Cover art by Michael Edwards.
Through the series Mr Tompkins by George Gamow, and decades later, a single work, Alice in Quantumland by Robert Gilmore, the reader is able to take a tour with the characters, Mr Tompkins and the reconstituted Alice, to a world that appears physically implausible to our quotidian yet very real. The range of that experience exists outside our consciousness unless we can partake in time travel, move at close the speed of light, or navigate a timescale that is at the micro of a microsecond (or more). Additionally, you would require an energy level that is likely to make you spontaneously combust in your meat suit.
Jacket design by J.C. Suar?s for Copernicus, an imprint of Springer-Verlag.
And yes, there are actually very serious, non-science fiction types of discussion on the feasibility of time travel (I touched lightly on that subject in my very first Scientific American blog post) that you can find in books such as Paul J Nahin?s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction,? Jim Al-Khalili?s Black Holes, Wormholes, and Time Machines, and Lawrence Krauss?s The Physics of Star Trek. But such discussions will be for another post.
Blau
Time Travel, from comicvine.com
To live the life of an atom, or even the ?organs? constituting the atoms (the electrons, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, quarks, mesons, any other exotic microscopic physical entity you can think of), one must imagine oneself in a world similar to the ones Mr Tompkins and Gilmore?s Alice each occupies. Physicists resist the idea of thinking about the physical atom as merely particulate although biologists have no qualms in thinking that.
Image from solarwiki.ucdavis.edu
But really, the atom is probably a higher dimension creature (something that string theorists would like to see happen) whose manifestations of particular properties are based on what we are able to observe of them.? In our three-dimensional world (even it we count time, that merely allows the curvature or space to be accounted for, and not much else), we can only see whatever characteristics the atom is able to manifest under such circumstances: some magnetic properties, spin, energy levels, rotational direction, and wave-like functions when it interacts with another atom.
ircamera.as.arizona.edu
The atom had fascinated philosophers of old, from Democritus to Aristotle to Lucretius to Leibniz to Newton. It also fascinated fiction writers and artists. There was the idea of the atom as a particle in ancient Greece (but I think most of you reading this know that), and, between the 18th and 19th century, there was also the idea of the atom as being a field, conceptualized in the early 19th century as the theory of vortex.1
Image from www.pa.uky.edu
The people grappling with the idea of the vortex atom were also the ones trying to work out the problem of certain observable paradoxes in thermodynamics relating to certain behavior of the atoms. The theory fell into disrepute by the mid-nineteenth century, though not the concept of the atomic field; otherwise, we would not have the beginnings of the gauge interactions, also known as the interactions of the known particles of nature, that are important to shaping the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
Image from 18thandfairfax.wordpress.com
Less we think only boys come out to play here, there were also women involved, even if their involvement were not as well publicized. While Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and their little troop over in France were making progress in their study of radiation with only the most rudimentary understanding of the character of the atom, given that much of the work leading to understanding its nature only took place in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the German-Jewish-Austrian women in the form of Marietta Blau and her assistant, Hertha Wambacher2, were doing their experiments with nuclear isotopes with the help of their portable emulsion unit that are the fore-runners of the films used in the cameras of the twentieth century.
Marietta Blau. Photo from jwa.org
Their experiments were rudimentary versions of what the accelerators are doing today, though the idea is not novel, since people like Chadwick and Rutherford were also doing some bombarding of their own over at Cambridge, England. However, Blau and Wambacher perfected the emulsion technique that enabled them to isolate and capture very sharp and detailed images of the interactions at the nucleic level. Their work was going on at around the same time when some other guys were looking at the same sort of collisions but at the cosmic level, through the cosmic rays.
Hertha Wambacher. Image from www.i-l-g.at
Cosmic rays, as high-energy charged particles, are sets of naturally occurring particles found through the process of atmospheric nuclei decay. They are also foundational to the study of neutrinos. Interest in neutrino physics came about as the result of the physicists?? attempts at resolving the enigma surrounding the conservation of momentum and energy of the protons, electrons, and neutrons.? Neutrons were produced in greater abundance when large nuclear reactors were built in the aftermath of the Second World War. The physicists found that the laws of conservation were violated because of the possible existence of a third element that was neither proton nor electron.
