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October 14th, 2008 by Sean Introduction to Quantum Physics

Not that many people know that a second Scientific Revolution happened in the 1920’s. It was during this time that scientists like Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others had finally started putting together a deeper understanding of our world on a sub-atomic level. A lot of important discoveries had been made up until that point, but in 1925, a new scientific field of study had emerged out of equations and experiments: Quantum Physics.

It sure sounds cool! “Quantum Physics”. Ooh yeah :-D. But is this just another inaccessible scientific body of knowledge - only privy to those who understand the jargon of the University professors? No! Quantum Physics might sound a little intimidating, but it’s actually pretty easy to gain a basic understanding of what happened in the 1920’s, and how it impacts our understanding of reality.

Prior to this Revolution, humanity had a Newtonian outlook on reality. This world-view was invented in the 1600’s, by Sir Isaac Newton, and stated that things are basically mechanical. When you push something, you are putting a force on it. When you drop something, it falls because the Earth has a gravitational field… pulling objects towards the center. If you throw something up in the air, it will curve in a parabolic arc - eventually falling back to the ground. Things accelerate, and move, and everything behaves according to what math tells us. There is a formula for how everything works. Reality is just one big machine.

When we started to zoom in on things, we expected to see this same mechanical world. We zoomed into the cell, and saw miniature machines. Then zoomed in more, to the molecule, and saw little gears. Then even more: in 1913, Niels Bohr came up with his famous depiction of the atom:

Marbles! Brilliant! Looks like Newton was right - everything is just mechanical. Everything is just a bunch of complicated machines, working in amazing ways - but still just machines.

It’s important to understand this mindset. This is the mindset that a lot of people have about reality today. If you ask someone to draw an atom, they will likely draw the 1913 version above. The only problem is that it isn’t 1913. It’s 2008.

The funny thing is… if you zoom in a little bit more… everything seems to just fall apart. The normal rules about reality - the normal common-sense-Netwonian rules - don’t work. Not only do they fail, but they fail magnificantly.

This is what an atom looks like in 2008:

What, no marbles? My goodness… that almost looks as though it’s some sort ball of energy…

So what happened? What changed our understanding in 1925, that made us re-think everything?

The Uncertainty Principle

Scientists saw those marbles, and thought: “Well gee, if I know exactly where the marble is, and what direction it’s moving in, then I can predict exactly how the atom is going to behave.”

And when they tried to find where the marble was, they couldn’t figure out what direction it was moving in. And when they could figure out the direction, they suddenly couldn’t figure out where it was! No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t figure out both pieces of information (location + direction) at the same time.

So what? It sounds like we just need better equipment, right? The Uncertainty Principle changed that - it stated that it’s physically impossible to know both the location and direction at the same time. It’s a law etched into our reality.

Why was this a fantastic deal in the 1920’s? Because the mechanical world that scientists have grown and loved over the previous 300 years was shattered. Things were no longer machines. There was divine Uncertainty, hard-coded into reality itself. And Uncertainty is scary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 9 Responses to “Introduction to Quantum Physics”

1. MagicDick Says:
   October 15th, 2008 at 1:09 am

   Cool, glad to see that other people are interested in this kind of stuff. Uncertainty takes away a sense of security about how the universe operates, but it also seems to bring unspoken freedom with it. Still makes me wonder why things behave mechanically on a larger scale. If you add up all the uncertainties, do they really matter?

2. Antisankari Says:
   October 15th, 2008 at 6:11 pm

   If we could “force” the direction from the outside and determine the position, we would know both at the same time

   Or by stopping the thingy alltogether, we would have its position as a constant and then determining its direction.

   Sounds simple, yet for some reason or another is impossible.
   Go figure.

3. Linked Says:
   October 16th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

   Cool now i understand the univers! *manic laugh*

   being serios though, i wonder how an atom would respond to actually being stopped alltogether.
   …
   i think something bad would happen. >.>

4. Anonymous Dark Says:
   October 17th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

   It’s amazing…there’s also a video on youtube about quantum physics that I think everyone should watch…

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

   Nevermind the creepy pedophile in the cape–it actually discusses legit and fascinating points…

   The universe is a strange place, and this stuff is proof that we’ve only scratched the top of the iceberg.

5. Antisankari Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 7:28 am

   I think Im actually going to recommend my uni to hire that predophile as a lecturer. He is more amusing than 85% of the current lip movers. Oo

6. SumacMaster Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

   Even more interesting than the momentum-location uncertainty relation is the energy-time uncertainty relation. Effectively, if ’something’ happens near instantaneously, the change in energy of a system because of that ’something’ becomes impossible to predict. General Newtonian mechanical laws of energy conservation dissolve, and energy can be created and destroyed from nothing.

7. Linked Says:
   October 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm

   I head energy and matter couldn’t be created or destroyed no matter what. O_o quantum physics is so amazeing.

8. Psikillion Says:
   November 1st, 2008 at 5:34 pm

   Could it be possible that electrons and other particles in quantum physics are actually moving in such a way that we cannot calculate it as of yet?

9. polymer Says:
   November 28th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

   yes, but that isn’t the scientific consensus ^
   the accepted reality of small things is fundamentally indeterministic.

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