Tag: Quantum

Reflections in Einstein’s bubble

On By rolcottIn Mathematics: Dimensions, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Light and Relativity, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s something peculiar in this earlier post where I embroidered on Einstein’s gambit in his epic battle with Bohr.  Here, I’ll self-plagiarize it for you…

Consider some nebula a million light-years away.  A million years ago an electron wobbled in the nebular cloud, generating a spherical electromagnetic wave that expanded at light-speed throughout the Universe.

Last night you got a glimpse of the nebula when that lightwave encountered a retinal cell in your eye.  Instantly, all of the wave’s energy, acting as a photon, energized a single electron in your retina.  That particular lightwave ceased to be active elsewhere in your eye or anywhere else on that million-light-year spherical shell.

Suppose that photon was yellow light, smack in the middle of the optical spectrum.  Its wavelength, about 580nm, says that the single far-away electron gave its spherical wave about 2.1eV (3.4×10-19 joules) of energy.  By the time it hit your eye that energy was spread over an area of a trillion square lightyears.  Your retinal cell’s cross-section is about 3 square micrometers so the cell can intercept only a teeny fraction of the wavefront.  Multiplying the wave’s energy by that fraction, I calculated that the cell should be able to collect only 10-75 joules.  You’d get that amount of energy from a 100W yellow light bulb that flashed for 10-73 seconds.  Like you’d notice.

But that microminiscule blink isn’t what you saw.  You saw one full photon-worth of yellow light, all 2.1eV of it, with no dilution by expansion.  Water waves sure don’t work that way, thank Heavens, or we’d be tsunami’d several times a day by earthquakes occurring near some ocean somewhere.

Feynman diagramHere we have a Feynman diagram, named for the Nobel-winning (1965) physicist who invented it and much else.  The diagram plots out the transaction we just discussed.  Not a conventional x-y plot, it shows Space, Time and particles.  To the left, that far-away electron emits a photon signified by the yellow wiggly line.  The photon has momentum so the electron must recoil away from it.

The photon proceeds on its million-lightyear journey across the diagram.  When it encounters that electron in your eye, the photon is immediately and completely converted to electron energy and momentum.

Here’s the thing.  This megayear Feynman diagram and the numbers behind it are identical to what you’d draw for the same kind of yellow-light electron-photon-electron interaction but across just a one-millimeter gap.

It’s an essential part of the quantum formalism — the amount of energy in a given transition is independent of the mechanical details (what the electrons were doing when the photon was emitted/absorbed, the photon’s route and trip time, which other atoms are in either neighborhood, etc.).  All that matters is the system’s starting and ending states.  (In fact, some complicated but legitimate Feynman diagrams let intermediate particles travel faster than lightspeed if they disappear before the process completes.  Hint.)

Because they don’t share a common history our nebular and retinal electrons are not entangled by the usual definition.  Nonetheless, like entanglement this transaction has Action-At-A-Distance stickers all over it.  First, and this was Einstein’s objection, the entire wave function disappears from everywhere in the Universe the instant its energy is delivered to a specific location.  Second, the Feynman calculation describes a time-independent, distance-independent connection between two permanently isolated particles.  Kinda romantic, maybe, but it’d be a boring movie plot.

As Einstein maintained, quantum mechanics is inherently non-local.  In QM change at one location is instantaneously reflected in change elsewhere as if two remote thingies are parts of one thingy whose left hand always knows what its right hand is doing.

Bohr didn’t care but Einstein did because relativity theory is based on geometry which is all about location. In relativity, change here can influence what happens there only by way of light or gravitational waves that travel at lightspeed.

In his book Spooky Action At A Distance, George Musser describes several non-quantum examples of non-locality.  In each case, there’s no signal transmission but somehow there’s a remote status change anyway.  We don’t (yet) know a good mechanism for making that happen.

It all suggests two speed limits, one for light and matter and the other for Einstein’s “deeper reality” beneath quantum mechanics.

~~ Rich Olcott

Gargh, His Heirs, and the AAAD Problem

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Gargh the thinkerGargh, proto-humanity’s foremost physicist 2.5 million years ago, opened a practical investigation into how motion works.  “I throw rock, hit food beast, beast fall down yes.  Beast stay down no.  Need better rock.”  For the next couple million years, we put quite a lot of effort into making better rocks and better ways to throw them.  Less effort went into understanding throwing.

There seemed to be two kinds of motion.  The easier kind to understand was direct contact — “I push rock, rock move yes.  Rock stop move when rock hit thing that move no.”  The harder kind was when there wasn’t direct contact — “I throw rock up, rock hit thing no but come back down.  Why that?”

