Quantum Mechanics ... and the South Pasadena Farmers Market?

Entanglement.

Schrödinger said it was the defining trait of quantum theory. What is it? It’s that quirky talent discovered by quantum physicists whereby a weird telepathic link allows teeny tiny subatomic particles to mysteriously influence each other’s properties even if they are very far away from one another. These particles are linked together -- or entangled -- so that one can't be sufficiently described without a full mention of its counterpart. In fact, you can instantly influence the properties of a particle on the opposite end of the universe by merely nudging its entangled twin. Some say the power travels at millions of times the speed of light. Even Einstein was baffled. He called it too spooky to be real.

Okay, so I can’t really get my head around it either.

But it gets me thinking…

Whine and Cheese

So, you try to eat right.

Your mother probably taught you based on the beloved Four Food Groups model -- a guideline issued by the United States Department of Agriculture in the mid fifties -- with each meal emphasizing meat, whole fat dairy products, breads and a few vegetables or fruits. In the nineties, the government's suggestion morphed from a square of equal food categories into a triangle of dietary regulation: the official food pyramid. Fat was out. Carbs were in. So we eschewed our steaks, buttered potatoes and homemade pie for heaping plates of pasta with drizzled olive oil and Entenmann's fat-free cookies. But that didn't prove to be a recipe for health, and by end of the 20th century more Americans had obesity, heart disease and diabetes than back in the sixties when everyone was asking for seconds of Mom's meatloaf and gravy.

Dean Ornish says to give up all fats and you'll stave off or even reverse heart disease. That is, unless you end up with fatty acid deficiency and insulin resistance. Vegetarian experts say to eliminate all animal products and you'll give your body the perfect human diet. Until you find yourself deficient in protein, vitamin B12, iron, iodine and omega 3 fatty acids. Proponents of a Stone Age diet insist that we should avoid agricultural products and eat like our prehistoric hunter/gatherer ancestors ate -- lots of meat, fish, fowl, nuts, berries, fruits and veggies. Sounds good, except that when we hunt at the local grocery store we also gather genetically modified produce with pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls and recombinant bovine growth hormone.

Fish is good, right? Oops, there's the methylmercury contamination. Then how about soy? Natural health experts tell us it can wreck your thyroid and cause pancreatic dysfunction. Okay, then what about beans? Aren't beans an ideal food? Sure, except for that bisphenol-A lining the cans. Stir fried vegetables are healthy, aren't they? Nope, not if you consider the trans fats and cancer-causing acrylamide -- a by product of all fried food. Milk? Anti-dairy experts warn of dioxins, hormones and herbicides. Bottled juice? Nutritionists tell us to stay away from high fructose corn syrup.

Water. We can just drink water. But not if you listen to scientists who say that fluoride is more toxic than lead and only slightly less poisonous than arsenic. (Bottled water? Oncologists remind us that those plastic bottles might cause cancer. Oh, and the scientists chime in that a lot of bottled water is fluoridated.)

Sigh. I'm really getting tired of all this advice from all these health experts. In fact, all these health experts are making meal time a fairly large bummer, which can't be good for anyone's mental health.

So, I have some advice of my own: have the chili cheese fries from Hi-Life Burgers. They're filled with enough animal fat, cholesterol and glutamate to make Sanjay Gupta break out in hives, But I can play the statistics game too. Am I an expert? Well, yes, actually. I'm quite the expert on chili cheese fries. So here goes:

The potatoes have heart-healthy potassium and magnesium, not to mention vitamin C, phosphorous and zinc. Cheese offers bone protection with much-needed calcium. Plus, there's a little-known Danish study which found that men who ate 1 ounce of full fat cheese every day for three weeks had no increase in their LDL cholesterol. Now, for the chili. Well... that beef is loaded with iron and something called conjugated linoleic acid which numerous studies have shown reduces incidences of cancer and suppresses growth of existing cancer.

Most important, the chili cheese fries are delicious. They're the kind of ooey-gooey tasty that just makes you happy. And happiness causes a cascade of positive body responses from hormone balance to endorphin release. In fact, a substantial Mexican study has shown that happy people are more likely to have better immune systems and live longer than unhappy people, regardless of other medical factors.

Chili cheese fries as a health food? Maybe not. But I sure felt better after eating them.

Face Time

I've mentioned this phenomenon before, but I just have to point out another example. Come on, dear readers ... tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this house looks like a face? A very surprised, possibly aghast face?

Or maybe I just love to anthropomorphize things.

Big Smile

We should think like a three year old...

My little daughter kept asking me when we were going to drive past "that happy face place" again. I had no idea what she meant until we were driving on El Centro and she pointed at the spartan Dynasty Iron Doors building and exclaimed, "There's that happy face place! See Mommy? That whole place is smiling."

Happy face place, indeed!

Yeah, there's a logical explanation for this sort of thing -- buzzkillers, those neuroscientists -- but I prefer, like my little girl, to assume the world is smiling at me. (And, apparently, so does this guy!)

Color Wonders

I tend to go for houses painted in unconventional ways. But did you ever stop to think about why we respond to specific colors? Is it just an emotional reaction, or do different shades trigger physical changes on some bioelectric level?

When light hits the photoreceptor cells of your retina, it is converted into little electric impulses which dash right up to your brain and trigger a release of various hormones. Sunlight contains all wavelengths of color in the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and magenta) in addition to infrared and ultraviolet light, which we can‘t see. The body's various responses to the collection of colors contained in the sun's rays may contribute to why we feel so euphoric after a day at the beach.

