It is coming, and impossible to stop. In fact, we are already there, but have yet only scratched the surface of an enormous iceberg, the majority of which is still hidden and unused. Those who do not realize this fact will be left helplessly behind.
In my job I often come across people - who should know better - who believe that today's
engineers just need to learn Newton's mechanics. Talk about living in the past! 300 years, to be more exact... Modern engineers will not be able to function on 300-year-old physics alone! We are talking about the people who will develop (the technical aspects of) our future society. Steam engines and other mechanical gadgets of the industrial revolution will never again lead to real breakthroughs that time has long since passed. Quantum science is going beyond the probe of atoms, and exploring the weird and wacky! New words are entering science, new ideas, theories and dimensions, String Theory, Zero Point Energy Theory, and Membrane Theory to mention a few. But the weird and wacky isn't new to science, there has always been controversy and mystery in the science of the very little.
In ancient Greece there was a controversy about the nature of light. Euclid, Ptolemy and others thought that "light" was some sort of ray that travels from the eye to the observed object. The atomists and Aristotle assumed the reverse. Nearly 800 years after Ptolemy, circa 965 CE, in Basra in what is now Iraq, Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) settled the controversy with a clever argument. He said that if you look at the Sun for a long time you will burn your eyes: this is only possible if the light is coming from the Sun to our eyes, not vice versa. In 1672 another controversy erupted over the nature of light: Newton argued that light was some sort of a particle, so that light from the sun reaches the earth because these particles could travel through the vacuum. Hooke and Huygens argued that light was some sort of wave. In 1801 Thomas Young put the matter to experimental test by doing a double slit experiment for light. The result was an interference pattern.
Thus, Newton must have been wrong: light had to be a wave. The double-slit experiment contains a lot of the best aspects of the weirdness of quantum physics for example a light shining through a small hole or slit (like in a pinhole camera) creates a spot of light on the screen (or film, or detector). However, light shown through two slits that are close together creates not two spots on the screen, but rather a series of alternating bright and dark lines with the brightest line in the exact middle of this interference pattern. This shows that light is a wave since such a pattern results from the interference of the waves coming from each slit.
However, in the year 1900 physicist Max Planck showed that certain other effects in physics could only be explained by light being a particle. Many experiments followed to also show that light was indeed also a particle (a "photon") and Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for his work showing that the particle nature of light could explain the "photoelectric effect." This was an experiment whereby low energy (red) light, when shining onto a photoelectric material, caused the material to emit low energy (slow moving) electrons, while high energy (blue) light caused the same material to emit high energy (fast moving) electrons. However, lots of red light only ever produced more low energy electrons, never any high-energy electrons. In other words, the energy could not be "saved up" but rather must be absorbed by the electrons in the photoelectric material individually. The conclusion was that light came in packets, little quantities, and behaved thus as a particle as well as a wave.
So light is both a particle and a wave. OK, kind of unexpected, but perhaps not totally weird. But the double slit experiment had another trick up its sleeve. One could send one photon (or "quantum" of energy) through a single slit at a time, with a sufficiently long interval in between, and eventually a spot builds up that looks just like the one produced when a very intense (many photons) light was sent through the slit. But then a strange thing happened. When one sends a single photon at a time (waiting between each laser pulse, for example) toward the screen when both slits are open, rather than two spots eventually building up opposite the two slit openings, what eventually builds up is the interference pattern of alternating bright and dark lines! Hmm... how can this be, if only one photon was sent through the apparatus at a time? The answer is that each individual photon must - in order to have produced an interference pattern -- have gone through both slits! This, the simplest of quantum weirdness experiments, has been the basis of many of the unintuitive interpretations of quantum physics. We can see, perhaps, how physicists might conclude, for example, that a particle of light is not a particle until it is measured at the screen. It turns out that the particle of light is rather a wave before it is measured. But it is not a wave in the ocean-wave sense. It is not a wave of matter but rather, it turns out that it is apparently a wave of probability. That is, the elementary particles making up the trees, people, and planets -- what we see around us -- are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!
The shock of matter being largely empty space may have been extreme enough -- if an atom were the size of a huge cathedral, then the electrons would be dust particles floating around at all distances inside the building, while the nucleus, or center of the atom, would be smaller than a sugar cube. But with quantum physics, even this tenuous result would be superseded by the atom itself not really being anything that exists until it is measured.