Gargh was the first but hardly the last physicist to puzzle over the Action-At-A-Distance problem (a.k.a. “AAAD”).  Intuition tells us that between pusher and pushee there must be a concrete linkage to convey the push-force.  To some extent, the history of physics can be read as a succession of solutions to the question, “What linkage induces this apparent case of AAAD?”

Most of humanity was perfectly content with AAAD in the form of magic of various sorts.  To make something happen you had to wish really hard and/or depend on the good will of some (generally capricious) elemental being.

aristotle 1Aristotle wasn’t satisfied with anything so unsystematic.  He was just full of theories, many of which got in each other’s way.  One theory was that things want to go where they’re comfortable  because of what they’re made of — stones, for instance, are made of earth so naturally they try to get back home and that’s why we see them fall downwards (no concrete linkage, so it’s still AAAD).

Unfortunately, that theory didn’t account for why a thrown rock doesn’t just fall straight down but instead goes mostly in the direction it’s thrown.  Aristotle (or one of his followers) tied that back to one of his other theories, “Nature hates a vacuum.”  As the rock flies along, it pushes the air aside (direct contact) and leaves a vacuum behind it. More air rushes in to fill the vacuum and pushes the rock ahead (more direct contact).

We got a better (though still AAAD) explanation in the 17th Century when physicists invented the notions of gravity and inertia.Newton 204

Newton made a ground-breaking claim in his Principia.  He proposed that the Solar System is held together by a mysterious AAAD force he called gravity.  When critics asked how gravity worked he shrugged, “I do not form hypotheses” (though he did form hypotheses for light and other phenomena).

Inertia is also AAAD.  Those 17th Century savants showed that inertial forces push mass towards the Equator of a rotating object.  An object that’s completely independent of the rest of the Universe has no way to “know” that it’s rotating so it ought to be a perfect sphere.  In fact, the Sun and each of its planets are wider at the equator than you’d expect from their polar diameters.  That non-sphere-ness says they must have some AAAD interaction with the rest of the Universe.  A similar argument applies to linear motion; the general case is called Mach’s Principle.
JCMaxwell

The ancients knew of the mysterious AAAD agents electricity and its fraternal twin, magnetism.  However, in the 19th Century James Clerk Maxwell devised a work-around.  Just as Newton “invented” gravity, Maxwell “invented” the electromagnetic field.  This invisible field isn’t a material object.  However, waves in the field transmit electromagnetic forces everywhere in the Universe.  Not AAAD, sort of.

It wasn’t long before someone said, “Hey, we can calculate gravity that way, too.”  That’s why we now speak of a planet’s gravitational field and gravitational waves.

But the fields still felt like AAAD because they’re not concrete.  Some modern physicists stand that objection on its head.  Concrete objects, they say, are made of atoms which themselves are nothing more than persistent fluctuations in the electromagnetic and gravitational fields.  By that logic, the fields are what’s fundamental — all motion is by direct contact.einstein-tongue edged

Einstein moved resolutely in both directions.  He negated gravity’s AAAD-ness by identifying mass-contorted space as the missing linkage.  On the other hand, he “invented” quantum entanglement, the ultimate spooky AAAD.

 ~~ Rich Olcott

Is there stuff behind the stats?

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

dragon plate 3It would have been awesome to watch Dragon Princes in battle (from a safe hiding place), but I’d almost rather have witnessed “The Tussles in Brussels,” the two most prominent confrontations between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.

The Tussles would be the Fifth (1927) and Seventh (1933) Solvay Conferences.  Each conference was to center on a particular Quantum Mechanics application (“Electrons and Photons” and “The Atomic Nucleus,” respectively).  However, the Einstein-Bohr discussions went right to the fundamentals — exactly what does a QM calculation tell us?

Einstein’s strength was in his physical intuition.  By all accounts he was a good mathematician but not a great one.  However, he was very good indeed at identifying important problems and guiding excellent mathematicians as he and they attacked those problems together.

Einstein 187Like Newton, Einstein was a particle guy.  He based his famous thought experiments on what his intuition told him about how particles would behave in a given situation.  That intuition and that orientation led him to paradoxes such as entanglement, the EPR Paradox, and the instantaneously collapsing spherical lightwave we discussed earlier.  Einstein was convinced that the particles QM workers think about (photons, electrons, etc.) must in fact be manifestations of some deeper, more fine-grained reality.

bohr 187Bohr was six years younger than Einstein.  Both Bohr and Einstein had attained Directorship of an Institute at age 35, but Bohr’s has his name on it.  He started out as a particle guy — his first splash was a trio of papers that treated the hydrogen atom like a one-planet solar system.  But that model ran into serious difficulties for many-electron atoms so Bohr switched his allegiance from particles to Schrödinger’s wave theory.  Solve a Schrödinger equation and you can calculate statistics like average value and estimated spread around the average for a given property (position, momentum, spin, etc).

