Eigenvectors of the Force

[Jessica Med-Beq]

After attempting to secure a trade deal from the United Trade Conglomerate for drydocks on Trandosha, in an attempt to lower the tensions with the Trandoshans, in exchange for passage through First Order territory, Jessica returned to Kachirho's Jedi temple, where another Jedi seemed to have questions for her. With many of those capable of answering those questions being either in the Metharian Nebula in an attempt to breach the blockade, or elsewhere in SJ-land, it so happened that Jessica could be that one person answering the questions that relative newcomer might have. She knew that Jedi came with uneven knowledge bases, and also uneven intellects, and also that some Jedi were content to go around their business with little knowledge of the Force, and swinging lightsabers around. Meanwhile, she knew who to delegate the paperwork part of her job as the Grand General of the Order, so helping out Jedi in their quest for knowledge would, in the long run, be beneficial on an individual level and on a collective level, or so she thought. She came across [member="Sefain Gatholil"] in the temple library:

"I'm Jessica. I sense that you have some questions about the Force, light-and-dark, Force-sensitivity and other stuff of that nature..." she spoke, in a soft voice, in Sefain's direction.

 

[Sefain Gatholil]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"]

Sefain had been reading up on the legends of Kashyyk, when she felt a presence behind her. She turned, and was greeted by a tall blonde Jedi.

"I'm Jessica. I sense that you have some questions about the Force, light-and-dark, Forse-sensitivity, and other stuff of that nature..." she said.

"Uh, yeah actually." Sefain said, surprised that someone could get that accurate of an emotion reading. "Recently I've been doing a lot of research in Force sensitivity, and why it manifests in some people, and others not. More so, how some people can have a stronger sensitivity than others. It's all very interesting." she continued. "As for Force abilities, I've been looking into the ability to comprehend foreign languages, but I haven't actually been able to achieve it myself..." Sefain finished, trailing off.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"While the Force can access each and every one of us, Force-sensitivity refers to our ability to touch it. The most popular theory regarding Force-sensitivity is the midichlorian concentration, according to which the higher the concentration of midichlorians, the more easily the body can handle the Force, and with it, the mind can more easily manipulate it, too"

After hearing about how [member="Sefain Gatholil"] would like to learn the ability to comprehend foreign languages, the one thing that sprung to mind was Comprehend Speech? More like she would like some holocron containing information on the topic, she thought, while realizing that teaching Comprehend Speech was not obvious to her at all. She never was much of a linguistics girl. Then again, like mechu-deru, Instinctive Astrogation Control, Comprehend Speech was a cognition-intensive Force-power. For all the bad memories I had of that Jedi healer on a hoverchair that couldn't be trusted by Geonosians, I nevertheless learned something from that healer: Force-sense, and also Force-sensitivity testing, she thought, while she'd talk about false-positives and false-negatives in Force-sensitivity testing as appropriate. No test is foolproof, and a false-negative in her childhood made her a rather different Jedi vs. what she could have been. In her experience, false-positives that are nevertheless introduced to the Order don't last very long or would usually instead try to go for the less Force-intensive branches, where they can more easily hide their lack of Force-sensitivity, such as dogfighting, diplomacy.

"That said, while the most popular method for detecting Force-sensitivity relies on using midichlorian counting, there are some risks of running into false-negatives and false-positives, depending on the circumstances. The same can be said of every testing method so, when somebody is in a yellow area where false-negatives or false-positives is a very real risk, we usually ask people to have a different test administered. I myself was a victim of a false-negative once"

 

[Sefain Gatholil]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"]

"I myself was the victim of a false-negative once."

"Interesting." commented Sefain. "I'm surprised I didn't find any holocrons on the subject. I guess it must've been quieted when the Old Jedi Order collapsed. I still think I would've heard of it elsewhere though. My sister and I found out we were force sensitive when we still lived on Nar Shadaa, but then again, there were rarely Jedi on Nar Shadaa when we were little. Anyways, would that mean genetics can play a role in force sensitivity, or is it different from person to person and it's more of a luck-of-the-draw sort of thing? And how can the midichlorian testing give a false reading? Is it a flaw in the ability to read midichlorian levels or is more along the lines of 'number doesn't necessarily determine force sensitivity'?" she asked, a little embarrassed that she had spent so much time researching a topic with an already very clear answer.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Genetics play a role in the process, since Force-sensitivity appears to be a recessive trait"

[member="Sefain Gatholil"]'s question about what caused false-negatives or false-positives was a curious one, one that she knew was often asked by budding Recruiters. Usually in the world of medical statistics, not rejecting the null-hypothesis is considered a negative result, and the null hypothesis is, at least 19 times out of 20, taken to mean healthy until proven sick. In the case of Force-sensitivity, the null hypothesis means that the individual is not Force-sensitive. Even though midichlorian counters are pretty simple to use, because they are sensitive to the Force-signatures of their users as well as those of their surroundings, FU examiners need to be mindful of that fact; that's why recruiters tend not to be the most powerful Force-users, she thought, while pondering the implications of what could well account for false-positives or false-negatives. Jessica then answered what she knew about why could such phenomena occur, with precognition, telepathy, enhanced reflexes being the other aims of alternate Force-sensitivity tests, much like the pazaak card test she was administered.

