Introduction To Quantum Mechanics (1st of an occasional series)

It is time to discuss quantum mechanics, a branch of physics discovered in 1962 by my brother, Frankie. He came home from school one day and mentioned it with great enthusiasm as we enjoyed our daily afternoon recreation, which was squatting outdoors scratching out the secrets of the universe in the dirt with sticks. He drew a cloud of virtual photons that could be made actual by adding an electric charge. These irreducible units of energy would propagate and be received as a quantum wave function by photoelectric cells (or electric eyes as we called them then) or by antennas on radios. I scratched up a cartoon head with a brain in it and that isolated the enigma. Could an electrochemical device (brain) in living things respond to magnetic waves?

Could brain also, on its own, exploit some form of quantum coherence? Here is a more sophisticated, modern-day experiment and illustration:

What you see here are two nearly identical shapes. On the left is a barncat named Schrodinger. On the right is a rare albino pumpkin --captured at great cost by safari into darkest Antarctica where its protective coloring renders it invisible to lions, sabre-toothed penguins, fossil-eating troglodytes and other predators. They are the same shape because they receive the same quantum wave function and respond to it. How is this possible?

One might as easily ask how we get our names. Barncat has hunting rights in our barn and is a cat. Pumpkin could not take any other form and still be seriously named Pumpkin. Geo. is my name --a voiced velar fricative followed by a diphthong-- and indicates thought, but yes, the brain of Geo.! Barncat has a brain too, and does this:

He wakes up and thinks. He thinks: I shall pour myself off this bench and go where Norma won't disturb me with her camera. The pumpkin, on the other hand, does a very peculiar thing. Pumpkin does nothing, and that is peculiar. Pumpkin, as friend Delores might say, is too full of pumpkin mush to have room for brains.But from where do these instructions come? I believe Frankie and I solved that enigma in 1962.

There has been much scientific inquiry in the past 40+ years that substantiates our theory that all of human consciousness was heavily influenced by a borderblaster A.M. radio tower near Chula Vista, California, operating in excess of 100,000 Watts and heard over this planet's entire western hemisphere. We used to wear headphones in bed and listen to THE WOLFMAN, late at night (if you draw a blank here, I suggest Geo. Lucas's film, American Graffiti). Although my brother and I both have autonomous brains, Wolfman is probably the reason neither of us can endure morning sun until late afternoon.