wittgenstein 187Here’s where Ludwig Wittgenstein may have come into the picture.  Wittgenstein is famous for his telegraphically opaque writing style and for the fact that he spent much of his later life disagreeing with his earlier writings.  His 1921 book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (in German despite the Latin title) was a primary impetus to the Logical Positivist school of philosophy.  I’m stripping out much detail here, but the book’s long-lasting impact on QM may have come from its Proposition 7: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“

I suspect that Bohr was deeply influenced by the LP movement, which was all the rage in the mid-1920s while he was developing the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM.

An enormous literature, including quite a lot of twaddle, has grown up around the question, “Once you’ve derived the Schrödinger wave function for a given system, how do you interpret what you have?”  Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation was that the function can only describe relative probabilities for the results of a measurement.  It might tell you, for instance, that there’s a 50% chance that a particle will show up between here and here but only a 5% chance of finding it beyond there.

Following Logical Positivism all the way to the bank, Bohr denounced as nonsensical or even dangerously misleading any attachment of further meaning to a QM result.  He went so far as to deny the very existence of a particle prior to a measurement that detects it.  That’s serious Proposition 7 there.

I’ve read several accounts of the Solvay Conference debates between Einstein and Bohr.  All of them agree that the conversation was inconclusive but decisive.  Einstein steadfastly maintained that QM could not be a complete description of reality whilst Bohr refused to even consider anything other than inscrutable randomness beneath the statistics.  The audience consensus went to Bohr.

None of the accounts, even the very complete one that I found in George Musser’s book Spooky Action at A Distance, provide a satisfactory explanation for why Bohr’s interpretation dominates today.  Einstein described multiple situations where QM’s logic appeared to contradict itself or firmly established experimental results.  However, at each challenge Bohr deflected the argument from Einstein’s central point to argue a subsidiary issue such as whether Einstein was denying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Albert still stood at the end of the bouts, but Niels got the spectators’ decision on points.  Did the ref make the difference?

~~ Rich Olcott

Gin And The Art of Quantum Mechanics

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, Uncategorized2 Comments

“Fancy a card game, Johnny?”
“Sure, Jennie, deal me in.  Wot’re we playin’?”
“Gin rummy sound good?”

Great idea, and it fits right in with our current Entanglement theme.  The aspect of Entanglement that so bothered Einstein, “spooky action at a distance,” can be just as spooky close-up.  Check out this magic example — go ahead, it’s a fun trick to figure out.

Spooky, hey?  And it all has to do with cards being two-dimensional.  I know, as objects they’ve got three dimensions same as anyone (four, if you count time), but functionally they have only two dimensions — rank and suit.gin rummy hand

When you’re looking at a gin rummy hand you need to consider each dimension separately.  The queens in this hand form a set — three cards of the same rank.  So do the three nines.  In the suit dimension, the 4-5-6-7 run is a sequence of ranks all in the same suit.Gin rummy chart

A physicist might say that evaluating a gin rummy hand is a separable problem, because you can consider each dimension on its own. <Hmm … three queens, that’s a set, and three nines, another set.  The rest are hearts.  Hey, the hearts are in sequence, woo-hoo!> 

“Gin!”

If you chart the hand, the run and sets and their separated dimensions show up clearly even if you don’t know cards.

A standard strategy for working a complex physics problem is to look for a way to split one kind of motion out from what else is going on.  If the whole shebang is moving in the z-direction, you can address  the z-positions, z-velocities and z-forces as an isolated sub-problem and treat the x and y stuff separately.  Then, if everything is rotating in the xy plane you may be able to separate the angular motion from the in-and-out (radial) motion.

But sometimes things don’t break out so readily.  One nasty example would be several massive stars flying toward each other at odd angles as they all dive into a black hole.  Each of the stars is moving in the black hole’s weirdly twisted space, but it’s also tugged at by every other star.  An astrophysicist would call the problem non-separable and probably try simulating it in a computer instead of setting up a series of ugly calculus problems.Trick chart

The card trick video uses a little sleight-of-eye to fake a non-separable situation.  Here’s the chart, with green dots for the original set of cards and purple dots for the final hand after “I’ve removed the card you thought of.”  The kings are different, and so are the queens and jacks.  As you see, the reason the trick works is that the performer removed all the cards from the original hand.

The goal of the illusion is to confuse you by muddling ranks with suits.  What had been a king of diamonds in the first position became a king of spades, whereas the other king became a queen.  You were left with an entangled perception of each card’s two dimensions.

