Why this week? Well, that's uncertain, but I guess the probability amplitude for the event was high. Each day there will be a new video describing the features and/or bugs of quantum physics.
Quantum physics is pretty old science, almost 100 years old, and our civilization greatly depends on the workings of quantum mechanics.* Fortunately, it has proven to be the most accurate description of the world to date—not one exception to quantum physics has been found. Furthermore, all objects obey the laws of quantum mechanics, not just microscopic ones.
However, despite its obvious importance, it is typically not taught in high school and few learn about it in college. Like sex, we pick it up from the street. So, this week, for a change, we will learn what physicists have to say about it.
This first video, despite the cartoon physicist, is the best introduction I could find. Like practically all introductions to quantum physics, it describes the double slit experiment. Most of you are familiar with this stuff, but I'm hoping that with the thousands who visit the site (cough), some will be students unfamiliar with the experiment.
['Dr. Quantum' is actually theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf. He has some pretty…um…unique ideas about quantum physics, consciousness and eastern religion, but for our purposes this video is pretty decent. We may touch on some of the philosophical repercussions of quantum physics later.]
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* "…today an estimated 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics, from semi-conductors in computer chips to lasers in compact disc players, magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, and much more." —Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler in Scientific American, Feb. 2001
"There is no part of chemistry that does not depend, in its fundamental theory, upon quantum principles." —Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling
"And if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical…." —Richard Feynman
5 comments:
It's this sort of thing that prompts people like Niels Bohr to say things like: "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it." Or Richard Feynman to say thinks like: "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."
Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman obviously know what they are talking about, but I will make this, perhaps even stranger, prediction:
The children growing up today, or in the next generation or two, will find quantum physics no stranger than those of us today find that the earth travels around the sun, despite everyday appearances.
(But it will take things like Quantum Week to bring that about ;)
"The children growing up today, or in the next generation or two, will find quantum physics no stranger than those of us today find that the earth travels around the sun, despite everyday appearances."
Jim, you may well be correct, and perhaps I do not have enough faith in the plasticity of the human mind, but I have another theory: Every creature has its hard wiring. A spider lives in a spider world; a cat lives in a cat world. We also live in a human world. We can only imagine so much.
The breakthrough of quantum mechanics is that we have discovered a reality that we can't imagine. If I am correct, the quantum world will always be unimaginable to us. But, more importantly, quantum discoveries prove that our own creaturely limitations -- our own hard wiring -- is not an insurmountable barrier. It is perhaps proof that there is no knowledge that is not available to us. We need not be able to imagine something to know that it is true.
JBS Haldane was correct: "My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." But the inscrutability of the universe will not stop us from learning about it.
You anticipate tomorrow's post. Your comment makes a lot of sense. I have a bit more to add.
On a completely different note, I'll like to relay what I saw in another video from David Albert, the physicist/philosopher from Columbia. He said Heidegger felt that the fundamental mistake of physics was to treat time as just another spacial variable. From that moment on, physics had already doomed itself to not being able to say anything deep or interesting about what time was.
Comments?
[Physics does treat time as a spacial variable and all Newtonian laws are symmetrically time reversible. And that is contrary to everything we know.]
Well, not everything we know.
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