— Richard Feynman, American physicist (1918-1988), in 1985, cited in G. Laurence Nickard, Phenomenal surfaces and noumenal depths: Philosophy and quantum theory, ProQuest, 2006, p. 5. (via amiquote)
If anyone’s ever studied quantum mechanics, this legitimately happens. You get it, and then you don’t.
(via detko2)
Has Science Found the First “White” Hole?
A white hole is a theoretical beastie that exists as a set of equations that were a by-product of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is basically a black hole in reverse. If a black hole is an object from which nothing can escape, then a white hole is an object into which nothing can enter—it can only radiate energy and matter.
:O
Paul Ehrenfest Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr at the Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics, Brussels 1930
“Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.” Physicists John Bell to Graham Farmelo
— Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says—”you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting—it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.
-Richard Feynman, ”The Beauty of a Flower” - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Sparks In Empty Space?
In what may be a landmark experimental proof of quantum mechanics, a group of researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden are claiming to have created sparks in a vacuum.
Read The Short ArticleTheir findings are yet to be peer reviewed, but if they turn out to be correct, this is remarkable. Thanks to refreshinginhere for originally posting this.
To understand the Casimir Effect, one first has to understand something about a vacuum in space as it is viewed in quantum field theory. Far from being empty, modern physics assumes that a vacuum is full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves that can never be completely eliminated, like an ocean with waves that are always present and can never be stopped. These waves come in all possible wavelengths, and their presence implies that empty space contains a certain amount of energy—an energy that we can’t tap, but that is always there.
Now, if mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, some of the waves will fit between them, bouncing back and forth, while others will not. As the two mirrors move closer to each other, the longer waves will no longer fit—the result being that the total amount of energy in the vacuum between the plates will be a bit less than the amount elsewhere in the vacuum. Thus, the mirrors will attract each other, just as two objects held together by a stretched spring will move together as the energy stored in the spring decreases.
CASIMIR EFFECT
This effect, that two mirrors in a vacuum will be attracted to each other, is the Casimir Effect. It was first predicted in 1948 by Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir. Steve K. Lamoreaux, now at Los Alamos National Laboratory, initially measured the tiny force in 1996.
It is generally true that the amount of energy in a piece of vacuum can be altered by material around it, and the term “Casimir Effect” is also used in this broader context. If the mirrors move rapidly, some of the vacuum waves can become real waves. Julian Schwinger and many others have suggested that this “dynamical Casimir effect” may be responsible for the mysterious phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.
One of the most interesting aspects of vacuum energy (with or without mirrors) is that, calculated in quantum field theory, it is infinite! To some, this finding implies that the vacuum of space could be an enormous source of energy—called “zero point energy.”
But the finding also raises a physical problem: there’s nothing to stop arbitrarily small waves from fitting between two mirrors, and there is an infinite number of these wavelengths. The mathematical solution is to temporarily do the calculation for a finite number of waves for two different separations of the mirrors, find the associated difference in vacuum energies and then argue that the difference remains finite as one allows the number of wavelengths to go to infinity.
Although this trick works, and gives answers in agreement with experiment, the problem of an infinite vacuum energy is a serious one. Einstein’s theory of gravitation implies that this energy must produce an infinite gravitational curvature of spacetime—something we most definitely do not observe. The resolution of this problem is still an open research question.
At the heart of the experiment is one of the weirdest, and most important, tenets of quantum mechanics: the principle that empty space is anything but. Quantum theory predicts that a vacuum is actually a writhing foam of particles flitting in and out of existence.
— David Griffiths, 1995 Preface to Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (via dozennebulae)
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart.
Now, two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky effect, called entanglement, could also bind particles across time.
If their proposal can be tested, it…
Double-Slit Experiment at home because I was bored. (The laser was a little too bright for my camera so it looks bad, but the interference pattern is there)
This quantum mechanics experiment was conducted and submitted themusicinmylife. Absolutely fantastic.