In quantum mechanics that kind of entanglement crops up any time you’ve got two particles with a common history.  It’s built into the math — the two particles evolve together and the model gives you no way to tell which is which.

Suppose for instance that an electron pair has zero net spin  (spin direction is a dimension in QM like suit is a dimension in cards).  If the electron going to the left is spinning clockwise, the other one must be spinning counterclockwise.  Or the clockwise one may be the one going to the right — we just can’t tell from the math which is which until we test one of them.  The single test settles the matter for both.

Einstein didn’t like that ambiguity.  His intuition told him that QM’s statistics only summarize deeper happenings.  Bohr opposed that idea, holding that QM tells us all we can know about a system and that it’s nonsense to even speak of properties that cannot be measured.  Einstein called the deeper phenomena “elements of reality” though they’re currently referred to as “hidden variables.”  Bohr won the battle but maybe not the war — Einstein had such good intuition.

~~ Rich Olcott

Oh, what an entangled wave we weave

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Here’s the poly bag wiff our meals, Johnny.  ‘S got two boxes innit, but no labels which is which.”
“I ordered the mutton pasty, Jennie, anna fish’n’chips for you.”
“You c’n have this box, Johnny.  I’ll take the other one t’ my place to watch telly.”
…
<ring>
” ‘Ullo, Jennie?  This is Johnny.  The box over ‘ere ‘as the fish.  You’ve got mine!”

In a sense their supper order arrived in an entangled state.  Our friends knew what was in both boxes together, but they didn’t know what was in either box separately.  Kind of a Schrödinger’s Cat situation — they had to treat each box as 50% baked pasty and 50% fried codfish.

But as soon as Johnny opened one box, he knew what was in the other one even though it was somewhere else.  Jennie could have been in the next room or the next town or the next planet — Johnnie would have known, instantly, which box had his meal no matter how far away that other box was.

By the way, Jennie was free to open her box on the way home but that’d make no difference to Johnnie — the box at his place would have stayed a mystery to him until either he opened it or he talked to her.

Entangled 2Information transfer at infinite speed?  Of course not, because neither hungry person knows what’s in either box until they open one or until they exchange information.  Even Skype operates at light-speed (or slower).

But that’s not quite quantum entanglement, because there’s definite content (meat pie or batter-fried cod) in each box.  In the quantum world, neither box holds something definite until at least one box is opened.  At that point, ambiguity flees from both boxes in an act of global correlation.

There’s strong experimental evidence that entangled particles literally don’t know which way is up until one of them is observed.  The paired particle instantaneously gets that message no matter how far away it is.

Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity is involved here.  He held that because it’s impossible to measure both wave and particle properties at the same time, a quantized entity acts as a wave globally and only becomes local when it stops somewhere.

Here’s how extreme the wave/particle global/local thing can get.  Consider some nebula a million light-years away.  A million years ago an electron wobbled in the nebular cloud, generating a spherical electromagnetic wave that expanded at light-speed throughout the Universe.

cats-eye nebula
The Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543)
courtesy of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

Last night you got a glimpse of the nebula when that lightwave encountered a retinal cell in your eye.  Instantly, all of the wave’s energy, acting as a photon, energized a single electron in your retina.  That particular lightwave ceased to be active elsewhere in your eye or anywhere else on that million-light-year spherical shell.

Surely there was at least one other being, on Earth or somewhere else, that was looking towards the nebula when that wave passed by.  They wouldn’t have seen your photon nor could you have seen any of theirs.  Somehow your wave’s entire spherical shell, all 1012 square lightyears of it, instantaneously “knew” that your eye’s electron had extracted the wave’s energy.

But that directly contradicts a bedrock of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.  His fundamental assumption was that nothing (energy, matter or information) can go faster than the speed of light in vacuum.  STR says it’s impossible for two distant points on that spherical wave to communicate in the way that quantum theory demands they must.

Want some irony?  Back in 1906, Einstein himself “invented” the photon in one of his four “Annus mirabilis” papers.  (The word “photon” didn’t come into use for another decade, but Einstein demonstrated the need for it.)  Building on Planck’s work, Einstein showed that light must be emitted and absorbed as quantized packets of energy.

It must have taken a lot of courage to write that paper, because Maxwell’s wave theory of light had been firmly established for forty years prior and there’s a lot of evidence for it.  Bottom line, though, is that Einstein is responsible for both sides of the wave/particle global/local puzzle that has bedeviled Physics for a century.

~~ Rich Olcott

Think globally, act locally. Electrons do.

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Watcha, Johnnie, you sure ‘at particle’s inna box?”
“O’course ’tis, Jennie!  Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Me Mam sez particles can tunnel outta boxes ’cause they’re waves.”
“Can’t be both, Jessie.”

