Love, Lust and Other Entanglements

• Quantum entanglement is perhaps the purest form of love—it's quantum romance. If you think of two lovers living at the opposite ends of this planet, the shared emotions, the sense of belonging, the way they perceive each other despite several thousand miles of distance, is nothing short of entanglement.
• The experience of falling in love is altogether reminiscent of what in quantum physics is known as entanglement.
• In the microscopic realm, once two particles experience a shared state, they are no longer separate entities but exist as one. This remains true even when they are separated by a great distance. The "falling" part of the falling in love process requires a falling away of many individual boundaries as the two people merge significant parts of themselves. The coupling moves the two individuals into an entangled sense of oneness.
• All living beings are energy fields manifesting through their physical form. Mere physical attraction to another is based on sensory stimulation, but being in lust is not quite the same as being in love.
• Falling in love requires that our energies coalesce with one another.
• When this occurs, our energy field resonates with our partner’s energy field, and our vibrations harmonize with each other’s so that two individuals are no longer distinctly separate. This energetic interchange happens simultaneously on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, and it is what makes falling in love—and staying in love—potentially the most fulfilling experience in life.
• Over the course of time, however, many people indicate that although they may still love the other, they no longer feel in love. There’s a common belief that as the years pass, falling out of love is natural and to be expected. I’d suggest that it may be ordinary, but that doesn’t make it natural.

Falling in love and sustaining it requires maintaining a sense of oneness.

• In the turmoil that we experience when a relationship becomes adversarial, we need to acknowledge or change something to shift the energy away from separation and back toward entangled wholeness. Making that shift may mean changing our beliefs, our perceptions, or our behaviors or possibly all of these.
• You might ask yourself, “What is my partner seeing in me that I don’t see in myself?”
• If you set out to reenter the energy field of the initial romantic entanglement or the caring friendship, you can selflessly try to get in the other’s shoes. This is an exercise in empathy. Doing this doesn’t mean you are abandoning your position; it simply means loving and validating your partner.
• If I try to appreciate and care about my upset partner’s point of view, I’m invoking a shift of energy.
• Connecting empathetically with our partner is the most powerful thing we can do in such troubled moments. It can turn the tide from a competitive, maybe even emotionally and verbally abusive, exchange back into a loving energy field once again entangled with caring. (If you try this approach consistently and with genuine affection, but your partner doesn’t reciprocate over time, you might well consider whether the relationship is right for you.)
• Another way of shifting the energy of a relationship is to express positive feelings or appreciation for your partner. Once a couple’s energy has drifted into separatism and conflict, they may default to unloading critical thoughts and feelings with each other. Negativity then fills the divide they have structured.
• Yet there are times in therapy when individuals may share with me positive or appreciative feelings they experienced about their partner. When I ask, “Did you share that with your partner?” I rarely hear a yes. Why would we become acclimatized to sharing the negative, yet feel awkward or reluctant to express approving or positive feelings?
• It’s because we’ve gotten stuck in the groove of negativity, which only widens that gap between us. We may be holding back an expression of approval so as not to give the other a stronger hand—a sign that we have set up separate battle stations. So set your intention: When you feel good about the other person, articulate it to him or her.
• In trying to reset the downward spiral of the relationship cycle, it may be helpful to pause and not be reactive.
• Take a moment before criticizing or defending and ask yourself, “Does this really matter?” If it doesn’t, you can choose to let it go and create a very different reality. Again, this is an energy shifter.
• The common expression “You can’t change the other person” appears sensible when a relationship is in turmoil. But from the quantum view of inseparability, if you change some aspect of yourself, it will necessarily affect your partner, because you’re both as connected as our quantum particles.
• Thus though Love & Quantum physics are completely related, and strangely parallel.
• For one thing, they're both mysterious — we don’t really understand how either one of them works. But they share something else — what scientists call "entanglement."
• People get entangled with each other when they fall in love, and it can start when they’re nowhere near each other, perhaps catching each other’s eyes for the first time across a crowded room.
• And it seems that tiny, subatomic particles — things like electrons or photons — can also get entangled with each other at a great distance, in a way that physicists still don’t understand but are already starting to make use of.
• It’s “this really delightful, really strange” thing, of the phenomenon known as “quantum entanglement. Somehow what happens to one particle can have an impact on what we would expect the second one to do, even if those particles are nowhere near each other.”
• But it’s also a really difficult phenomenon to understand. When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet is not so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. Emotional and quantum entanglement are metaphors for each other, as each sheds a little light on the mysteries of the other.
• “What if our fate is not only our own?. “What if parts of us are entangled with parts of other things, other dreamers?"
• Entangled particles break the rules. They are influenced by each other, instantly, no matter how far apart they [are]. Even if they’re on opposite sides of the universe. If you observe an entangled quantum particle ... you get an answer, And at the exact same moment, you know the answer for its partner. Those answers are related.

