Let's have a little story: Three characters are standing on a street corner somewhere in Brooklyn. The tall blonde woman with glasses is a quantum physicist named Mary. Beside her stands a short fellow named Steve who's a social philosopher. And facing them on the other side of his pushcart is a fruit peddler named Mel Brooks with a pushcart piled high with fruit. (My apologies, Mel. I love you.) Mary the Quantum Physicist stands straight and says that at the level of quantum phenomena all reality is merely an arrangement of probabilities. Steve the Social Philosopher sneers and waves a hand and says that since all of science is always an enterprise in a social context, all its conclusions are locally biased. Mel the Fruit Peddler watches them and rubs his jaw. He finally lifts a nectarine from his pushcart and he holds it out to them and says: "Hey, guys, why doesn't someone buy a nectarine? Half a plum, half a peach, it's a hell of a fruit."
There's nothing new here. It's merely a representation of a sophomoric conundrum: There are often several ways to look at the real world, and it's common that more than one way can be both interesting and useful.
Quantum physics is a way of looking at the real world, a view generated by the idea that at very small scales, time, space, and energy are discontinuous. It would be nothing but an entertaining philosophical idea except that when you formulate the idea quantitatively you can use the equations to predict nearly everything that happens on Earth and in the entire Cosmos to a fabulous degree of accuracy.
Which means quantum physics ought to be taken seriously by anyone interested in the real world and how to deal with it. Which in turn underscores the irony that not only does the average Joe or Jane know hardly anything about quantum physics, but the movers and shakers of this crazy planet, the people in politics and finance and industry who ought to at least be curious about the real world for the most part don't give a damn.
History, or course, has its own form of justice. A thousand years from now neither Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Lady Gaga, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett will be known to anyone. Dust to dust, as the saying goes. If in a thousand years anyone will need to make a list of noteworthy people who have lived in the past hundred years, let's say 1912 to 2012, the list will be short -- almost a joke. Here's my list: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Richard Feynman. All physicists, all participants in the wondrous human mental migration from counting pebbles to quantum mechanics.
No one else. No politicians, no football jocks, financiers, movie stars, software barnstormers, or druggie blondes with press agents. All dead and gone, reduced to disparate and disconnected atoms behaving according to the laws of what? -- quantum physics.
Everyone who cares about physics has a favorite anecdote about quantum physics. My own favorite is about someone not included in the Magic Six listed above. It's about a Nazi storm-trooper who happened to be a quantum physicist -- not just any quantum physicist but a quantum physicist and mathematician who contributed a heavy dose of his own magic to our understanding of quantum phenomena.
For the past 80 or so years the tendency in professional physics has been to mention Pascual Jordan as little as possible because of his political involvements. I think it's a mistake. I think it's important for people to understand that it's possible for someone who is borderline crazy - -- or even someone on the other side of the sanity border -- to have magical talents and ground-breaking ideas. Yes, Jordan was a despicable Nazi committed to the Nazis and the corrupted Nazi ideology, but there's no need for physicists to be ashamed of his existence. Pascual Jordan is simply a prime example of the complexity of the human brain -- an information network whose parts can produce both brilliant mathematics and serial killers inside the same head.
In the publishing world there's a tendency to groan at the appearance of one more book attempting to explain quantum physics to people who are not physicists. In truth, there are never too many such books, since the awful ignorance of the masses about quantum physics needs to be addressed.
So here's a new book: The Quantum Universe: (And Why Anything That Can Happen, Does). Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Da Capo Press, 2012.
It's a book by two British physicists who talk to you from inside the world of the physicist, a careful and reader savvy exposition that pulls no punches. As the authors say in the final words, "Quantum mechanics, no matter how strange it might seem, is a theory that describes the real world."
Indeed, it does.
If you're interested in the real world and want a worthy introduction to the major achievement of humanity in the past hundred years, get hold of this book, read it slowly, digest it, make it part of your life and your life will change for the better. Never, never can you know too much about where you are.
Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Richard Feynman, may be a few more can be added to this .... But I do agree.. These are the people who mattered... The rest... as someone said..... are just, either Democrats or Republicans.
Regardless of where we stand with regard to our level `Uqm` of understanding of the subject, if at any time due to a certain flash of understanding, if a certain component `x` is added to our knowledge of QM., it is always accompanied with the realization that there is a certain other component `y` which gets added to that segment of QM, which we do not understand… And that `y` is always greater than `x`.
Nevertheless it is always a thrilling sensation…. that flash of understanding `x` whenever it happens, and even more exciting to know that there will – in the future – be many more such `flashes of understanding` to look forward to .
And so it looks like I might get hold of this book - notwithstanding the fact that I am in the process of writing one myself - and read it.
It will do no harm to me….. If my `Uqm` increases somewhat.
"... I thought long and hard about how I am going to present this. But I couldn't come up with anything better than what other people have done. ..."