Double slit experiment
The double-slit experiment.
An electron beam travels from the source at left to a display screen. In between there’s a barrier with two narrow slits.

Maybe it can.

Nobel-winning (1965) physicist Richard Feynman said the double-slit experiment (diagrammed here) embodies the “central mystery” of Quantum Mechanics.

When the bottom slit is covered the display screen shows just what you’d expect — a bright area  opposite the top slit.

When both slits are open, the screen shows a banded pattern you see with waves.  Where a peak in a top-slit wave meets a peak in the bottom-slit wave, the screen shines brightly.  Where a peak meets a trough the two waves cancel and the screen is dark.  Overall there’s a series of stripes.  So electrons are waves, right?

But wait.  If we throttle the beam current way down, the display shows individual speckles where each electron hits.  So the electrons are particles, right?

Now for the spooky part.  If both slits are open to a throttled beam those singleton speckles don’t cluster behind the slits as you’d expect particles to do.  A speckle may appear anywhere on the screen, even in an apparently blocked-off region.  What’s more, when you send out many electrons one-by-one their individual hits cluster exactly where the bright stripes were when the beam was running full-on.

It’s as though each electron becomes a wave that goes through both slits, interferes with itself, and then goes back to being a particle!

By the way, this experiment isn’t a freak observation.  It’s been repeated with the same results many times, not just with electrons but also with light (photons), atoms, and even massive molecules like buckyballs (fullerene spheres that contain 60 carbon atoms).  In each case, the results indicate that the whatevers have a dual character — as a localized particle AND as a wave that reacts to the global environment.

Physicists have been arguing the “Which is it?” question ever since Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, the 7th Duc de Broglie, raised it in his 1924 PhD Thesis (for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1929 — not bad for a beginner).  He showed that any moving “particle” comes along with a “wave” whose peak-to-peak wavelength is inversely proportional to the particle’s mass times its velocity.  The longer the wavelength, the less well you know where the thing is.

I just had to put numbers to de Broglie’s equation.  With Newton in mind, I measured one of the apples in my kitchen.  To scale everything, I assumed each object moved by one of its diameters per second.  (OK, I cheated for the electron — modern physics says it’s just a point, so I used a not-really-valid classical calculation to get something to work with.)

“Particle” Mass, kilograms Diameter, meters Wavelength, meters Wavelength, diameters
Apple 0.2 0.07 7.1×10-33 1.0×10-31
Buckyball 1.2×10-24 1.0×10-9 0.083 8.3×10+7
Hydrogen atom 1.7×10-27 1.0×10-10 600 6.0×10+12
Electron 9.1×10-31 3.0×10-17 3.7×10+12 1.2×10+29

That apple has a wave far smaller than any of its hydrogen atoms so I’ll have no trouble grabbing it for a bite.  Anything tinier than a small virus is spread way out unless it’s moving pretty fast, as in a beam apparatus.  For instance, an electron going at 1% of light-speed has a wavelength only a nanometer wide.

Different physicists have taken different positions on the “particle or wave?” question.  Duc de Broglie claimed that both exist — particles are real and they travel where their waves tell them to.  Bohr and Heisenberg went the opposite route, saying that the wave’s not real, it’s only a mathematical device for calculating relative probabilities for measuring this or that value.  Furthermore, the particle doesn’t exist as such until a measurement determines its location or momentum.  Einstein and Schrödinger liked particles.  Feynman and Dirac just threw up their hands and calculated.

Which brings us to the other kind of quantum spookiness — “entanglement.”  In fact, Einstein actually used the word spukhafte (German for “spooky”) in a discussion of the notion.  He really didn’t like it and for good reason — entanglement rudely collides with his own Theory of Relativity.  But that’s another story.

~~ Rich Olcott

Location, Location, Location

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“Hoy, Johnny, still got that particle inna box?”
“Sure do, Jessie.”
“So where’s hit in there?”
“Me Pap says hit’s spread-out like but hit’s mostly inna middle.”
“Why’s hit spread then?”
“The more I taps the box, the wider hit spreads. Sommat to do wiff energy.”

PIB0
Newton would have answered Jessie’s question by saying, sort of, “Pick a point anywhere in the box.  The probability that the particle is at that point is equal to the probability that it’s at any other point.” PIB stack

Quantum physicists take a different approach. They start by saying, “We know there’s zero probability that the particle is anywhere outside of the box, so there must be zero probability that it’s exactly at any wall.”

Now for a trick that we’re actually quite used to.  When you listen to an orchestra, you can usually pick out the notes being played by a particular instrument.  Someone blessed/cursed with perfect pitch can tell when a note is just a leetle bit flat, say an A being played at 438 cycles instead of 440. You can create any sound by mixing together the right frequencies in the right proportion. That’s how an MP3 recorder does it.