One might rightly ask, then, what does it mean to measure something? And this brings us to the Uncertainly Principle first discovered by Werner Heisenberg. Dr. Heisenberg wrote, "Some physicist would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist independently of whether we observe them. This however is impossible." If this wasn't weird enough, along came the absolute wacky in the shape of Entanglement!
Entanglement shows us that it is possible to link together two quantum particles - photons of light or atoms, for example - in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science - Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name "entanglement" called it "the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics." Entanglement is fascinating in its own right, but what makes it really special are dramatic practical applications that have become apparent in the last few years. Is it possible that entangled particles are not actually in immediate communication, but are simply programmed to behave in the same way? Much like twins separated at birth who live eerily similar lives - assume the same professions or marry similar spouses. If you take some property of a particle, the equivalent of color, say the spin of an electron, it doesn't have the value pre-programmed. It has a range of probabilities as to what the answer might be, but until you actually measure it, there is no fixed value. What happens with a pair of entangled electrons is you measure the spin of one. Until that moment, neither of them had a spin with a fixed value. But the instant you take the measurement on one, the other immediately fixes its spin (say to the opposite value).
These quantum bits were every possible color until you looked at one. Only then did it become pink, and the other instantly took on another color.
Einstein among other scientists could not accept quantum entanglement. It seems to throw out the whole notion of cause and effect, so how confident are physicists that quantum entanglement exists and what are the implications for science and the scientific method?
Einstein had problems with the whole of quantum physics - which is ironic, as it was based on his Nobel Prize winning paper on the photoelectric effect. What he didn't like was the way quantum particles don't have fixed values for their properties until they are observed - he couldn't relate to a universe where probability ruled That's why he famously said that God doesn't play dice. I think an even better quote, less well known, was when he wrote: "I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist." Einstein believed that underneath these probabilities were fixed, hidden realities we just couldn't see. That was why he dreamed up the idea of entanglement in 1935.
It was to show that either quantum theory was incomplete, because it said there was no hidden information, or it was possible to instantly influence something at a distance. As that seemed incredible, he thought it showed that quantum theory was wrong. It did take a long time to prove that entanglement truly existed. It wasn't until the 1980s that it was clearly demonstrated. But it has been shown without doubt that this is the case. Entanglement exists, and is being used in very practical ways. Entanglement doesn't throw away the concept of cause and effect. But it does underline the fact that quantum particles really do only have a range of probabilities on the values of their properties rather than fixed values. And while it seems to contradict Einstein's special relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than light, it's more likely that entanglement challenges our ideas of what distance and time really mean. Similarly, entanglement is no challenge to the scientific method.
We need to use a different kind of math, but this is still the same science. Quantum science is going beyond the probe of atoms, and exploring the weird and wacky! New words are entering science, new ideas, theories and dimensions, String Theory, Zero Point Energy
Theory, and Membrane Theory to mention a few. But the weird and wacky isn't new to science, there has always been controversy and mystery in the science of the very little.
In ancient Greece there was a controversy about the nature of light. Euclid, Ptolemy and others thought that "light" was some sort of ray that travels from the eye to the observed object.
The physicist and science philosopher Thomas Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shift". Normally science develops slowly and remains within the same broad paradigms, i.e. the same framework. But sometimes revolutions happen that are impossible to arrive at gradually. Physics has undergone four really big paradigm shifts:
1. Newton's mechanics from the 1680s.
2. Maxwell's electrodynamics from the 1860s.
3. Einstein's relativity theory of 1905 (special) and 1915 (general).
4. Quantum physics in the 1920s.
These are represented in turn by:
1. Newton's three laws of motion.
2. Maxwell's equations.
3. Einstein's equations.
4. The Schrödinger equation.
It seems that about 50 years is needed to translate revolutionary scientific discoveries into the first practical applications, and after roughly 100 years the really big money is capitalized from them: The Industrial Revolution was at its peak in the 1800s (railways, mechanical industries, etc.) and was based on Newton's equations. The Information Revolution - which we live in right now - is based on Maxwell's equations. The Quantum Revolution is underway, but has barely started. For a very long time to come, all pioneering applications (medicine, computers, communication, and every other "micro-engineering") will be based on quantum physics. AND the Bill Gates of the new era will be a quantum engineer! The truth is we use scale every waking moment without even realizing it.
Our binocular vision combined with our advanced biological processing unit, or brain as we affectionately call it, allows us to compare the scale of everything we see. Even children can tell the difference between a small object that is close by or a large object that is further away.
