The Needle's Tip that we would call infinitesimal, is, in its "scanning electron micrograph," the corbelled and tunneled and buttressed and corrugate Tower of Babel as Bruegel envisioned it under construction
Albert Goldbarth
More and more sophisticated radio, microwave and optical telescopes proved Einstein's Theory of relativity correct and through the century they detect pulsars or heard the background radiation that is the very echo of the universe's birth. With each discovery we have realized more and more the range of the universe and the awesome nature of it. However, when we look in the opposite direction so to speak, as we look into the world of the particle, the wonder grows even more. Since the renaissance, when an early science began to peer into a microscope, we discovered surprise after surprise. The microscope reached its limits and we resorted to other tools and methods to explore smaller and smaller scales. Only then did the world that we perceive began to break down and the constituents of matter and their behavior seemed not to pare with the everyday macro world in which we lead our lives. In short, as scientists developed a thorough and all encompassing theory of the of the micro-world, our building blocks became more and more non sense. In this chapter we will look at some of the most astonishing and mind-bending discoveries science made during this century. These discoveries deal, not as Einstein's, with the place we inhabit, but with the world is made of. Quantum deals with the atom and its particles.
As we have seen from the previous chapter, at the end of the nineteenth century, physics worked within certainties. The Newtonian model of the universe presented certain paradoxes which were difficult to solve but which also most scientists believed would be solved without disturbing Newton's framework radically. As conservative as Einstein and many other scientists were, their findings at the beginning of this century did not merely revolutionized physics and science, but actually shifted the paradigms within which science worked. As we have seen, Einstein's relativity did just that. The general theory argued that galaxies, stars and planets are free-falling through a four dimensional space-time which was curved in the fourth dimension.
While Einstein's conclusions seem somehow mind-boggling, Einstein himself as well as many of his contemporaries did not only try to solve the cosmological paradoxes they inherited from classical mechanics, but also worked with some of the paradoxes and problems that arose in the study of the atom and its components. In fact, if any branch of science would challenge common sense and to an extent revolutionize our conception of the world we live in, quantum mechanics would do it to boot. Quantum mechanics is so puzzling in its assertions that both scientists and philosophers have either rejected or shrugged at its findings. Einstein's famous remark that God does not play dice with the universe was a direct response to one of Quantum's most cherished premises. The Columbia University philosopher David Z. Albert has written that quantum is " an unsettling story," "the most unsettling story, perhaps, to have emerged from any of the physical sciences since the 17th century." [ Note 1 ] Similarly, in his book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Nick Herbert argues that with quantum, scientists "lost their grip on reality." [ Note 2 ]
In one of the best popularizations of the subject, David Lindley explains why quantum seems both to oppose the logic of classical physics and to seem, using a word which quantum physicists have adopted, so weird:
This is the heart of the fundamental issue. In classical physics, we are accustomed to thinking of physical properties as having definite values, which we can try to apprehend by measurement. But in quantum physics, it is only the process of measurement that yields any number for a physical quantity, and the nature of quantum measurements is such that it is no longer possible to think of the underlying physical property (magnetic orientation of atoms, for example) as having any definite or reliable reality before the measurement takes place. [ Note 3 ]
The difficulty or weirdness of quantum stems from the fact that the physical reality it describes cannot be measured because once the measurement is done that reality has changed. Like most of quantum, the latter statement seems paradoxical. More paradoxical, however, is the fact that if one looks at the different branches of science and attempts to pinpoint the most precise by the way each science is able to predict exact outcomes, then quantum is the most exact of science. The rub, of course, is that whatever precision quantum yields, it does so only to defy our common sense.
In this chapter we will attempt to make some sense of quantum mechanics: what it studies, what its conclusions are and see how these conclusions tie up with the macro-cosmos which we dealt with in the previous chapter. Quantum studies the behavior of the atom and its particles. It does so by predicting the probabilities of possible results. In other words, an analogue discipline to quantum in the macro-world would be ballistics. Ballistics takes a projectile, a launcher, friction, gravity, etc. as its variables and through formulas calculates the way in which the missile will travel and where it will land. In other words, ballistic takes certain variables and converts them into possible results. Similarly, quantum takes an atom and calculates the probability of its charge or color. The difference here, of course, is that ballistics functions in a classical universe. Ballistics experts have to consider two things, matter, the substance of projectile and launcher and fields, in this case the earth's gravitational field. The bullet is made out of metal, matter, follows a trajectory due to inertia and if not stopped, eventually lands because the earth's gravitational field pulls it. Quantum is not that simple.
When people talk about quantum they are often talking about the various interpretations which scientists have tried to frame in order to describe or explain what quantum is saying. For instance, Niels Bohr, who is known for the Copenhagen interpretation, would argue that quantum tells us that there is no deep reality. Like the Bishop Berkeley three centuries before him, Bohr argued that the world we see around us might be real enough, but its components, what is built on, is not real. It follows then, that the second premise of the Copenhagen interpretation pivots around the idea that, since there is no deep reality, what the scientist observes is a phenomenal reality. Phenomenal reality argues that in the absence of an observer phenomena do not exist. In other words, the scientist creates reality as he determines the electron's spin or momentum.