QM solutions use that strategy the other way round. They calculate probabilities by adding together sets of symmetric elementary shapes, all of which are zero at certain places, like the box walls. For instance, on average Johnnie’s particle will be near the middle of his box, so we start a set with an orange mound of probability right there. That mound is like our base frequency — it has no nodes, no non-wall places where the probability is zero.

Then we add a first overtone, the one-node yellow shape that represents equal probability on either side of a plane of zero probability.

Two nodal planes at right angles give us the four-peaked green shape. Further steps up have more and more nodal planes (cyan then blue, and so on). The video shows the running total up to 46 nodes.

.PIB sum
As we add more nodes, the cumulative shape gets smoother and broader.  After a huge number of steps, the sum will look pretty much like Newton’s (except for right at the walls, of course).

So if the classical and QM boxes wind up looking the same, why go to all that trouble?  Because those nodes don’t come for free.

Inverse tennisSuppose you’re playing goalie in an inverse tennis game.  There’s a player in each service box.  Your job is to run the net line using your rackets to prevent either player from getting a ball into the opposing half-court.  Basically, you want the ball’s locations to look like the single-node yellow shape up above.  You’ll have to work hard to do that.

Now suppose they give you a second, crosswise net (the green shape).  You’re going to have to work twice as hard.  Now add a third net, and so on … each additional nodal plane is going to be harder (cost more energy) to keep empty.  Not a problem if you have an infinite amount of energy.

Enter Planck and Einstein.  They showed there’s a limit for small systems like atoms and molecules.  Electrons dash about in atom- or molecule-shaped boxes, but the principle is the same.  The total probability distribution is still the sum of bounded elementary shapes.  However, you can’t use an infinite number of them.  Rather, you start with the cheapest shapes (the fewest nodes) and build upward.

Tally two electrons for each shape you use.  Why two?  Because that’s the rule, no arguments.

It’s important to realize that QM does NOT say that two specific electrons occupy one shape.  All the charge is spread out over all the shapes — we’re just keeping count.

When you run out of electrons the accumulated model shows everything we can know about the electronic configuration.  You won’t know where any particular electron is, but you’ll know where some electron spends some time.  For a chemist that’s the important thing — the peaks and nodes, the centers of negative and positive charge, are the most likely regions for chemical reactions to happen.

Johnnie’s energetic taps make his particle boldly go where no particle has gone before.

~~ Rich Olcott

Particles and Poetry

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“Hoy, Johnny, wotcher got inna box?”
“Hit’s a particle, Jessie.”
“Ooo, lovely for you.  Umm… wot’s a particle then?”
“Me Pap says hit’s sommat you calc’late about wiffout knowin’ wot ’tis.”

Pap’s right.  Newton was a particle guy all the way (he was a strong supporter of the idea that light is composed of particles).  One of his most important insights was that he could simplify gravitational calculations if he replaced an object with an equally massive “particle” located at the object’s center of mass.  Could be a planet, or a moon, or that apple — he could treat each of them as a “particle.”  That worked fine for his purposes, because the distances between his object centers were vastly larger than the object sizes.

Fleas
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em / And little fleas have lesser fleas and so on infinitum.” ~~ Augustus De Morgan

It took Roche to work out what happens when the distances get small.  Gravitational forces break the original “particles” into littler particles.  And when two of the little ones approach closely enough they break up, and then those break up…  You get the idea.  Take the process far enough and you get Saturn’s Rings, for instance.

But the analysis can keep going.  Consider one “particle” in Saturn’s A-ring.  It’s probably about 3″ across, made of ice, and contains something like 1024 particles that happen to be molecules of H2O.  Each molecule contains 3 nuclei (2 protons and one oxygen nucleus) and 10 electrons, all 13 of which merit “particle” status if you’re calculating molecules.  They’re all held together by a blizzard of photons carrying the electromagnetic forces between them.  The oxygen nucleus contains 16 nuclear particles, each of which contains 3 quarks.  The quark structures would fly apart except for a host of gluons that pass back and forth transmitting the nuclear strong force.  Hooboy, do we got particles.

“Particle” is a slippery word.  For Newton’s purposes, if an object is small relative to its distance from other objects, that was all he needed to know to treat it as a particle.

One dictionary specifies “a small localized object which has identifiable physical or chemical properties such as volume or mass.”  However, there are theoretical grounds to believe that the classic “particle of light,” the photon, has neither mass nor volume.  Physicists have had long arguments trying to devise a good working definition.  Nobelist (1999) Gerard ‘t Hooft ended one such discussion by saying, “A particle is fundamental when it’s useful to think of it as fundamental.”

