The special crossover broadcast between MIFV and Kaiju Weekly on Godzilla: Singular Point went long. So long, in fact, Nate wasn’t able to share his research on quantum mechanics. Their “Amalgam Universe” fusion wasn’t quite absolute. Well, I should say he wasn’t able to share our research. I did 97% of it since, you know, I worked at NASA. But as Nate said during the broadcast, he’s “the best three-percenter” we know. (I kid, by the way. Nate spent several hours researching, and he consulted with me and the other scientists on Monster Island).
So, as a supplement to this special episode (which will be out Wednesday on both the Kaiju Weekly and Monster Island Film Vault feeds), I’m presenting that research. I think it explains quantum mechanics pretty well for a layman and sheds a little light on Singular Point. It’ll hopefully make the series a bit easier to understand and increase your appreciation for it. Toh Enjoe, the screenwriter, is a former physicist, and that background is definitely apparent in this wonderful series.
Anyway, like I said, the episode drops Wednesday. Enjoy!
NOTE: All bullets in quotes are lifted directly from the listed sources. All others are paraphrases.
NOTE 2: Read Nate’s leftover notes on the series itself in another Jimmy’s Notes.
- Sources:
- Richard Feynmann, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, said, “If you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.”
- However, has helped us develop technologies like computers, digital cameras, LED screens, lasers, and nuclear power plants.
- Basically, everything works with quantum physics.
- “It’s right there in the name– the word “quantum” comes from the Latin for “how much” and reflects the fact that quantum models always involve something coming in discrete amounts.”
- “Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.[2]:1.1 It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.”
- “Classical physics, the description of physics that existed before the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, while quantum mechanics explains the aspects of nature at small (atomic and subatomic) scales, for which classical mechanics is insufficient. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.[3]”
- “In classical mechanics, objects exist in a specific place at a specific time. However, in quantum mechanics, objects instead exist in a haze of probability; they have a certain chance of being at point A, another chance of being at point B and so on.”
- “Quantum mechanics (QM) developed over many decades, beginning as a set of controversial mathematical explanations of experiments that the math of classical mechanics could not explain. It began at the turn of the 20th century, around the same time that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, a separate mathematical revolution in physics that describes the motion of things at high speeds. Unlike relativity, however, the origins of QM cannot be attributed to any one scientist.”
- The three principles of quantum mechanics, which gained acceptance between 1900 and 1930:
- “Quantized properties: Certain properties, such as position, speed and color, can sometimes only occur in specific, set amounts, much like a dial that “clicks” from number to number. This challenged a fundamental assumption of classical mechanics, which said that such properties should exist on a smooth, continuous spectrum. To describe the idea that some properties “clicked” like a dial with specific settings, scientists coined the word ‘quantized.’”
- “In 1900, German physicist Max Planck sought to explain the distribution of colors emitted over the spectrum in the glow of red-hot and white-hot objects, such as light-bulb filaments. When making physical sense of the equation he had derived to describe this distribution, Planck realized it implied that combinations of only certain colors (albeit a great number of them) were emitted, specifically those that were whole-number multiples of some base value. Somehow, colors were quantized! This was unexpected because light was understood to act as a wave, meaning that values of color should be a continuous spectrum. What could be forbidding atoms from producing the colors between these whole-number multiples? This seemed so strange that Planck regarded quantization as nothing more than a mathematical trick.”
- “Planck’s equation also contained a number that would later become very important to future development of QM; today, it’s known as ‘Planck’s Constant.’”
- “Particles of light: Light can sometimes behave as a particle. This was initially met with harsh criticism, as it ran contrary to 200 years of experiments showing that light behaved as a wave; much like ripples on the surface of a calm lake. Light behaves similarly in that it bounces off walls and bends around corners, and that the crests and troughs of the wave can add up or cancel out. Added wave crests result in brighter light, while waves that cancel out produce darkness. A light source can be thought of as a ball on a stick being rhythmically dipped in the center of a lake. The color emitted corresponds to the distance between the crests, which is determined by the speed of the ball’s rhythm.”
- “In 1905, Einstein published a paper, “Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light,” in which he envisioned light traveling not as a wave, but as some manner of “energy quanta.” This packet of energy, Einstein suggested, could “be absorbed or generated only as a whole,” specifically when an atom “jumps” between quantized vibration rates. This would also apply, as would be shown a few years later, when an electron “jumps” between quantized orbits. Under this model, Einstein’s “energy quanta” contained the energy difference of the jump; when divided by Planck’s constant, that energy difference determined the color of light carried by those quanta.”
- “Roughly two decades after Einstein’s paper, the term “photon” was popularized for describing energy quanta, thanks to the 1923 work of Arthur Compton, who showed that light scattered by an electron beam changed in color. This showed that particles of light (photons) were indeed colliding with particles of matter (electrons), thus confirming Einstein’s hypothesis. By now, it was clear that light could behave both as a wave and a particle, placing light’s “wave-particle duality” into the foundation of QM.”
- “Waves of matter: Matter can also behave as a wave. This ran counter to the roughly 30 years of experiments showing that matter (such as electrons) exists as particles.”