An illustration of the cosmic rays by Simon Swordy of the U of Chicago. Image from nasa.gov
According to the law of conservation, the disintegration of neutron should produce equal part electrons and equal part protons, but this was found not to be the case. Therefore, Enrico Fermi named it for a particle which is supposed to exhibit zero mass and zero charge (a sort of ?virtual? particle at that time) so as to counteract the ?shortfall? that would have resulted from the proton and electron not being consistently emitted as a ?neutrino.? More of the story of the cosmic rays can be found in this lucid paper by Alexander W Stern, who was also one of the important players in the story of quantum mechanics.3
Later, physicists would begin to think about how the collisions of this atomic matter, at different energy levels, could result in the possibility of reproducing, in tiny doses, the conditions that had enabled the formation of our universe. In fact, even as they are keeping an eye on what is going on at the cosmic level, through cosmology and astrophysics, they are trying to understand the extend in which some of the physics are replicated at the atomic level. This was what drove the decades of work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, though that was not, by all means, the only important discovery.
They want to know how understanding a specific property of strong interaction at the subatomic level can help explain why so much of our universe is constituted of dark matter. They also want to know if understanding more about the properties of the atom would allow them to understand how gravity, currently a bit of an outcast in quantum theory, can be connected to all the other atomic level interactions that are going on. Most importantly, they want to understand how the atom constitutes the meaning of life at the most fundamental level, though this is more of a big picture comprehension than an attempt to answer a specific scientific question.
Image from brusselsjournal.com
The atom is singular in its reduction to itself, in that it does not contain or uphold the metaphysical. However, the very notion of thinking about the atom, external to quantifiable and objective measurements, already sets up the way in which we would like to think about the atom. Otherwise, how did we end up with the tragicomedy that is Schr?dinger?s cat, that story of a long-distance relationship between Alice and Bob, and the parable of how one twin ages but not the other when the former decides to take a short holiday in space alone, and a paradoxical personality disorder that is maybe not so paradoxical if we think of its behavior statistically, or, think of the atom as being legion rather than singular, a particle-field hybrid.
Image from tvtropes.org
The big boys who pioneered the way we thought about physics in the twentieth century spilled the ink (of their fountain pens), quarreled, and wrote papers arguing that they each had a better explanation on what the electron, and therefore the atom, is like. Is an atom wave-like or a particle, and what mathematics is the best way for describing its physical state? In fact, besides coming up with mathematically infused and experimental analysis of the atom, they also wrote what later became the narratives of philosophy of quantum physics.4 The conversation about interpreting that atom began from the time when one among them got interested in what the atom was like and decided to write about it for his PhD dissertation on the electron theory of matter.
The atom dances at the center of an attempt at conciliation between supposed definite properties (and therefore, strong sense of certainty) in classical physics and one where causality can only be partially spied through the effects observable of the properties as found in quantum physics.
The Solvay Conference of 1927, featuring some of the who?s who in quantum theory. Image from socwall.com
However, atoms live in a micro-evental level where quantum rules dominate the operation.? Although we might be able to use classical mechanics to talk about some of their properties, such as in the case of thermodynamics and the black body, there is a threshold limit to when that changes and one has to then speak of the atom as exhibiting the behavior of quantum effects. One of the way of thinking about the atom across these two spectrum has been through the idea of the simple harmonic motion (SHM). The SHM allows us to think about an oscillating atom, when put in the same space as a bunch of other atoms, as producing certain effects that could then be visualized through the use of specific calculus, such as integration. The SHM connects the mathematics that operates in the classical physical world with that of quantum physics.
