A Quick Moment of Quantum Mechanics

May the f=ma be with you.

I am a writer. You may already know that, but what you may not know is that I am also fascinated with science, specifically in ares such as physics, astronomy, and quantum mechanics. Whenever I'm at work and doing mindless data entry my favorite thing is to go to YouTube to listen to lectures on string theory, Einsteinian relativity, dark matter/energy, blackholes, and any other buzz word you might find in a script of Star Trek: Voyager. These concepts fascinate me even though I really only have the most basic of grasp on any of it. So, I with that most rudimentary understanding, I wanted to try giving you, my reading public, a primer on quantum physics from Aristotle to M-theory.

Now before we can even begin to talk about quantum physics, you're going to have to forget everything you think you know about how the universe works. It's kind of like becoming a Jedi, "You must unlearn what you have learned." You see, we live in a world of Newtonian Physics. In our world the Apple falls from the tree because (it was poorly designed by Steve Jobs and because) the force of gravity of the Earth acts upon it to do so. To us that is logical. We take all of Newton's laws as a constant because we can observe them. If I throw a ball up into the air, it will drop back down to Earth because of gravity. If I hit a puck across the ice it will keep moving, but it will eventually slow because of friction, however if that puck was in the void of space it wouldn't slow its momentum unless acted upon by another force. Instinctively most people understand such things, but Aristotle would not have. According to Aristotlean physics, "Objects that are in motion eventually tend to rest, because they will become tired." That, to Aristotle and the people of his time, made sense. It was what they could observe and until Newton that was the prevailing theory.

A very similar sort of thing happens when you move from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics/quantum physics. Like Aristotle we must move our way of thinking from the familiar and the observable to that of the exotic. Einstein's laws do not normally affect us on a day to day basis, (well they do, but you just don't observe them as often as you think.) Even when we are launching rockets to the moon or Mars we are still doing it based off of Newtonian physics, because the calculations of Newton are still relevant today. Yet, even though Newton is still right, its not the full picture. Einstein talked about a world we couldn't readily observe or even make calculations about. He described a universe not based upon what we can see but upon theory and math. As a result, quantum mechanics breaks our universe down into smaller and smaller parts governed by four fundamental forces, Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Weak Nuclear Force, and the Strong Nuclear Force. All of these forces act upon us at our smallest minute levels and govern everything in our world from why our feet are on the ground to the movement and speed of light. This is not the intuitive world you grew up believing in.

Gravity according to Einstein.

For instance, in QP, space and time are not two separate entities, but one fabric, and gravity (which we often thing of as such a strong force) warps both space and time (and it is actually the weakest of the forces that act upon us.) You need to think of space/time as a bed sheet pulled taught and each object with mass is laid on top of that bed sheet. The more mass the object has the more it flexes the bed sheet around it. Object which are caught in that flex are then pulled down into the valley created by the larger object. In essence everything is falling into something else, the moon is falling toward the Earth, and the Earth toward the Sun, but because we are also rotating and moving, (as is the sun and the moon,) we never collide. Astronauts in space are always falling to Earth, but they never collide with us. We call that orbiting... Okay, but that's space, how does gravity affect time? Well, depending on where you are on that slope warped bed sheet will alter how you experience time. Gravity affects time the same way it affects space, because the two things are one in the same.

Did you know that satellites in orbit above the Earth have to be programed with slower internal clocks, (I'm talking nanoseconds slower,) because due to their distance from the Earth and the lessened gravity that is acting upon them, if their clocks were allowed to run at (Earth standard) normal speeds, eventually they would go out of sync with the clocks on Earth? Now when you are talking a GPS satellite that is controlling where you drive, a one second loss of time or even a half second loss of time could result in your navigation being off by several miles. That is an observable and unbelievable affect of gravity affecting space/time, just as Einstein theorized. It is also the example I use when people claim that QPs doesn't affect their lives in any meaningful way.

So, now that you have a very very very brief gist of QP, lets talk about something even more complicated, M-theory. It is my favorite theory of all time, and more importantly has the potential to be the unifying theory, the theory that explains how everything in the universe works. Also, don't get caught up by the name, as the "M" doesn't really stand for anything, Magic, Mother, Mystery, Membrane, etc. This new theory emerged as a branch of string theory. So in order to better explain M-theory we should probably pause for a moment and look at string theory.

String theory is a way of looking at the microscopic world in a whole new way. If you break all matter down you will find atoms. If you break atoms down you will get electrons, neutrons, and protons. If you break those subatomic particles (or hadrons) down you will get quarks, which can have different properties based upon things like color, spin, and taste, but we won't go into that, because that would require another lecture altogether. All you need to know about string theory is that these, the tiniest of subatomic particles, may in fact not be particles as we perceive them, but really vibrating strings. Change the harmonics of a string and change what kind of particle it is, like plucking the string on a guitar to change the note. However, the mathematics of string theory don't work unless the string is allowed to vibrate though several different dimensions, (and I don't mean dimensions like Dimension X, the home universe of Krang, I mean dimensions,) like 3 dimensions of space, 1 dimensions of time, and 7 dimensions which are so small we cannot perceive them with our naked eye. Also, they are curled up over themselves and we can't correctly guess the shape or size of these dimensions. We have some idea through math what they must look like, but there are literally millions of billions candidate shapes that these dimensions can be, but that is a digression from my main point.

"I created also Calculus. You are welcome future generations
of high school math students." - Sir. Isaac Newton.

M-theory takes everything a step further to unify the (what were) 5 disparate string theories. What I find so fascinating with M-theory is that it postulates that, with 11 dimensions, the strings which theoretically exist on the quark level could possibly be, not just strings, but membranes that extend to... well everything. The membranes... for lack of a better explanation... "surround us and bind us, they hold the Galaxy (our Universe) together." I am not at all suggesting that these subatomic membranes are like the Force... but when you think about it, they could be.

 

I mean that is what I love so much about quantum physics, it is like philosophy and science combined into one elegant harmonic vibrating membrane of awesomeness. The further into it you go the more questions arise and the stranger the universe seems, but strange is good. Hell, strange is great and wonderful. Its a world of surreal wonder and that excites me more than anything, because with wonder and strangeness comes possibility. The universe is something we can figure out, we can calculate and postulate on. Think of what this means for our future as a race. Its one thing to pay lip service to the fact that human beings really have not even begun to understand the mysteries of the universe, but it is entirely another thing to begin your trip down the rabbit hole and scratch the surface of what we don't understand. You begin to truly understand how amazing our world is and how exciting it can be.

 

In all fairness, I haven't explained QP or anything I've talked about even half as well as they can be explained, but maybe I am hoping that with a taste there will be more people out there who will want to learn about quantum physics and string theory and M-theory and all the rest. I believe if more people start to understand how wondrous science can be, the better off we will be. Science breeds exploration which breeds cooperation, which breeds a humanity that is not only smarter but peaceful.

 

I am a poor poor teacher, so please don't take my word for how awesome this stuff is. To learn more about quantum physics and other amazing facts of science visit some of my favorite places on YouTube to watch and read more:
 

Sci Show

V-Sauce
Khan Academy
Crash Course

Michio Kaku

Nova

Brian Greene

Making Sense of String Theory

Through the Wormhole

And much much more...

 

Not to sound too much like a public service announcement, but America is falling behind in science. We need to energize our next generation and show them how important, strange, wondrous, amazing, incredible, (and any the other sort of adjectives you can think to insert,) science is.