- These aren’t physical waves, though. It’s an abstract mathematical description. In other words, no one knows if it’s real because no one has seen a quantum wave. All we see is an electron particle. This barrier in knowledge between the quantum realm and our world is called a measurement barrier.
- The Double Slit experiment: Think of firing a paintball gun at a wall with two slits. You expect to see two lines on the back wall thanks to the slits. Quantum wavelengths enter those slits and then split off into new waves, creating multiple lines.
- “Quantized properties: Certain properties, such as position, speed and color, can sometimes only occur in specific, set amounts, much like a dial that “clicks” from number to number. This challenged a fundamental assumption of classical mechanics, which said that such properties should exist on a smooth, continuous spectrum. To describe the idea that some properties “clicked” like a dial with specific settings, scientists coined the word ‘quantized.’”
- “Also in 1927, Heisenberg made another major contribution to quantum physics. He reasoned that since matter acts as waves, some properties, such as an electron’s position and speed, are “complementary,” meaning there’s a limit (related to Planck’s constant) to how well the precision of each property can be known. Under what would come to be called “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” it was reasoned that the more precisely an electron’s position is known, the less precisely its speed can be known, and vice versa. This uncertainty principle applies to everyday-size objects as well, but is not noticeable because the lack of precision is extraordinarily tiny. According to Dave Slaven of Morningside College (Sioux City, IA), if a baseball’s speed is known to within a precision of 0.1 mph, the maximum precision to which it is possible to know the ball’s position is 0.000000000000000000000000000008 millimeters.”
- “In 1927, Paul Dirac applied a quantum understanding of electric and magnetic fields to give rise to the study of “quantum field theory” (QFT), which treated particles (such as photons and electrons) as excited states of an underlying physical field.”
- “Since the breakthrough of renormalization, QFT has served as the foundation for developing quantum theories about the four fundamental forces of nature: 1) electromagnetism, 2) the weak nuclear force, 3) the strong nuclear force and 4) gravity. The first insight provided by QFT was a quantum description of electromagnetism through “quantum electrodynamics” (QED), which made strides in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Next was a quantum description of the weak nuclear force, which was unified with electromagnetism to build “electroweak theory” (EWT) throughout the 1960s. Finally came a quantum treatment of the strong nuclear force using “quantum chromodynamics” (QCD) in the 1960s and 1970s. The theories of QED, EWT and QCD together form the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics. Unfortunately, QFT has yet to produce a quantum theory of gravity. That quest continues today in the studies of string theory and loop quantum gravity.”
- “There’s lots of places to start this sort of discussion, and this is as good as any: everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature, at the same time. There’s a line in Greg Bear’s fantasy duology (The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage), where a character describing the basics of magic says “All is waves, with nothing waving, over no distance at all.”
- “One of the most surprising and (historically, at least) controversial aspects of quantum physics is that it’s impossible to predict with certainty the outcome of a single experiment on a quantum system. When physicists predict the outcome of some experiment, the prediction always takes the form of a probability for finding each of the particular possible outcomes, and comparisons between theory and experiment always involve inferring probability distributions from many repeated experiments.”
- “The mathematical description of a quantum system typically takes the form of a “wavefunction,” generally represented in equations by the Greek letter psi: Ψ.”
- “In either class of foundational model, the probability of finding an outcome is not given directly by the wavefunction, but by the square of the wavefunction … This is known as the “Born Rule” after German physicist Max Born who first suggested this (in a footnote to a paper in 1926), and strikes some people as an ugly ad hoc addition.”
- Einstein’s EPR paper and “entanglement”:
- “The EPR paper argued that quantum physics allowed the existence of systems where measurements made at widely separated locations could be correlated in ways that suggested the outcome of one was determined by the other. They argued that this meant the measurement outcomes must be determined in advance, by some common factor, because the alternative would require transmitting the result of one measurement to the location of the other at speeds faster than the speed of light. Thus, quantum mechanics must be incomplete, a mere approximation to some deeper theory (a “local hidden variable” theory, one where the results of a particular measurement do not depend on anything farther away from the measurement location than a signal could travel at the speed of light (“local”), but are determined by some factor common to both systems in an entangled pair (the “hidden variable”)).”
- “This was regarded as an odd footnote for about thirty years, as there seemed to be no way to test it, but in the mid-1960’s the Irish physicist John Bell worked out the consequences of the EPR paper in greater detail. Bell showed that you can find circumstances in which quantum mechanics predicts correlations between distant measurements that are stronger than any possible theory of the type preferred by E, P, and R. This was tested experimentally in the mid-1970’s by John Clauser, and a series of experiments by Alain Aspect in the early 1980’s is widely considered to have definitively shown that these entangled systems cannot possibly be explained by any local hidden variable theory.”
- Quantum tunneling: when a wavelength passes through a barrier, is degrades. If the barrier is narrow enough, it may still exist on the other side. Protons have a chance of existing on the other side. We’re alive because of it. This is what makes the sun shine. Protons normally repel each other, but they have a small chance of tunneling, which turns hydrogen into helium and releases fusion energy.
Until next time, remember: #WeShallOvercome
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