The Electron's mind

My friend can be quite choosy about eating out. Where he eats depends on his mood. However, 80% of the time he eats Indian food, 15% of the time italian and rest he will randomly choose between chineese and thai. All of us have preferences like that because we have our own mind - we think. If I throw a ball upwards it will go upwards, it does not get to choose whether or not it wants to go downwards - it has no mind. In classical physics objects do not "think" for themselves, they have no choice but to obey precisely the laws of physics.

An electron on the other hand thinks for itself and chooses what to do!! Consider the following example - if I sneak up and hit someone with a snowball in their face, one of three things will happen, i) he will immediately react and hit me back with a snowball or ii) he will ignore it or iii) he will wait for an opportune moment to throw a snowball at my face. If I hit a wall with a rubber ball, the rubber ball will immediately bounce back at me from the wall - this is similar to the first case. If I hit the ball on sand, the sand will absorb the shock and no recoil will be seen, similar to the second case. These two cases are predictable behaviours. If you hit an electron with a photon, it will get excited, that is quite understandable. The electron now has to let out its frustration by emitting the photon back out. The interesting part is the fact that it is impossible to know how long after being hit by the photon, an electron will release a photon out. The electron will let out the photon at a time that it "thinks" is best. Now that's amazing considering it does not have a brain!!!

Just as we can kind of predict what a certain person will do under certain circumstances based on our past interactions with him/her, it turns out that we can do the same with electrons. My friend gets irritated when he fails an exam. You can be 90% sure that he will refuse to come to play on that day. However, if he passes the same, you can be 90% sure he will come. My other friend however, doesn't care about exams and he will come out to play 95% of the time whether or not he passes or fails. These behavioural aspects of people define their character and personality. Now this is the sort of thing that we can do with electrons. It turns out that the amount of time the electron will wait before emitting its electron has a probability distribution, ie it is 50% likely it will do so within 10^(-7) secs, 90% likely that it will do so within 10^(-6) seconds and so on for example. This is as if the electron has a "mind" of its own and its unpredictable behaviour has a structure that defines its personality. Now that's even more amazing considering again that the electron has no brain!!!

When I first understood the implications of quantum mechanics, I was quite shocked and unwilling to believe it. How can the electron have a mind of its own? How can it choose? Perhaps there is some underlying phenomenon here that we do not understand. After all, randomness arises from our own limitations rather than anything fundamental. For example, if you could count exactly how many times a coin has flipped in mid air fast enough, knowing its initial state you could exactly tell whether it would be head or tails. I am sure a computer equipped with a video camera and a reasonably simply program can do this. Then the result is not 50% heads or tails but we would exactly know the result. The randomness of weather comes only because i) we cannot compute it exactly down to every air molecule, ii) the weather phenomenon is a chaotic system and iii) determining the exact initial state of every molecule is impossible. After all, psuedorandom numbers are random only if one does not know the generating function and the seed.

In a way I find most people more predictable in their actions than electrons. I believe society makes people so. I will perhaps never completely get over the feeling of shock and disbelief I felt when I learnt for the first time that electrons have a mind of their own and that they think in their own simple way - perhaps more than many humans do today.