Personal Notes on The Weight of Your Mind
The idea for this story came from an old article I read in 2017 on New Scientist Magazine, titled “Quantum test could show if minds are matter”, written by Anil Ananthaswamy and pertaining an experiment being underway as made by Lucien Hardy at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, suggesting that certain measurements could be controlled by something that might potentially be separate from the material world: the human mind. This had its start in previous experiments known as Bell tests that have confirmed the weirdness of quantum mechanics – specifically the“spooky action at a distance” that so irked Einstein. A new Bell test had been proposed using something unprecedented: human consciousness. If the results proved to differ from those of standard Bell tests, it could hint that our minds are immaterial… And, as a consequence, if Physics oversees the material world, the human mind not being made of that same matter might mean that we could overcome Physics with free will! Then, I connected those tests, and what they might mean, to a bigger, and much older question: “Does every object have gravity?” And the answer is “Yes, of course, everything that has mass will cause a gravitational pull on other objects.” In fact, every atom on the earth is pulling at every atom in your body, the sum result of all this force we call gravity.
But what happens when we speak of gravity at a Quantum Level? In fact, gravity doesn’t seems to exist at Quantum Level, or this has never been proved so far, though there are many theories, and tests, being underway at present worldwide, and it is the ‘Higgs Effect’ that gives a particle mass! The ‘Higgs field’, as recent finds demonstrate, seems to be just an energy field that exists everywhere. It is accompanied by another particle called the ‘Higgs Boson’ – and I think anyone that reads articles about Science, or Astronomy, has already heard of it (this was one of the most important finds in Physics of the last years, after all…) – that the field itself uses to continuously interact with other particles. As particles passed through the field they are ‘given’ mass, much as an object passing through treacle would become slower.
So, the question, and actually this is what many scientists are wondering about nowadays, was as follows: if also our thoughts, or our dreams, are matter, or are made of real matter, and every matter creates gravity, could the gravity created by our thoughts be measured in some way? Could it warp spacetime around us at least at a Quantum Level (provided that can be demonstrated, one day, that gravity exists also at Quantum Level, without mass)? Or that hypothetical quantum mass that we can’t detect yet nowadays, and that might exist past the so-called Planck scale (which is exactly where quantized theories of gravity had characteristics, named as ‘quantum foam’, that represent fluctuations in the shape and form of the underlying space-time and would lead to physical effects that couldn’t be appropriately seen at present given our technology of nowadays), could warp space-time?
Then, other questions might be possible, as a result, like: what happens if someone could separate quantum particles from their quantum mass (if it really exists…) and then aggretate/assemble the two things again later? “Beam me up, Scotty”, for example, might become a real thing, not just a Star Trek’s Teleportation effect, and also Time-Travel might become real, if someone could send the quantum particles of our body back to the past, or to the future, without being affected by the seemingly insurmountable limit of lightspeed, and then use the ‘Higgs Effect’ and give those same particles mass again at the destination…This is matter, for now, just for some Science-Fictional themes, anyway…
About the rest, the story itself is just a Sci-Fi tale, and not based on any real, and present, Science experiment, as the events depicted move towards a Horror setting more than to a reality of any sort, of course…
~ Sergio Palumbo
Orchid's Lantern 