Quanta Organica
22.05.2024 Dane Harrison
But what is quantum physics? Honestly I have no idea. The science and mathematics are beyond me. I speak only from literature. And so I confess before the trial: this is only a story. But science too is a story. As is mathematics. We present models, concepts and images to help us deal with what we can’t see because it is helpful for our thoughts to arrange themselves onto the structure and form of something they have seen.
Thus all things require a little imagination. And at the onset, we imbue ourselves into what we are seeing. Here is a story then, a very primitive song of quantum physics, sung a little out-of-key, no doubt, but nevertheless: music. A colourful music to be visualised, to incite a little curiosity, to stir up imagination so that others may look into it themselves and via their own enlightenment, enlighten me.
Let me first, if I may, lay down a floor of egg shells for us to tread on, hand-in-hand. This is to remind us to take things ever lightly. There is a common misrepresentation that science believes it will prove everything - let us dispel this straight away. All true science is humble. It predicts and observes and what it predicts are only hypotheses - there is never anything 'proven'. It is a story told to help us in our understanding of ourselves and our place amongst the cosmos - that is all. But there is a lot to learn from this story if we are open to it. So let us open a page together and see what we find.
To begin with, let us revert to the question unanswered: what is quantum physics? Plainly speaking, it seems that quantum physics is a solution to the problem of observing small things. In general, most visible things are big. They seem to be in one place, at one time. When we look at things which are very small, however, we cannot say exactly where they are. Why? Because we cannot see them. They are beyond the shortest wavelength of light. Not only can we not see them, we can never hope to see them. We can 'interpret' them, however, in a different way.
Suppose you had one of those machines which fired tennis balls, it was new moon and you were down on the beach firing randomly. You would expect that each ball would pass through the air and end in the water with a splash. However, to your intrigue, occasionally one of the balls comes back at you. How? There must be something there which deflects it. Though we cannot see what it is (because it's new moon and the sky is perfectly black), if we know certain things about the tennis ball, like its approximate mass and velocity, we can calculate the mass or energy of the unknown thing by the motion of the ball deflecting back at us. Thus, by using what we can see, we can approximate the thing we cannot see. Of course, this is an obtuse and not at all accurate analogy and science can do this in a far more precise and controlled manner.
I must stress that we are not talking about tennis balls or beaches, we are talking about things which are incomprehensibly small, thus we need models to describe them. To see these very, very small things, we can pass incredibly short wavelengths at them and then interpret the disturbance in the wave. In this way, we can see things that ordinarily we could not see, like atoms or what exists inside atoms. But there is a problem in this method and it is this problem which quantum theory attempts to overcome.
Since we must exert force on the thing we wish to see by firing something at it, we unavoidably disturb the path of that thing we wish to see. This disturbance disrupts its natural motion, meaning that we can never see where it is exactly. And the more accurately we wish to see something, the higher energy we need to fire at. The higher energy we fire at it, the more we disturb it. This introduces a degree of uncertainty into science. And so this discovery by Heisenberg, which seems to be the seed of quantum mechanics, is called the Uncertainty Principle. Effectively, it means that we can either know where a thing is, or how fast it is going, but not both. The more we want to know about its position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa. This is a real spanner in the works for science. But as Emerson said, 'every wall is a door’.
Instead of precise facts we must now work within probabilities, the probability that a thing will be here or there. And this is where it gets interesting. In classical theory where things were at one point in space/time, it was helpful to think of them as travelling along one path. Now in the quantum world where we cannot know exactly where a thing is, it is helpful to think of it as travelling along every path at once. Is this not an image of the modern world? Assuming that all roads are travelled at once, we take the probability of each and find which is most likely. This may seem imprecise, however, the predictions agree with observation - which is all science aims for. Moreover, it has revolutionised modern science and modern society. Energy, computers, telecommunication; everything is quantum now. Whether we like these things or not, pragmatically speaking it is to our advantage in society to adopt them. As it is pragmatically to the advantage of science to accept quantum theory because its predictions support experimental observation. Pragmatically speaking, it is good.
However, pragmatism has a way of justifying unusual things. And science is never just science; at least not to me. What interests me more is philosophy. And, given that science is a story, what does this new story about the very small nature of the universe symbolise? Let us crack some egg shells, if you please.
I go back to my first answer, that quantum physics seems to be a solution to the problem of observation. It was once thought that atoms 'made up everything', that is, they were the smallest, most indivisible mass or matter. New technology has led us to the discovery of smaller masses like protons, neutrons, electrons. Even newer technology has prompted the discovery of even more elementary particles like letpons, quarks and bosons. Our picture of the world today is in light of the energies our current technology can utilise. In the future it is likely we will be able to harness higher energies and perhaps will continue to discover smaller and smaller things. Scientific theory will have to adjust to these discoveries. Or, as often happens, the theories and mathematics predict things which seem implausible at first and can only be verified down the line with the advent of new technology. Given that the history of science seems to be new discovery after new discovery, it would appear that our discoveries will go on indefinitely. But what is the significance of these discoveries? And in what relation do they stand to the last? What is the broader picture and where are we going with all this new science?
To be continued.