Concepts explained
Do Atoms Remember Whose Breath They Were? — Feelings Travel Another Way
Atoms of one kind are identical, with nowhere to record whose breath they were, and quantum strangeness unravels in a warm body faster than a blink. Yet feelings really do cross between people, riding not on atoms but on faces and voices.
The director's question
I knew that the atoms in the air hold no feelings. Still, part of me could not let the thought go. In the quantum world, which we do not yet fully understand, might some atom resonate with an atom in my body? And if so, might a little of someone's heart cross over along with their breath?
Science's answer — atoms have no résumé
Atoms of one kind are exactly alike. Carbon from Admiral Yi's breath and carbon just out of a car exhaust are identical, with no label and no trace. Weigh them or shine light on them and you find no difference. It is not that they forgot where they came from; there was never anywhere to write it. The library piece Atoms Have No Memory explains why.
Quantum effects do not survive in a warm body
mechanics does have truly strange things: , one particle holding two states at once, and , two distant particles linked. This is where the idea of feelings riding on breath would like to lean.
But these effects last only somewhere very small, very cold and very quiet. That is why quantum computers barely run inside vessels chilled almost to minus 273 degrees. One bump from anything outside and the strange state unravels. This is called .
Our bodies are the opposite: warm, with water molecules colliding countless times a second. A strange quantum state in the brain would unravel far, far faster than a blink. That atoms carried on a breath could resonate with mine and pass on feelings cannot happen by today's science.
And yet feelings really cross over
The story does not end there. Feelings really do cross between people, by other routes. See a smile and you smile back without meaning to; hear a trembling voice and you grow uneasy; yawns spread. Psychology calls this emotional contagion. Eyes, ears and facial muscles are its paths.
Smell may be one too. In some experiments, people who smelled the sweat of frightened people showed more activity in fear-related parts of the brain. The effect is small and some repeat studies do not find it, so it cannot yet be called certain.
Atoms carry nothing, but people seep into one another through the same air. The first imagining only looked for the answer in the wrong place; the question itself was not wrong.
A little further in
Those who asked first
The Austrian Schrödinger, one of the makers of quantum mechanics, also doubted that its strange rules carried over to our big world. Hence the cat in the box: apply quantum rules to something as big as a cat and, until the box is opened, the cat is alive and dead together. He told it to show how absurd that is. Today decoherence carries much of the answer: something as big as a cat collides endlessly with the air in the box and cannot hold a strange state for an instant.
What we do not know yet
How the mind arises from the brain is one of science's greatest mysteries. Some scientists, like the British physicist Roger Penrose, have tied consciousness to quantum mechanics. But the objection that quantum states cannot survive in a warm brain is strong, and most scientists do not accept it. It is not proven but one scientist's grand imagining.
In the film
David tells a child: in quantum physics, it might be both. In the world of a single particle, that is science. Applied to children, trees and people, it is a sentence Schrödinger would have shaken his head at. The film chooses to believe it through a child's eyes. Where science stops explaining, the film's imagination begins.
The question that remainsIf feelings that cannot ride a breath can travel by a face, what has carried feelings the farthest?