Magician Of Spin

Baryons and leptons, strange quarks and unstable particles of all wavelengths! Who is the wizard who walks through walls, scintillates at the speed of light, and oscillates among flavors in mid-flight?

Elementary, my dear boson. I am the great and infinitesimal Count Neutrino, magician of spin.

Tonight, we shall delight in the manifest miracles of a Cosmos in motion. Welcome to my lair, a laboratory auditorium, where we put the macrocosm under the microscope, and bend the lenses of perception.

Let’s adjust the angle of you, as we surf the pulses of the surreal cortex and the nebulous neural net for a quantum leap across synapse gaps.

Envision a global landscape standing still beneath our feet, while rotating away the day at a thousand miles per hour; a planet running laps in an orbital track at around a thousand times the speed of sound; an Earth drawn through the galaxy by the fiery chariot of Helios, blasting past at nearly half a million miles per hour.

You may need your reading glasses on for this first trick. Observe, in my right hand, a bright little photon, acting as a particle; in my left hand, another photon, behaving like a wave.

Or, is the photon waving in my right hand, while being particular in the left? Does it matter? Does it energy?

If a particle waves and there’s no observer around to gather data, can the physics department still secure a research grant?

Behold! The photons have morphed into electrons, through the magical transmutation of photo-voltaic alchemy. Watch carefully as I split up these twin points of light, propelling them toward distinct destinies.

See the invisible cord linking them? No? Neither do I.

Yet as these particles drift apart, going their separate ways, they remain linked, mystically entangled, like unfortunate ex-lovers still carrying the torch.

Speaking of entanglement, for my next trick, I will transform this ordinary, wingless caterpillar into a brilliant aeronautical butterfly, through the sorcery of metamorphosis.

The flutter-by effect?! Gag me with a cocoon! {Hand-flap butterfly}

See how the gentle breeze generated by these flapping wings leads to a wild tornado in, say, faraway Texas? No, on second thought, make that Kansas.

Yes, the flatland of Kansas, where a simple farm girl is waiting to be swept off her feet to an outrageous allegorical fable, where she will murder a witch and steal her shoes, cavorting with straw-men and other logical fallacies.

Let’s skip down the gold-brick road, silk road, or any road, toward the Rubric’s cube at the core of experience, where chance happenstance assembles itself into coherent structures of concrete metaphor, to eventually unmask a dubious wizard, lurking behind Rube Goldberg Machines and concealed by a curtain of mystery.

Have we opened a window on a new world, or merely stumbled into a looking glass, curving and inverting what we already know?

Have we unwittingly stepped on the set of a motion picture, projected on a screen which is but another shady curtain of obscurity? These questions and more will be explored on the next episode, but we’re out of time. Moving at light-speed, you know! C you later.

Bell’s theorem strikes now, and so the moment make moves toward the next attraction, the Hall of Infinite Mirrors.

Please exit simultaneously in all possible directions. Go that-away!