By Hal Brown, MSW: I was a psychotherapist and not a physicist, but by chance I actually know eight physicists who live in my senior community
Introduction
This is a diary about gravity and physics, however it has nothing to do with yesterday’s diary about “political physics” which, in all modesty, is well looking at not just because it is bigly clever but because I made some dandy illustrations for it:
Now to real science…
until I go off on a tangent* which I tend to do. I won’t blame this tendency on the pandemic, Trump, or both, it’s just how my mind works.
Tangent has a dual meaning apropos to this diary. Remember sine, cosine, tangent? 1) It is a straight line or plane that touches a curve or curved surface at a point, but if extended does not cross it at that point. 2) a completely different line of thought or action: Hal quickly went off on a tangent about Trump. 3) Mathematics the trigonometric function that is equal to the ratio of the sides (other than the hypotenuse) opposite and adjacent to an angle in a right triangle.
There is a more in the news this week about gravity and it isn’t in a snarky article about Trump. It is big news if you’re a physicist.
Let’s start with what may be the major story. It was published yesterday by The American Association fo the Advancement of Science:
Quantum theory (sometimes referred to as quantum physics and quantum mechanics) is the theoretical basis of modern physics that explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level. Niels Bohr and Max Planck were two of the founding fathers of Quantum Theory. Each received a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. You may not have heard of them but you’ve heard of Einstein who is considered the third founder of Quantum Theory.
If you’re reading this I assume you know that one of the oddest, one might say craziest, aspects of quantum theory is that a particle can be in two places at once even if they are on other sides of the planet. Weirder still is that the theory says that act of a person observing the particle “collapses” it, such that it appears at random in only one of its two locations. This is an anthropocentric idea, in other words it involves a person observing, not through their own eyes, but through technology, the particle in one place that makes it disappear in the other place where another scientist has a machine detecting the same particle.
To try to better understand as aspect of quantum theory involving gravity researchers built a detector out of a crystal of germanium (a chemical element a lustrous, hard-brittle, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors silicon and tin) the size of a coffee cup.
Renowned University of Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose praised the new work. The article notes that “he thinks it’s not really possible to test his version of the model. He says he was never comfortable with particle swerves, because they might cause the universe to gain or lose energy, violating a basic principle of physics. He has spent the pandemic lockdown creating a new and improved model.”
I like the last sentence of the article...
...physicist Maaneli Derakhshani of Rutgers University, New Brunswick. All in all, he says, if gravity does cause collapse, the process has to be more complicated than Penrose originally proposed. “One could reasonably argue that … the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze… who said that physicists don’t have a sense of humor?
Tangent alert
A few months ago I was just watching a silly 2010 Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson movie on Netlix|called "How Do You Know" and saw this briefly next to a door at a university which was in one scene. I paused it and took this photo. It has the real APS logo on it. I sent it to my physicist friend:
He told me that all physicists have seen or heard the saying below, and many have versions of this t-shirt or buttons with the slogan that they picked up at one or another conference.
I’m sorry that I digressed from the point of writing this.
It has been an interesting week or two for physics news although there also has been news about black holes. I will focus on news related to quantum theory.
The above story was shared over 11,000 times so obviously lots of scientists are interested in it.
Here’s an article about the possibility of alternate universes.
Excerpt:
Quantum physics tells us that quantum particles exist in a state called superposition until they’re measured. If you imagine a quantum particle as a coin, it’s neither heads nor tails and both heads and tails until such time as a measurement is performed (you flip it, wait for it to come to a stop, and decide whether it’s heads or tails). If a quantum particle isn’t measured, it should remain in superposition.
Some quantum physicists believe that this is possible because quantum reality is comprised of more than one universe. In other words, the reason a quantum particle can be both heads and tails until it’s measured or observed, is because it exists in more than one universe at a time.
For an easier to understand article about quantum theory try this. I’m not saying I understood half of it, but it is more accessible to non-physicists and it does have a video about Schrödinger's cat.
The article begins with an intriguing introduction.
Quantum mechanics vs. common sense
Take a look at these three statements:
- When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
- It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
- A choice made in one place can’t instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this “locality”.)
These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true — or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level.
This is the strongest result yet in a long series of discoveries in quantum mechanics that have upended our ideas about reality. To understand why it's so important, let's look at this history.
Another:
Here’s an article I was interested in for personal reasons:
This is because my 65 inch LG OLED television has burn in so bad from watching MSNBC it looks like this when there’s a solid color background (from the documentary #UNFIT).
Quantum dots (QDs) are tiny semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having optical and electronic properties that differ from larger particles due to quantum mechanics. They are a central topic in nanotechnology. When the quantum dots are illuminated by UV light, an electron in the quantum dot can be excited to a state of higher energy. Wikipedia
For more recent news about quantum theory and cutting edge research click here.
Tuesday, Sep 8, 2020 · 2:27:37 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Update from Salon
In considering Einstein's legacy, though, Loeb says we have to reckon with what has and hasn't changed about the physics world. In the 1890s, when Einstein was in college, physics knowledge was a shell of what it is today. Quantum mechanics, dark matter, nuclear physics and most fundamental particles were unknown, and astronomers knew little about the nature of the universe — or even that there were other galaxies outside our own. Nowadays, many of the biggest physics discoveries happen by virtue of some of the largest and most expensive scientific instruments ever built: gravitational wave observatories, say, or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Given the landscape of physics today, could an Einstein-like physicist exist again — someone who, say, works in a patent office, quietly pondering the nature of space-time, yet whose revelations cause much of the field to be completely rethought?
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What are some of the "dark clouds" in physics, as you say?
One of the challenges is unifying quantum mechanics and gravity. So you have this huge contingency of string theories that agree among themselves that they are leading the frontier, but nevertheless, they haven't provided any concrete predictions that can be tested by experiments over the past 40 years. [Editor's note: String theory unifies quantum mechanics and gravity, but it is, as Loeb mentions, not testable as far as anyone knows.]
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So in the mainstream approach, there is this stubbornness — like, we stick to the ideas that we believe in. And then anyone that deviates from that will be sidelined. You know, anyone that considers any other theory for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity through string theory is sidelined, even though there is no reasonable evidence for string theory. So I would say the potential now for a breakthrough that will be really revolutionary is not smaller — it's actually bigger right now [than it was in Einstein's]. It's just, the social pressure is stronger.
So we do need — we desperately need another Einstein. There is no doubt.