Quantum Entanglement and Database Engines
On a lark I started asking an LLM about quantum entanglement. And when it spit out "an answer" it was a little tough to follow (of course). So I asked it to give me some analogies that might be more relatable. Here are some of what it came up with:
The Internet/Network Analogy
Think of quantum entanglement like network packets with shared session IDs:
When you change something on one server, all servers with that session ID instantly "know" about it
The "threads" are like persistent TCP connections that maintain state across the network
Gravity emerges like how network topology creates the "shortest paths" between nodes
There were others, and one of them talked about a Video Game Physics Engine which had invisible links and when one object moved, the other responded regardless of distance and gravity in the game world was just an emergent behavior. It then talked about force and information propagation which I "understand" is not possible given that information transmission is still gated by the speed of light.
A very odd relationship has emerged where YouTube will show me more and more videos about quantum mechanics, the Jinn particle, Schrödinger's poor dead/alive cat and at each time I pop over to an LLM to get a more thorough explanation. Each time now, because of my initial analogy request and the memory RAG, it gives me usually what amounts to an increasingly odd software engineering analogy. The most hilarious one so far is when I asked if you could send messages faster than the speed of light it gave me all the reasons why it couldn't, and then said "Think of the speed of light like a fundamental database constraint"
--- This is built into the universe's "database engine"
ALTER TABLE spacetime
ADD CONSTRAINT causality_limit
CHECK (information_speed <= speed_of_light);
-- You can have correlations (like foreign keys)
-- But actual data transfer hits the constraint
Now if Einstein or Bohr had the analogy engine here, maybe we'd be boarding a different imagination train. Through some of these analogies though, as mixed up as sometimes they appear to be, I think I've got a bit of a better understanding of some of these concepts. These analogies help me map a familiar pattern with an unfamiliar concept.
When I am explaining concepts in client meetings or with colleagues I will try to reach for an analogy if I can cook one up. If I'm explaining load testing I may mention it like a restaurant during a lunch rush since it equates well in a business setting. How many customers can we serve with the building and staff that we have? When explaining architecture or difficult concepts about how an integration will work it reduces the cognitive load and brings everyone up to speed quicker than a dry technical description. One thing I think we can always work on is having a wider variety of analogies to choose from.
Sometimes in a meeting or an unfamiliar setting an analogy can fall flat. That is totally OK! We can often learn what works best in these settings and steer the discussion toward the highway to understanding we're all shooting for. I have tested this in person meetings with a dozen people and in conference halls of up to 500+ people in cities outside my country of origin giving lectures on technology. It is very rare that I don't reach for multiple analogies in any of these situations as it is relatable, and connects us all.
The last bits that I had been researching in my context window that originally started with "proper methods of validating Pydantic enums" involved the concept of superposition. My understanding is that it relates to the thought experiment that Schrödinger was attempting when discussing this poor cat. I've always understood that the act of opening the box and observing the cat is what collapses the superposition into a single state.
Now comes Hugh Everett in the 50s with the Many Worlds Interpretation. Instead of this "mystical" collapsing of a superposition once a thing is observed and ending the story there, he theorized that all possible outcomes may actually happen and there is countless other universes where it occurs in all states. My brain hurts. So tonight I attempted to take the analogies, and the feeble amount of understanding I had gained from research and pull my family into explanations about all I had learned. In each of the humans I hold very dear, as I kept explaining I saw their mind there and not there at the same time. The many worlds interpretation in action!
Now I have ventured back to the computer to get a little work done. Maybe in one of these many worlds this code review includes tests.