"False-negatives usually occur because of noise in the midichlorian counter, when a person is tested in a Force-dead area or when the examiner is of opposite alignment to that of a nexus, while false-positives often tend to occur when around high concentrations of Force-energy of the same alignment as the examiner, in which case the counter may sometimes double-count a specific midichlorian from time to time. Or sometimes plain old negligence, as was my case"

 

[Sefain Gatholil]

"Hmm." Sefain was quite intrigued by this.

Just another downside of being raised away from Jedi Civilization she supposed; not knowing the ins and outs of force sensitivity. Jessica was clearly an older member of the Silver Jedi Order. Though Sefain was certainly no newcomer, having done most of her training on the Temple back on Voss, she was realizing now that she wasn't as well educated in this topic as she had originally thought.

"How long did everyone think you weren't force sensitive?" She asked, who was at this point quite interested in Jessica's past.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Let's see: I was about 10 when I was tested and I had this false-negative, and then I was re-tested at age 35, and then I was diagnosed as a Force-sensitive. Oftentimes civilian authorities will want to screen people for Force-sensitivity for several reasons, such as gifted education, as was my case, or even security purposes sometimes. As a child the midichlorian counter returned a midichlorian count that placed me in some sort of yellow area where I was at risk of falling under false-negatives or false-positives. It was considered safer, back then, for me to be lumped into the NFU category. And it wasn't straightforward to come to terms with my Force-sensitivity. With the detection grid being tighter than it has ever been in galactic history, the topic of false-positives and false-negatives in Force-sensitivity is a topic of public security interest"

[member="Sefain Gatholil"] may or may not be interested in exactly who was behind this. A Jedi healer on a hoverchair that was so untrustworthy that even the Geonosians did not trust her - and the Geonosians were usually pretty gullible when it came to the Force, while otherwise considering Force-sensitivity as just one trait like another - that's something. Hopefully Sefain will prove more trustworthy even though that isn't saying a whole lot. Just that high amounts of luck might have been key for detecting Force-sensitivity after the fact. But coming to terms with her Force-sensitivity was not straightforward - no more than would be the case for anybody else in a similar situation. Perhaps, just this once, Jessica could get to talk about the alignment operator, what eigenvalues/vectors are and the operator's matrix form. I'm not sure as to whether there really is anybody - anybody! else in the Order that actually understands matrix algebra because the alignment operator relies on matrix algebra, she thought, realizing that, in fact, not every Jedi would even know about either topic.

"So sometimes it did happen that people could hide their Force-sensitivity behind something else, such as their brains. Do you wish to move on to the next topic, light-and-dark perhaps?"

 

[Sefain Gatholil]

"Yes, definitely." Sefain responded, quite eager to continue the conversation.

Sefain herself had discovered of her force-sensitivity with her twin sister; or at least she thought so. She had very few memories of her family. She knew she had a mother and father obviously, and she was pretty sure she had a twin sister. She could faintly recall something about younger triplets, but that was about all. She couldn't even remember their faces.

As for the light and dark sides of the force, Sefain could only anticipate what [member="Jessica Med-Beq"] would say. The force had both a light and a dark side; even non-Jedi knew that, but what caused both to exist seemed unknown to most. Sefain dearly wished the council would teach more in-depth lessons such as the one she was receiving right now. As wars and battle became ever more present in the galaxy, it almost seemed as if the path of the Consular was beginning to become overlooked.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"I can sense that you feel the consular path being in decline. Now, I'm not saying that consular-hood is in decline because of any intellectual decay. It just seems that the Guardian path requires a different mindset, where the mental aspect of it is just not the same as how we do it. As a prospective Consular, you probably realize that your brain is a really big tool for anybody walking down that path"

Concurrently with [member="Sefain Gatholil"], Jessica was also led to think that many areas which, in peacetime, were typical of Jedi intervention, such as diplomacy, were being neglected, and that she always found that the allure of being mostly some Force-using bounty hunter with a lightsaber was perhaps so great that it was done to the detriment of the other duties. Not that they lacked brainpower, and clearly Sefain had a rather fast brain, pretty similar to Eri. But not quite on the level of Taygeta, or even Jairdain, Paige. Just that it seemed to be more of a motivation problem than an input problem. And yet it also seemed that, while FUs were readily recruited in their late-teens or early twenties these days, it's about who seeks out such organizations and why. But she has to return back to the topic at hand. Light and darkness, as seen through a rather unorthodox lens, that of quantum mechanics. A lens through which she knew very few Jedi would actually understand. But was Sefain one of them? Might be a stretch, but may as well try... it's just more complicated than usual.