Erotic love is the highest form of contemplation.

• Entanglement between two particles is similar to the deep connection between two individuals who are experiencing intense feelings of attraction and desire towards each other, like lust.
• Just as entangled particles share a connection that is beyond our normal understanding of space and time, individuals who are deeply attracted to each other may share a connection that is beyond our usual social and psychological boundaries. This connection may not be fully understood by science, just like quantum entanglement is still a mystery in many ways.

• So quantum entanglement actually is good for something & makes us wonder at the parallels between human emotions and the workings of the universe, between the “solid and sensible” rational world “above” and the world “below ... with different rules ... wondrous and mystifying ... in everyone.”
• While quantum particles are loving and lusting each other infinite times each moment, we do not regard that as derogatory as particles do not have consciousness or emotions like humans do.

• Quantum particles are fundamental building blocks of matter and energy that follow the laws of quantum mechanics, which describe how particles behave at a very small scale. These particles interact with each other in ways that are described by mathematical equations and observed through experiments. And these ways are infinite times more love and lust that humans have with each other.

• To appreciate the above, it is important to understand what particles makes us, what particles we make and what particles we meet every moment of our life. 

The particle physics of you

• Fourteen billion years ago, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe quickly expanded, all of the matter and antimatter that existed should have annihilated and left us nothing but energy. And yet, a small amount of matter survived.
• We ended up with a world filled with particles. And not just any particles-particles whose masses and charges were just precise enough to allow human life. Here are a few facts about the particle physics of you that will get your electrons jumping.

The particles we’re made of

• About 99 percent of your body is made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life.
• While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars.
• The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.
• As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless.
• If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons.

The particles we make

• Your body is a small-scale mine of radioactive particles. You receive an annual 40-millirem dose from the natural radioactivity originating inside of you. That’s the same amount of radiation you’d be exposed to from having four chest X-rays. Your radiation dose level can go up by one or two millirem for every eight hours you spend sleeping next to your similarly radioactive loved one.
• You emit radiation because many of the foods you eat, the beverages you drink and even the air you breathe contain radionuclides such as Potassium-40 and Carbon-14. They are incorporated into your molecules and eventually decay and produce radiation in your body.
• When Potassium-40 decays, it releases a positron, the electron’s antimatter twin, so you also contain a small amount of antimatter. The average human produces more than 4000 positrons per day, about 180 per hour. But it’s not long before these positrons bump into your electrons and annihilate into radiation in the form of gamma rays.

The particles we meet

• The radioactivity born inside your body is only a fraction of the radiation you naturally (and harmlessly) come in contact with on an everyday basis. The average American receives a radiation dose of about 620 millirem every year. The food you eat, the house you live in and the rocks and soil you walk on all expose you to low levels of radioactivity. Just eating a Brazil nut or going to the dentist can up your radiation dose level by a few millirem. Smoking cigarettes can increase it up to 16,000 millirem.
• Cosmic rays, high-energy radiation from outer space, constantly smack into our atmosphere. There, they collide with other nuclei and produce mesons, many of which decay into particles such as muons and neutrinos. All of these shower down on the surface of the Earth and pass through you at a rate of about 10 per second. They add about 27 millirem to your yearly dose of radiation. These cosmic particles can sometimes disrupt our genetics, causing subtle mutations, and may be a contributing factor in evolution.
• In addition to bombarding us with photons that dictate the way we see the world around us, our sun also releases an onslaught of particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are constant visitors in your body, zipping through at a rate of nearly 100 trillion every second. Aside from the sun, neutrinos stream out from other sources, including nuclear reactions in other stars and on our own planet.
• Many neutrinos have been around since the first few seconds of the early universe, outdating even your own atoms. But these particles are so weakly interacting that they pass right through you, leaving no sign of their visit.
• You are also likely facing a constant shower of particles of dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light, making it quite hard to detect, yet scientists think it makes up about 80 percent of the matter in the universe.
• Looking at the density of dark matter throughout the universe, scientists calculate that hundreds of thousands of these particles might be passing through you every second, colliding with your atoms about once a minute. But dark matter doesn’t interact very strongly with the matter you’re made of, so they are unlikely to have any noticeable effects on your body.
• The next time you’re wondering how particle physics applies to your life, just take a look inside yourself.