He was sweating it, because he knew that, if he didn't want to lose the audience completely, he had to oversimplify things. I thought that was a very honest moment of a physicist who was really trying hard to explain a very complicated subject better than it is done usually, but who felt that the subject matter was winning.
All in all he was very honest about the physics, though. Whenever something is in the early hypothesis stage, he was calling it out as speculation. I thought that was very good.
Let's see how the last three parts are. Looking forward to it.
If you want to learn QM, you have to grab a set of TEXTBOOKS. With math. With headaches included.
Just like you have to grab a saw if you want to learn the art and craft of a carpenter.
A couple nights ago I met an amateur astronomer who was setting up for a star party. I had a good chat with him about his semi-professional hobby. I learned a lot from him. It was tons of fun. Why? Because he knew a lot more about astronomy with small instruments than I do. He's been doing this thing since he was a boy. It totally doesn't matter to me that I know more about what is going on inside stars or what's happening at the event horizon of a black hole. When it comes to WORKING with small instruments, HE KNOWS MORE THAN ME. That's because he HAS BEEN DOING these things for quite a while. And I haven't. I do have a couple of books about hobby astronomy. But I never put them to use by actually observing with an instrument... and that's why most of the knowledge in those books is useless to me... so far. The day I buy an instrument and start observing, it will take on a whole new dimension.
Fair?
"real" is a bit much for something that is based on numbers divided by zero having real values - but until the Ohms law and 6 atoms no QM effect result, QM had a 100% record, at least to me knowledge, of being able to predict results in that world.
But "real" - reality is metaphysics - a religion - for these latest theories - just Ideas that are asserted that can't be shown to be wrong, but also can't be "proven" - the best we can do is get QM to predict with amazing accuracy despite a mathematical birth that is mystical.
"Ohms law", of course, is not even a physical law. It doesn't hold under any circumstances. Not even for pure copper, not even at room temperature. If you want metals for which it is a fairly reasonable approximation, you need to make them synthetically at very high cost. That's what precision resistor manufacturers do for limited temperature ranges near room temperature... and boy are those products expensive.
The real laws of metal conductivity, of course, are derived in solid state physics from... quantum mechanics... and it turns out that for ideal metals and weak currents the temperature dependent conductivity is a modified power law give by the Bloch–Grüneisen formula, where the effective power depends on the dominant interaction of band electrons with phonons, s-d electrons or other band electrons. At very low temperature, of course, many metals turn into superconductors... a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon.
None of this is metaphysics, it's extremely well confirmed physics. So is the standard model of elementary particles... except, of course, that nobody believes that it, or any version of string theory suggested so far, is even close to the real thing.
But then... that's the fun part... to keep hunting for the real thing.
http://www.cornell.edu/video/?videoID=909
Energetic as ever... and totally on point. I only watched the first few minutes of the introduction, but boy does he know what he is talking about... his conceptual description of current physics is very, very good.
Today much of the distilled knowledge is available to everyone. In some fields, like astronomy, we are beginning to make the raw data and the tools available to everyone. And one day, hopefully, everybody will have access to every shred of science evidence ever recorded in readable form.
This methodology, of course, requires you to accept that there are thousands of people as smart, smarter or much smarter than you in the science community who know what they are talking about.
If you don't believe that, but instead like to think that you are much smarter than everybody else who spends their lives doing this stuff, then you shouldn't take science citations seriously. Instead, you will do well to remark constantly of how poor a student Albert Einstein was and that the next great thinker may be living in a trailer park somewhere in obscurity instead of teaching physics at a university or working on physics in a national laboratory.
I am pretty sure that will give you plenty of solace for the rest of your life.
The rest of us can continue to search the citation servers and learn bits and pieces until we have the full picture.
[1] N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos and G. Dvali, Phys. Lett. B429, 263 (1998)
You can find the pre-print here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9803315
I met Nima Arkani–Hamed, he is a very smart young guy (or was, back then), who had done a really good job about making his case for TeV scale gravity with his collaborators. At the time he had one of the most exciting ideas out there. I think that he is (unfortunately) wrong, though... and the reason why I think that is because the non-Newtonian gravity searches have severely constrained some of the predictions of TeV gravity physics. Unless they have found fairly obvious ways to work around those constraints, gravity does not happen on the TeV scale and there are no microscopic black holes to be found at LHC.
Now that's only the first of 28 references that one would have to check, if one were to read the paper and analyse it without ANY previous knowledge about the topic. I, of course, would have to, because I am not a specialist in these matters. Someone who has 20 years of experience with this, will either easily dismiss this paper, citing the required evidence, or classify it is a, probably far fetched, idea worth checking out on LHC data.
