LA traffic lost me in the quantum realm for three hours today. So first, a quanta of trivia.
Today’s mini-Moment of Science… Quantum Quotables.
Einstein’s work from 1907 to 1915 with relativity gave us a new way to understand gravity. The first tricky part is accepting that gravity is caused by matter warping spacetime, which is as far down this rabbit hole as we’re going today. Next is a lot of super fuck you complicated math, but eventually with enough cursing, some firm, definite answer can be coaxed out of his equations.
Then came quantum mechanics, the solution to- and cause of- all of physics’ problems. Around the same time in the mid-1920s, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrӧdinger cranked out some complementary ideas that made quantum the wibbly wobbly probabilistic monster it still is today.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental layer baked into the quantum cake stating that you can’t know the exact velocity and position of a quantum particle simultaneously. This wasn’t merely a flaw of their current technology, these were the rules for super tiny bits of universe. Schrӧdinger’s equations, the wave functions, gave a new way to crank out answers to where these particles… probably were. Answers were now in the form of probabilities.
Which bugged the fuck out of Einstein. Because he gave us a pretty goddamn exact speed of light and now he had to accept ‘there’s 16.67% chance to find the particle here?’ Horseshit.
Niels Bohr was all ‘it’s not like anything’s real, man.’ Or more accurately, he argued that “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.” Which I take to mean that, at least while all of this was still untested and theoretical, why would any of this have to follow the rules of what we observe in dolphins and kittens and jizz? This is a lot of super weird shit we can’t see.
Though Einstein agreed that quantum was ‘correct’ he thought it was incomplete. This led to the famous EPR paradox and the Einstein-Bohr debates. In a letter to Max Born regarding his objections to this fundamentally uncertain ability to understand the very particles that we’re made of, he penned the famous line, often stripped of all context when quoted:
“The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”
In reply to Einstein’s use of god in metaphors, Bohr was quoted as saying “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”
This has been your Moment of Science, taking a cat nap, in a box.
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