The Amazing Brennan B2

My new toy, a two Terabyte Brennan B2 digital music player arrived this week:

It’s a fascinating piece of kit. Slightly bigger than half a dozen CD cases, it will hold 4400 albums using lossless compression. It exposes a web interface so I can control the player from any browser – laptop, iPad or phone. The amplifier delivers 35 Watts into my bookshelf speakers but it also has a fibre optic digital interface to connect to a real hi-fi set-up.

First impression: already excellent but with huge potential for more. Sound quality – even through the built in amp and my cheapo Gale speakers –  is very acceptable (I didn’t buy the Brennan speaker offering). The menu system is basic but it does the job. Control of playback through the web-site gives you a manageable interface to a cupboard full of CDs.

Still too early to say what it can’t do – for example, I haven’t been able to find all the functions of the built in menu in the web interface – but it does currently have some limitations; or should I say potential for improvement. For example, the built in amplifier has no tone controls to compensate for the characteristics of the room or speakers. Solution: that separate high end power amplifier. It’s also quite slow at ripping and seems not to be able to play CDs while ripping them. That isn’t really a problem as one can quite easily rip on a computer and then transfer the data to the Brennan on a USB drive.

It’s also clear that some of the acknowledged limitations can be addressed in future (downloadable) software releases. My own personal wish list would include improved navigation in the web interface and the ability to stream music over the local area network – with an appropriate piece of hardware to connect traditional amplifiers to WiFi. I’d also like to see what materialises when Martin Brennan delivers his improved support for ripping vinyl.  

In summary, though, this is the device we’ve all been looking for to provide hifi quality storage and management for the CD collection; already great, as is, and still a lot more potential.

Take a look at http://www.brennan.co.uk/

If no-one else really understands this then why worry it might be rubbish?

Of course, if one is going to think about quantum mechanics in ordinary terms, there is a sense in which failure is inevitable. It’s probably impossible to stretch everyday experience to cover something this strange.

At the same time, this shouldn’t necessarily be discouraging. After all, even the most esoteric mathematical models of these phenomena are clearly incomplete. There’s a point where they don’t join up with relativity, Newtonian physics and so on. So we can expect our own models to run out of steam – probably even more quickly – but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used as stepping stones towards some sort of understanding.

Following on, for instance, from the idea of propagation as a wave / interaction as a particle, is the question of what the wave is like. We actually know quite a lot about the particle – after all, that’s what we can measure – but very little seems to have been written about the wave.

One possibility is that the wave is pure energy. The particle converts to energy as it travels and then, when it interacts with something, turns back into its expression as a particle. That’s in contrast with the idea (courtesy of Schrodinger and Feynman) that we can think of particles as interchangeable and simply disappearing at one location and then appearing again instantaneously somewhere else[1] with the probability of appearing at any specific location being given by the interaction of probability curves modelled as sine waves.

In the supposition I'm thinking of, the process is like a soap bubble. It radiates outward from its source, expanding as it goes, as long as it doesn’t encounter anything it can interact with. As long as it is in this phase of propagation it exists purely as a wave of energy. This could last a very long time, think of a photon that left a star early in the life of the universe and has travelled for 14 billion years before it’s detected by a telescope. When it interacts with something, it reverts to being a particle.

At that moment, since the particle needs a fixed quantum of energy, the bubble bursts and all the energy becomes concentrated at the point of interaction. The rest of the wave front would necessarily disappear and this could be thought of as having an instantaneous impact elsewhere – possibly a way of accounting for so-called quantum entanglement.

Returning to the two slit experiment, this provides a second question that could be used to check whether this idea has any validity:        

• ·         If a detector is placed to observe particles passing through just one of the slits then particles it detects would be distributed as particles. Entities which are not detected (i.e. the 50% of cases going through the other slit) would continue to show an interference pattern.

Another interesting question is what constitutes interaction. Clearly if a photon (for example) is absorbed by an object of the right colour that constitutes interaction. What about one that is reflected from a mirror? Or one that is refracted through a prism or diffracted by the edges of the slits in the double slit experiment.

This all sounds as if it fits with the facts. Subatomic entities, when they propagate cannot be detected without turning them into particles, that is, they aren’t detected as waves, but they behave as waves when confronted with the double slit. When they interact as particles, their wave-nature disappears and they interact at defined points. Nevertheless, their wave history determines where they are observed. The outcome is, to an extent, random because it is a function of the interaction that transforms energy to particle rather than something inherent in the transmission.

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[1] ‘…the particle hops off to anywhere and everywhere else in an instant.’ The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen p. 46 Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.