Color has played a role in healing ever since the early human figured out that gazing at a calm blue sky eased a headache almost as well as chewing on white willow leaves. Indian Ayurveda -- the oldest healing modality in the world -- teaches that specific colors correspond to specific energy centers in the body. Ancient Egypt’s temple of Heliopolis contained compartments designed to break up the sun’s rays into different colors -- each thought to positively affect a different ailment. Even Babylon’s famed Hanging Gardens were touted as containing plants of all colors of healing.

When Newton played around with prisms and figured out how to fraction out the colors of light’s visible spectrum, physicians over the next century were so impressed with this magical discovery, they believed that targeted use of those colors could treat everything from smallpox to hysteria. Enterprising doctor Edwin Babbitt published a groundbreaking work on a new model of healing called chromatotherapy: Principles of Light and Color. Babbit’s work was followed up by a student Dinshah Gahdiali who spent years developing colored filters and specialized light fixtures known as Spectro-Chrome lamps. These devices were prematurely thought to be a cure for tuberculosis, diphtheria, gout, venereal disease and diabetes.

While these early docs appear to have overestimated color’s plausible healing potential, Swiss psychologist Max Luscher honed in on color preference as a marker for mental illness. (Supposedly if you liked dark colors, you were in bad emotional shape. Luscher would have definitely diagnosed most modern day creative types as wildly unstable due to our preference for black clothes. Then again, maybe he was on to something…)

Luscher’s contemporary Russian researcher S.V. Krakov devoted his work to studying the way different light wavelengths affected body responses like blood pressure and adrenal function -- studies that contemporary color therapists still recall, and justification for why hospital rooms are never painted bright red.

Rudolph Steiner and Theo Gimbel also investigated the therapeutic uses of color. They both suggested that the vibrational quality of different colors have either regenerative or destructive effects on living things.

In the last few decades, studies have shown the positive effects of full-spectrum light on everything from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) to insomnia and infertility. (Sunlight suppresses daytime release of melatonin and increases serotonin.) Full-spectrum light is also the first line of treatment for neonatal jaundice. And of course, in upscale spas all over the western world, new age types will offer high priced “treatments” in the form of various colored bottles of essential oils or tiny colored flashlights directed at acupuncture points.

I have no idea what physical ailment I may potentially heal by lingering at the steps of this colorful porch ... but I feel better just looking at it!

Night Vision

I've always been fascinated by the way things look at night. If you gaze up at the sky (on a clear and moonless night away from the glare of city lights) you can see the hazy swath of our own Milky Way galaxy -- a blurry swoosh of the millions of stars that snuggle around a central black hole. We can be thankful for our rod cells—one of two types of photoreceptor cells in the retina -- that allow us to see by the fuzzy starlight of a dim night. The rod cells are blind to color and only work in very low light. The other type of photoreceptor cell -- the cone -- kicks into action when bright light is available, and is responsible for high acuity vision as well as color. My poor little rods and cones must wonder who is leading their dance as I prowl around in the wee small hours: wandering under bright street lights and then turning down a shadowy sidewalk...step, step, step, step, rod/cone/rod/cone... no wonder I get eye strain in the dark.

Which is why I love night photography. Unencumbered by something as limiting as biology, the camera sees nightscapes in a wholly different way. I think the camera captures night the way it looks in dreams. I don't recall this corner of Mission and Fair Oaks being quite this magical when I actually shot this picture. Or, maybe it was ... and I just needed the camera to reveal it to me.

Get out your protractor...

M.C. Escher said, "We adore chaos because we love to produce order." Well, I think he would have totally grooved on this wondrous scene from Mission Station. When I watched my husband and daughter walking into that linear vanishing point, I just had to grab a shot of it. Those competing angles are so dizzying they are verging on multistability!

Escher also said, "I walk around in mysteries." Don't we all?

Quantum Mechanics... and the Farmers Market?

Entanglement.

Schrödinger said it was the defining trait of quantum theory. What is it? It’s that quirky talent discovered by quantum physicists whereby a weird telepathic link allows teeny tiny subatomic particles to mysteriously influence each other’s properties even if they are very far away from one another. These particles are linked together -- or entangled -- so that one can't be sufficiently described without a full mention of its counterpart. In fact, you can instantly influence the properties of a particle on the opposite end of the universe by merely nudging its entangled twin. Some say the power travels at millions of times the speed of light. Even Einstein was baffled. He called it too spooky to be real.

Okay, so I can’t really get my head around it either.

But it gets me thinking…

The overly simplified but deeply poetic explanation of chaos theory told us that a butterfly beating its wings can eventually lead to a storm on the other side of the world. Everything is connected. Everything affects everything else. Some physicists now think quantum entanglement has macro implications, too.

So lets extrapolate ... or perhaps just take huge license with scientific theory. Sometimes it really does feel like little patches of life are oddly harmonious, as if seemingly separate things -- and people -- are somehow connected. For example: here at the Farmer’s Market the other day the people strolling along seemed to just fall into a perfectly aligned formation and simultaneously smile, as if each separate individual was – somehow – inextricably linked. I couldn't have choreographed it any better. Coincidence? Probably. Entanglement? Heck, I'm gonna go with that...

Coffee with a side of archetypal psychological analysis

Jung said that confronting a person with his shadow was to show him his own light. “Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites,” he said, “one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”

So, would you believe that’s exactly what happened to me here? Or, maybe it was just a cool shot I noticed by looking down late afternoon outside of Starbucks.