It may seem a little strange for a physicist to argue for imprecision.  In fact, ‘t Hooft was arguing for a broad, even poetic but still precise understanding of the word.

Poets use metaphor to help us understand the world.  Part of their art is to pack as much meaning as they can into the minimum number of words.  In the same way, scientists use mathematics to pack observed relationships into a simile called an equation  — a brief bit of math may connect and illuminate many disparate phenomena.

Think of physics as metaphor, with numbers.

Newton’s Law of Gravity works for for galaxies roving through a cluster and for basketball-sized satellites orbiting Earth and for stars circling a black hole (if they don’t get too close).  Maxwell’s Equations, just 30 symbols including parentheses and equal signs, give the speed of light and describe the operation of electric motors.  The particle physicists’ Standard Model makes predictions that match experimental results to more than a dozen decimal places.

Good equations are so successful that Nobelist (1963) Eugene Wigner wrote an influential paper entitled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

We sometimes get into trouble by confusing metaphor with reality.  Poetic metaphors can be carried too far — Hamlet’s lungs were not in fact filling with water from his “sea of troubles.”

Mathematical models can also be carried too far.  Popular (and practitioner) discussion of quantum mechanics is rife with over-extended metaphors.  QM calculations yield only statistical results — an average position, say, plus or minus so much.  It’s an average, but of what?  The “many worlds” hypothesis is an unnecessarily long jump.  There are simpler, less extravagant ways to account for statistical uncertainty. les Etats Unis

~~ Rich Olcott

Perturbed? You’re not the only one

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment
Dolls
Successive approximations
to a real girl, but still not there

It started with the Babylonians.  The Greeks abhorred the notion.  The Egyptians and Romans couldn’t have gotten along without it. Only 1600 years later did Newton gave final polishing to … The Method of Successive Approximations.

Stay with me, we’ll get to The Chicken soon.

Suppose for some weird reason you wanted to know the square root of 2701.  Any Babylonian could see immediately that 2701 is a bit less than 3600 = 602, so as a first approximation they’d guess ½(60 + (2701/60)) = 52.5.  They’d do the multiplication to check: 52.5×52.5 = 2756.25.

Well, 52.5 is closer than 60 but not close enough.  So they’d plug that number into the same formula to get the next successive approximation: ½(52.5 + 2701/52.5) = 51.97.  Check it: 51.97×51.97 = 2700.88.  That was probably good enough for government work in Babylonia, but if the boss wanted an even better estimate they could go around the loop again.

Scientists and engineers tackle a complex problem piecewise.  Start by looking for a simple problem you know how to solve. Adjust that solution little by little to account for the ways in which the real system differs from the simple case.  Successive Approximation is only one of many adjustment strategies invented over the centuries.

The most widely-used technique is called Perturbation Theory (which has nothing to do with the ways kids find to get on their parents’ nerves).  The strategy is to find some single parameter, maybe a ratio of two masses or the relative strength of a particle-particle interaction.  For a realistic solution, it’s important that the parameter’s value be small compared to other quantities in the problem.

Simplify the original problem by keeping that parameter in the equations but assume that it’s zero.  When you’ve found a solution to that problem, you “perturb” the solution — you see what happens to the model when you allow the parameter to be non-zero.

There’s an old story, famous among physicists and engineers, about an association of farmers who wanted to design an optimum chicken-raising operation.  Maybe with an optimal chicken house they could heat the place with the birds’ own body heat, things like that.  They called in an engineering consultant.  He looked around some running farms, took lots of measurements, and went away to compute.  A couple of weeks later he came back, with slides.  (I told you it’s an old story.)  He started to walk the group though his logic, but he lost them when he opened his pitch with, “Assume a spherical chicken…”

Fat chick bank
Henrietta
Fat Chicken Bank by Becky Zee

Now, he may actually have been on the right track.  It’s a known fact that many biological processes (digestion, metabolism, drug dosage, etc.) depend on an organism’s surface area.  A chicken’s surface area could be key to calculating her heat production.  But chickens (for example, our charming Henrietta) have a complicated shape with a poorly-defined surface area.  The engineer’s approximation strategy must have been to estimate each bird as a sphere with a tweakable perturbation parameter reflecting how spherical they aren’t.

Then, of course, he’d have to apply a second adjustment for feathers, but I digress.

Now here’s the thing.  In quantum mechanics there’s only a half-dozen generic systems with exact solutions qualifying them to be “simple” Perturbation Theory starters.  Johnny’s beloved Particle In A Box (coming next week) is one of them.  The others all depend in similar logic — the particle (there’s always only one of them) is confined to a region which contains places where the particle’s not allowed to be. (There’s one exception: the Free Particle has no boundaries and therefore is evenly smeared across the Universe.)