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v66/i9/e091901
This one was peer reviewed and published in Phys. Rev. D 66, 091901(R) (2002). Please note that this is a paper describing a hypothetical case, using a previously used, but by no means tested theoretical estimate. The authors do not claim to present a "theory of everything". They make a very simple observation about experimental discovery potential for which they spell out all the necessary theoretical premises. The introduction to the paper says
"It is now generally accepted that the scale of quantum
gravity COULD BE as low as a TeV [1]. IF THIS IS TRUE, then
we stand on the threshold of an exciting revolution in
our understanding of quantum gravity and perhaps even
string theory." (emphasis mine).
If nature doesn't put gravity at the TeV threshold, the paper is just that, a piece of paper with symbols on it. If the premise is wrong, so is the conclusion. Everybody who reads this starts out with that simple understanding between them and these authors. The rest of the paper could still contain technical mistakes. I am not going to analyse that... I just want to point out that I wouldn't know until I had read and understood every single sentence in it (which I didn't).
You will see how physicists teach, how they think, how they want their students to develop their own intuition that will allow them to think about complex problems of nature.
That's the real deal. FOR FREE. Stanford has some of Susskind's lectures online. Walter Lewin's MIT lectures seem a tad more dynamic, though.
This one seems to be a voice recording with a digital blackboard... interesting enough if you want to focus on the math.
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maloney/451/
http://freevideolectures.com is a very annoying site that has links to a lot of different online lectures. Pick the ones you like. IIT Madras has a series of well recorded, dry to the bone lectures on physics on there.
And there are tons of student materials online. I bet many packages contain similar homework, some might have some real gems in them.
What can I say... THIS is real physics for beginners.
http://theresonanceproject.org/research/haramein-paper-wins-award
A sentence like this though, from Dan Agin makes me lol. "It would be nothing but an entertaining philosophical idea except that when you formulate the idea quantitatively you can use the equations to predict nearly everything that happens on Earth and in the entire Cosmos to a fabulous degree of accuracy."
Physics is a profound thing. It is not so profound a thing as it sometimes claims. Physics may finally come to itself, if it ever embraces the infinite mass of the vacuum predicted, when it is no longer compelled to make **** up as in the renormalization process, or strong-force, or dark matter.
And, if Pascual Jordan is evidence of anything, it is that science is not a fit arbiter of truth, as any monster can practice science as well as any good man.
www.offthegridmpls.blogspot.com
Protons are charged. Protons have internal structure. Protons can be trivially annihilated with anti-protons and taken apart into other particles by high energy collisions. None of that is covered by his line of argument about microscopic black holes, but all of it is explained rather well by the standard model of physics.
Just saying... a little real physics knowledge can help to separate the real thing from the pretenders, even though I have to give it to this guy... he probably makes a good living with it. And that's all that counts to most folks these days, isn't it?
:-)
Have I fallen for typical pseudo-science? I am only trying to account for the vast distances between atoms in the hardest structures. Have you simply thrown him aside, or have you looked at his math?
As to whether he makes a good living, I would argue that most physicists are well compensated by the system. As to the internal structure, I do believe he accounts for that, though I don't have an opinion about his.
By the way, Quantum Physics does tell the energetic mass of the vacuum is infinite, yes? A little real physics knowledge...I can't make sense of the math, so that means I have no sense? That is the trouble with scientists, the reason many people don't trust them, and won't. It is the condescension. But maybe that's just me.
How comes that I a running this comment thread on the physics side almost by myself? None of you have posted anything substantial about QM itself... you are, at most, attacking me and my opinion about physics education or you are citing irrelevant old musings of physicists before QM was even understood.
I am, so far, the only one who has put QM into the wider perspective of QFT, in which it necessarily belongs.
Just curious... to me this is trivial stuff. How do you feel about it? Is it trivial stuff to you, too?
And my whole point is that if the layman wants to get ANY real understanding, the layman will have to spit in his hands, grab a real shovel and get dirty digging in! There is no other way of learning things.
What's so hard to understand about that?
"Drive a convertiblÂe?" Nope... why would I? I like hybrids, though. They are based on real physics understanding of vehicle design.
"Lol, sorry but from my novice view point you are sad and in need of getting out more."
And from my educated viewpoint you are like the first grade student who keeps telling his teacher that learning his ABCs is a waste of time.
"I have no more time for such nonsense,"
Looks like you don't have the time and the taste for the real thing, either. Which I knew from the first second you started whining about how hard this stuff is.
:-)
In any case, I am with David Mermin on the interpretation problem... he is said to have exclaimed "Shut up and calculate!"
And why am I with him? Because early in my career I contacted a theorist who had devoted most of his career to it. He was a broken old man who screamed at me over the phone "Young man, you are crazy. I am not taking any more students. I have ruined enough lives of young physicists.". I later met his only remaining student in person and asked him about the field... the guy was very unhappy. There has been some interesting research in the meantime, mostly motivated by quantum computing and quantum optics, but in the end it's still irrelevant... as none of it makes any observable difference.