The atom can exist at zero-point state (some like to equate that with the vacuum state), when it is at the lowest energy and temperature state, but for the most part, it is always in motion (even if the motion is vibrational). It has presided over the study of developments not only in thermodynamics but also in electricity and magnetism. Faraday, who did not at all know anything about the developments of the modern theory of the atom, given that his work took place in the early part of the nineteenth century, intuited the notion of the electric current in terms of electromagnetism. However it took both Maxwell and P.A.M Dirac to put all of that into mathematical perspective. But Faraday understood the connection between that and the developments that were also going on in physical chemistry at that time (which had the idea of elements, their breakdowns and chemical bonds even if not our current way of describing them), and wrote about it in his fifth series of the Experimental Researches in Electricity that had appeared in the Philosophical Transactions in 1833, the same journal that Bohr would publish his doctoral work in 1909.5
The atom decays over time, breaking down through chains of fission (rarely fusion since that consumes a lot of energy. However, that might change with the building of the first fusion reactor) and branching out into new child modes with each decay over its lifetime. The decay happens at the level of its nucleon, and the energy emitted is considerable. This is what had enabled the development of medical technology through radiation physics and nuclear medicine. At the same time, the degeneracy (or energy positions of one or more sub-atom particle at any single moment in time), allows for the development in laser physics and in precise time telling (as precise as one can get) through the atomic clock. The February of this year, for a winter school relating to Timing and Transformation in Switzerland, I had produced a poster on the ontology of time as represented in quantum level physics, and even created a comical sketch to accompany it!
Whatever the constituent level in which we are looking at, and regardless of the energy level of our interest, the study of atom has been spread broadly, over the course of more than a century, and over the study of many subfields in physics. Many instruments of great sophistication and wonder had been developed, and continue to be developed, for the study of the atomic figure. In December 2012, I gave a talk at Oregon State University while a resident scholar with its History of Science Special Collections and Archives that incorporated the subject of instrumentality and instrumentation that grew as a result of the connection between developments in nuclear and particle physics. You can find that here, with accompanying slides.
It is in thinking about the atom and what it can do that we have arrived at the interpretation of its myriad possibilities and potentialities in quantum mechanics, or why a physical entity can even be thought of as possessing a measurable quantity. But, there are many operations at the physical state, including the physics of life, that are not necessarily measurable in the mechanical sense, only because the interactions are less direct, and involve multiple bodies that are neither subatomic nor at the leve of quantum energy. This is where we then enter into the study of complex systems and how that is then used, instead, for thinking about the dispersal and cycles of energy at a more macroscopic level. But at this level, we are no longer thinking about the atom as a single atom in itself, but rather, as the conglomeration of many to create life at the level of a single organic cell and beyond. But complex level systems also involve inorganic bits of life that are built out of the same atomic system. Therefore, the atom itself, broken down to its most basic level, problematizes the anthropic principle: what constitutes life at a measurable or quantifiable level?
In the next installment, I will discuss networks of energy and information involving the idea of teleportation that is one of the new (or not so new) developments in quantum computation found in the work of foundational physical theorists and experimentalists. This is also where I will bring up the connection between the cybernetics of informational science and quantum information through the work of historical figures such as Von Neumann and Von Foerster, both born into the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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1See Kragh, H. (2002), The Vortex Atom: A Victorian Theory of Everything. Centaurus, 44: 32?114. doi: 10.1034/j.1600-0498.2002.440102.x.
2 More details on their work can be found in Peter Galison?s Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, chapter three. Also, see Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early Twentieth Century Vienna by Maria Rentetzi, which can be found online < http://www.gutenberg-e.org/rentetzi/>.
3http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1933JChEd..10?24S. Also if you are interested in some prehistory of the developments of interpretation in quantum mechanics, you might be interested in this letter be John A Wheeler (advisor to Richard P Feynman) and Alexander W Stern http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/bitstream/handle/10575/1123/Wheeler%20to%20Stern%2025-May-1956.pdf?sequence=1.
4 I suggest reading Helge Kragh?s Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth-Century, as a good place to start, and you can go on from there, through its exhaustive list of bibliography.
5 See http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/bohr-listing-of-all-works.html
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Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/basic-science/~3/-pAAGZKDxf8/post.cfm
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