We are very good at scale. Local scale that is. Because even outdoors the average horizon is no more than three miles away, so our eyesight and distance perception are focused towards being more accurate within that range. Eagles that soar thousands of feet in the air might have a horizon twenty miles away and so their sight is correspondingly better than ours. You could say that when compared to us they see things in a different scale. A bigger scale. The problem is that due to our own sensory limitations we have great difficulty in visualizing dimensions or distances that fall outside our everyday experience. This is why when driving across a plain towards a distant mountain range we find it very hard to accurately estimate the remaining distance. It fools our sense of scale. And it's not just here on earth that we have problems visualizing scale.
Take our home, the solar system. How many people can say that they truly understand how vast our solar system is? Not many? Ok, let's try a thought experiment that might help.
Imagine a ten-pin bowling ball. Eight inches in diameter. This represents our sun. So lets place it at the far end of a bowling lane, right on the number one pin spot, in the middle of the lane Now where is the earth? In scale to our model sun? To answer this you will first need to visit a kitchen and extract one small peppercorn from a pepper grinder. Make sure it's not a large one though. We don't want our earth to be too big. Now, going back to our imaginary sun, how far away do you think the peppercorn should be? Half way down the lane? Just past the arrows? At the foul line perhaps? The surprising answer is that you would need to walk backwards another eighteen feet, or six large paces, from the foul line. Just think about that for a moment. A peppercorn seventy eight feet away! And in truth, as planets go, we are actually pretty close to the sun. If you wanted to put Pluto (a pinhead) into our scale model you would have to carry on walking for almost exactly a mile! I hope this gives some idea of the vast scale of our solar system and the ratio of sizes and
distances involved. In fact ratios are something else we seem to have a natural ability with. Maybe it's because we have ten fingers, but everyone seems to understand something that is ten times bigger or ten times smaller.
Anyway, just for fun, let's work out some interesting ratios. Ratios that everybody can understand. First let's work out the total volume of our solar system. To do this we need to take the average distance to Pluto (it's orbit is not exactly circular) and use it to work out the volume of a sphere that would include all the planets. It comes to approximately
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles as it happens. Which is pretty big.
Now let's work out how much of that volume is habitable to us humans. To do this we need to work out the volume contained in our breathable atmosphere. If we assume that we can inhabit a zone of the earths surface that extends from sea level to about three miles above it we can then work out the total volume we have to live in. First we need to work out the volume of the earth. To keep things simple we will use an average radius that ignores the bulge caused by the earths rotation. Taking this average radius of 3,960 miles gives us a volume of 260,120,256,445 cubic miles. So if we then add three miles to our radius we can work out the volume including our habitable atmosphere.Which comes to 260,711,886,824
So to work out our actual 'living space' we simply subtract one from the other. It comes to about 591,000,000 cubic miles.Which sounds like a lot. But remember that volume we worked out earlier? The volume of the solar system. The one with a two followed by twenty nine zeros...
So let's have some fun and work out the percentage of our solar system that we can actually live in.To do this we divide our living space by the total volume of the solar system and then multiply the result by one hundred...Right now you're probably expecting me to come up with an answer.But the truth is I can't. The calculator on my computer just says 0.00! However Google will come to the rescue. Its web based calculator function can handle such vast numbers, but the result of this one is actually pretty small...0.000000000000000000029%!
To put that in perspective, it means that less than one third of one million million millionth of one percent of our solar system is inhabitable. That's a bit like saying all we have to live on is one grain of sand in the middle of the Sahara desert! It's that small. And it's not like we can go anywhere else either. Our nearest neighborhood star is four light years away, or about twenty four trillion miles. And it has no habitable planets we know of. Even if it did, and we could travel at 10% of the speed of light, (or an amazing sixty seven million miles an hour) it would still take forty years to get there ! Even if we do find evidence of other earth-like planets it's highly unlikely we would ever be able to get there because of the sheer distances involved. So here we are, stuck on the solid skin of an impossibly small speck of molten rock in the middle of an unimaginably vast universe with nowhere to go. And the best bit? We are destroying it. We poison its rivers, we pollute its atmosphere, we cut down its forests, we dump our most dangerous waste in its seas. And usually to make nothing more than a quick buck. Possibly because within our own limited human perception making a quick buck can seem like a pretty big deal? But as I said in the beginning, it's all about scale. And our real problem is that not enough people understand the true scale of the problem we face. It is both the biggest and smallest problem in our Universe. And just like the guy driving towards a distant mountain range, its scale tricks the mind's eye.
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