"In fact, light and darkness is actually a mathematical construct. Yes, one would say that the light is mostly about serenity and other positive emotions, and the darkness about mostly negative emotions, but that alone is not the end of the story: even in species unable to feel emotions, one could still use light-and-dark. There are a few postulates that are important here: as with all quantum operators with measurable outcomes, the alignment operator is Hermitian, that is, its eigenvalues are real-valued. Also, even though the expectation value of the operator as applied on an object, location or person can be anywhere between plus and minus one, the observed value when the Force is in use will always be plus or minus one, or zero. Oh and before you ask me about what the eigenvalues mean in the context, +1 means light, 0 means neutral, and -1 means darkness, the picture is different when you talk about the expectation value"

 

[Sefain Gatholil]

"Oh and before you ask me about what the eigenvalues mean in the context, +1 means light, 0 means neutral, and -1 means darkness, the picture is different when you talk about the expectation value"

Sefain nodded slightly. She didn't understand everything [member="Jessica Med-Beq"] had said, but she got the basic principals. It was quite interesting to see the Force from a mathematical point of view, as Padawans were only taught about the Force from a spiritual point of view. Having heard more about Jessica's past made Sefain realize how lucky she was to have been a recognized Force sensitive at an early age. Obviously, Jessica and the others who had been discovered as FS later in life fit perfectly in the Order, but Sefain could only imagine how strange (and maybe even infuriating in a sense) it must have been to discover that you have a connection that you had previously been told you most certainly didn't possess.

To be completely honest, Sefain hated the thought of not being Force Sensitive. She knew that a good majority of people were not FS, but she still was uncomfortable the prospect of not being able to have the Force to fall back on. She supposed, that this might be one of the downsides of her circumstance. She had spent her entire life learning how to tap into the Force, how to use it, and how to live in harmony with it, but therefore was heavily reliant on it. Sure, she was still a capable combatant without it, but she wouldn't be nearly as agile or perceptive. Jessica grew up learning how to use her own strengths and weaknesses to her advantage, so she most definitely didn't have this issue. The Force was an asset to her, and aid. It was something that boosted her power. To Sefain, the Force was her rock. It made up her strengths, it gave her her power.

Suddenly refocusing, her mind brought her attention back to the Light and Dark side. This reasoning would make sense why the old Jedi codes about banishing connection were done away with. If untimely, passion didn't inherently lead to the Dark side, then Jedi shouldn't have to push away love. To think of the force as a variable, not a constant light or dark, was something new for Sefain.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"With each eigenvalue is associated an eigenvector, conventionally understood as being (1,0,0) for light, (0,1,0) for neutrality and (0,0,1) for darkness, but each and every object, location, or person have a Force-alignment-wavefunction, such as X2+Y2+Z2 = 1, and X, Y and Z being usually taken as non-negative numbers, called the alignment coefficients. The expectation value of the alignment operator is hence E(A) = X2-Z2, and then light-sidedness occurs when E > 1/3, dark-sidedness when E < -1/3 and neutrality when -1/3 < E < 1/3"

In fact, the quantum expectation value is a quadratic form. E(A) was, in bra-ket notation, written as < w | A | w >, where w is a wavefunction, and A an operator. Advanced mathematics were key to actually understand the Force as quantum operators: complex analysis, linear algebra to name the main stuff, hence why virtually everyone else preferred to teach the more spiritual aspect. She could feel [member="Sefain Gatholil"] finally understood why the Teyan Apologia lost value, even though the Code proper did not: the mathematical approach could shed some light, no pun intended. But for this reason, her master even described her as a computer-like Jedi back then, much like she would calculate PV = NRT if she was to use pyro/cryokinesis on a gas, and usually play around with P when playing with T. Or solve for Maxwell equations when using Electric Judgment (she would realize most Jedi would simply be content with Ohm's law or Ampere's law, because it requires more mental effort of them and hence their brain will generate enough charges, but using these two items are not enough for her to generate the amount of charges in her head to discharge through her body).

"As for the relationship of love and passion to the Force, it actually can make people change Force-alignment, both ways. Yes, Jedi tended to think of where Darth Vader's romance fit in his fall to the dark side, but for each Vader, there are people for whom a loved one was just as important for shunning the dark. However, if you're familiar with chemistry, then maybe you can use your chemical knowledge to learn Detoxify Poison and also pyro/cryokinesis. In fact, it doesn't require a whole lot of chemical knowledge to learn those things"