FICTIONAL ARCHIVES PROJECT: TOMORROW’S YESTERDAY’S NEWS
QE Drugs & Entangled Highs
The Recreational & Medical World of Quantum Coherence
Author’s Note: This article is a speculative fiction
For the field of condensed matter physics in the early 21st century, the indefinite suspension of a BEC (bose-einstein condensate) at room temperature was, at the time, the impossible holy grail.
In 2013, Ayan Das and Pallab Bhattacharya lead a team which produced the first ever room-temperature BEC. Despite the fact that this condensate was achieved with a polariton (a quasiparticle resulting from level repulsion) and not a naturally occurring particle, this was an incredible achievement.
At one point in the past, most discoveries were attributed to one, maybe two scientific researchers. It would be nice to have one human to think of as being the person who discovered the secret to sustained, room-temperature coherence; however, as with most modern discoveries, this particular discovery belongs to a team of twenty from Tsinghua University. Keeping a list of twenty Chinese names at the ready for your everyday American nerd is far more of a task than most are willing to admit; hence, the common, and all too rushed dropping of the term, Hyong’s Team.
“Indefinite suspension of an element in a bose-einstein state is as simple as tying a knot to keep you shoelaces tight. In fact, tying a knot is, quite literally, what we have done.” — Professor An Hyong
The ease and simplicity of the team’s process, and the nearly unbreakable stability of the product’s coherence was all that was needed for the true quantum revolution.
Computation and communication was the first wave of innovation, and many thought it was the last as well. Working with this new specie of such a stable substrate was like adding a new element to the seasoned chemist’s laboratory — like adding a new color to the artist’s palette. Huang’s team had spawned an explosion of new technology, discovery, and advancement; one of which was the coherent molecular cage, or the v-cage.
The seeming paradox of the Huang Team discovery was that the condensate would lose cohesion at microscopic scales. It was the mass of the condensate, the sheer size of the product, that kept it stable. Smaller collections of atoms, like those worked with in the pre-quantum world, would simply decohere in the matter of milliseconds.
In order to avoid decoherance, it was discovered that a tuned molecular cage could provide the necessary containment pressures and provide an ingeniously designed denoising system. Coherence, it turned out, was not so much about cooling a material as it was about silencing the material — or denoising the system.
These atomic containers, commonly referred to as v-cages, employ quantum confinement in two very unique ways.
Traditionally, quantum confinement was used for a variety of products; from variable quantum dots (converting any wavelength of light to any other wavelength of light) to one-way energy pumps (allowing any wavelength of light to pass in one direction and reflecting all wavelengths from the other direction). With the v-cage, however, quantum confinement is used to perform “intelligent denoising” — which is extremely similar to the one-way energy pump; but with quantum noise instead of electro-magnetic energy.
V-cages can be composed of just about any element with a valence. Once the atomic cage is manufactured (four-point v-cages can be as small as 2 nm, composed of only four carbon atoms), and after the substrate sample has been injected, the v-cage is then tuned to begin the passive denoising process. Without the substrate sample, the v-cage would begin to denoise the empty space within which eventually gives rise to a flood of virtual electron & anti-electron pairs; destroying the bonds and breaking the cage apart. In fact, the v-cage has to be precisely tuned to the substrate to avoid such a cascade failure.
in 2101, Jamie Tyru Lindsey Lamar (who is the great great great granddaughter of one Anna Barrett (Leary) Butler, daughter of John James Leary, son of the infamous Timothy Leary) reclaimed the torch of her great ancestor and chemically mounted ergine (D-lysergic acid amide, or LSA) with a v-cage.
Dr. Jamie Lamar was searching for a topic for her dissertation, thinking it might be quite whimsical to base it on the substance her ancestor was so well known for promoting, when the idea hit her, as she put it, “like a bolt of lighting”.
Until then, though the v-cage was a fairly common research topic, and there had been some limited speculation as to its medical value, nobody had even considered binding them to a drug.
There were, of course, issues with properly tuning the v-cage after binding it to another chemical; but it was a fairly easy issue to overcome.
The famous experiment, later dubbed the “psychic mouse” experiment was conduced by Dr. Lamar’s team three short years later.
In Dr. Leary’s time people were terrified of psychedelics and other psychoactive drugs. This kind of research — the kind we’re doing — would have been utterly impossible. Back then, they just didn’t understand the symbiotic relationship humans have with drugs and it lead to all manner of problems. Today, we’re lucky. We understand that, say, heroin addiction is a natural step in rectifying emotional ills; that what they called “addiction” is merely the need to work through an emotional trouble. We understand that the “addiction” fades away when the mind begins to heal. Addiction. Funny. Today, we call it healing. We could never have done the work we’re doing now back then. Never.
— Dr. Lamar
What Dr. Lamar and her team have given humanity, is the platform for healing together. What psychedelics can do for one person, can now be experienced together — literally as a single mind.
Grieving families can now heal with augmented heroin — together. The healing process is accelerated and can take as little as a couple weeks as opposed to months, sometimes years, without the augmentation.
When the augmented drugs are used alone for recreation; these experiences open literal doors to other worlds. Worlds we can now quantify and measure. Worlds which — for thousands of years — were thought to be the wild ramblings of unquiet minds. Worlds woven into the fabric of space and time. Worlds within worlds within worlds within a single electron.
Psychedelics have always shown us how little we really understand; but now, they’ve shown us how little we understand about how little we understand.