Virtually all other quantum-based results — multi-electron atoms, molecular structures, Feynman diagrams for sub-atomic physics, string theories, whatever — depend on Perturbation Theory.  (The exceptions are topology and group-theory techniques that generally attempt to produce qualitative rather quantitative predictions.)  They need those tweakable parameters.

In quantum-chemical calculations the perturbation parameters are generally reasonably small or at least controllable.  That’s not true for many of the other areas.  This issue is especially problematic for string theory.  In many of its proposed problem solutions no-one knows whether a first-, second- or higher-level approximation even exists, much less whether it would produce reasonable predictions.

I find that perturbing.

~~ Rich Olcott

Smack-dab in the middle

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, General: Fun Stuff, Mathematics: Dimensions, UncategorizedLeave a comment

BridgeSee that little guy on the bridge, suspended halfway between all the way down and all the way up?  That’s us on the cosmic size scale.

I suspect there’s a lesson there on how to think about electrons and quantum mechanics.

Let’s start at the big end.  The physicists tell us that light travels at 300,000 km/s, and the astronomers tell us that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old.  Allowing for leap years, the oldest photons must have taken about 4.3×1017 seconds to reach us, during which time they must have covered 1.3×1026 meters.  Double that to get the diameter of the visible Universe, 2.6×1026 meters.  The Universe probably is even bigger than that, but far as I can see that’s as far as we can see.

At the small end there’s the Planck length, which takes a little explaining.  Back in 1899, Max Planck published his epochal paper showing that light happens piecewise (we now call them photons).  In that paper, he combined several “universal constants” to derive a convenient (for him) universal unit of length: 1.6×10-35 meters.  It’s certainly an inconvenient number for day-to-day measurements (“Gracious, Junior, how you’ve grown!  You’re now 8×1034 Planck-lengths tall.”).  However, theoretical physicists have saved barrels of ink and hours of keyboarding by using Planck-lengths and other such “natural units” in their work instead of explicitly writing down all the constants.

Furthermore, there are theoretical reasons to believe that the smallest possible events in the Universe occur at the scale of Planck lengths.  For instance, some theories suggest that it’s impossible to measure the distance between two points that are closer than a Planck-length apart.  In a sense, then, the resolution limit of the Universe, the ultimate pixel size, is a Planck length.

sizelineSo that’s the size range of the Universe, from 1.6×10-35 up to 2.6×1026 meters. What’s a reasonable way to fix a half-way mark between them?

It makes no sense to just add the two numbers together and divide by two the way we’d do for an arithmetic average. That’d be like adding together the dime I owe my grandson and the US national debt — I could owe him 10¢ or $10, but either number just disappears into the trillions.

The best way is to take the geometrical average — multiply the two numbers and take the square root.  I did that.  It’s the X in the sizeline, at 6.5×10-5 meters, or about the diameter of a fairly large bacterium.  (In the diagram, VSC is the Vega Super Cluster, AG is the Andromeda Galaxy, and the numbers are those exponents of 10.)

That’s worth marveling at.  Sixty orders of magnitude between the size of the Universe and the size of the ultimate pixel.  Yet from blue whales to bacteria, Earth’s life just happens to occupy the half-dozen orders right in the middle of the range.  We think that’s it.

Could this be another case of the geocentric fallacy?  Humans were so certain that Earth was the center of the Universe, before Brahe and Galileo and Newton proved otherwise.  Is there life out there at scales much larger or much smaller than we imagine?

Who knows? But here’s an intriguing physics/quantum angle I’d like to promote.  We know a lot about structures bigger than us — solar systems and binary stars and galaxy clusters on up.  We know a few sizes and structures a bit smaller — viruses and molecules and atoms.  We’re aware of quarks and gluons that reside inside protons and atomic nuclei, but we don’t know their size or structure.

Even a proton is huge on the Planck-length scale.  At 1.8×10-15 meters the proton measures some 1020 Planck-lengths.  There’s as much scale-space between the Planck-length and the proton as there is between the Earth (1.3×107 meters) and the Universe.

It’s hard to believe that Terra infravita’s area has no structure whereas Terra supravita is so … busy.  The Standard Model’s “ultimate particles,” the electrons and photons and neutrinos and quarks and gluons, all operate down there somewhere.   It’s reasonable to suppose that they reflect a deeper architecture somewhere on the way down to the Planck-length foam.

Newton wrote (in Latin), “I do not make hypotheses.”  But golly, it’s tempting.

~~ Rich Olcott