. In any case, you could take this as an inspiration to scratch your own intellectual itch, gatecrash a discipline, and autodidact your way into new areas of knowledge!
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