WEIRD SCIENCE

By

Karl H. Puechl

October 17, 1999

Before I get into my topic, I'd like to mention a couple interesting things that I recently found in a book written by Theodore Zeldin entitled, An Intimate History of Humanity. In this book he defines a 'marginal' as someone who lives somewhat outside of the main stream of society. By this definition, I suspect that most of us can be considered to be 'marginals'. Certainly, if the main stream includes conventional religion, we are all marginal. Then somewhere near the end of the book when describing the religions of India, he wrote: "Jainism, which has survived in India since the sixth century BC and which is an atheist religion, is based on the 'doctrine of maybe', holding that it is impossible to know or describe the world accurately: it preaches nonviolence towards everything that exists, for even stones and insects deserve respect." Interesting? There seems to have been an ecology or holistic movement even before the current era.

The main reason that I decided to give this talk on Weird Science was my feeling that too many people believe that science is a rather cold and unemotional subject; that scientists, to do their work, put some numbers into complicated formulas and out come answers which give them information on how to build bridges, design computers, go to outer space, etc. All these activities have nothing to do with science, they are in the provinces of technology or engineering which are outgrowths of science. I cringe every time I hear the words 'rocket scientists', because these words are deceiving since there aren't any such animals. In true science, the scientist does not know what the proper equation is; often he has little idea how the proper equation might be written because he is uncertain of the process that he is trying to describe; in short, he makes guesses, he tries, but usually he can't describe nature as it is, simply because he doesn't really understand it. True science is a very exciting undertaking because a scientist is seldom on solid ground, and the exhilaration is indescribable when through his efforts things seems to fall neatly into place; when he knows something that no on else on Earth knows until he tells them.

At first, I was going to give this talk off-the-cuff with only a few notes, but then I decided against it since under that procedure, we might be here all afternoon. So here goes with the topic of Weird Science written out and read. I hope that we have time for lots of questions.

To give some historical background, I could start this by going all the way back to the Greeks and giving some of the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and others; but doing this would take too long. So let me begin primarily with the theories of Isaac Newton who lived in the sixteen-hundreds, and whose basic premises stayed with the scientific community until about 1900. Up until then, some features of nature could not be quite understood, but the unknowns were not all that serious; in fact, one of the leading scientists in the late eighteen-hundreds is often quoted as saying that there was nothing much left for scientists to discover; that it was then simply a matter of filling in the details.

In rather simple and terse terms, let me first talk about what scientists, before 1990, believed to be true. First, they believed that things existed as separate entities and that each could be described at a specific time as being at a specific place and having specific, noticeable or measurable, characteristics which could be used to describe them. This supposition applied to large things, like you and me, as well as small things, like atoms, that they assumed existed even though they could not see them. Further, in order to allow calculation of the consequences of his laws of motion, Newton, and simultaneously, the German scientist/philosopher Leibniz, invented what is now called the differential calculus which is currently taught as a mathematics honors-course in most of our high schools. In essence, what allowed this mathematical schema to be so valuable was the assumption that both space and time could be described as being smooth functions; that is, if one plotted a curve that described a trajectory like a ball being thrown up into the air and falling back down, or a car traveling at various speeds to get from home to work, these movements could be described by plotting position as a function of time in units of seconds, or minutes, or hours, or microseconds, or any other unit of time. In short, one would be able to draw a continuous curve that described the movement; a curve without any gaps. Since the calculus was so successful, almost without any further thought, it was assumed that space and time were actually continuous without any gaps. Since this is important for something I will present later, let me try to be a bit more descriptive. Suppose that you were so small as to be essentially infinitesimal and that you were located somewhere in space. When you took a step of a certain magnitude, you ended up at another point in space. When you tried to walk with smaller and smaller steps, the definition of continuity means that you could always take smaller and smaller steps and that you would always end up at a point in space. If space were discontinuous, if your step became smaller than a certain size, you would fall off space. This would seem to be sort of ridiculous since we'd have a hard time answering the question: What would you fall into? Nevertheless, Kip Thorne of CalTech, and his mentor, John Wheeler, of Princeton have called these voids, 'wormholes', and they postulate that, perhaps, if fallen into they would take one backwards in time. Contrary to this, perhaps, if space were discontinuous, you would be limited to taking only steps that were larger than some critical size. I could make up a similar picture relative to the continuity or discontinuity in time, but I don't have enough time to cover everything I want to cover in all its gory detail. The logic would be similar to what I described for 'space'. As a more visual example, perhaps if space were discontinuous, it would be as if space were composed of very small balls and that these, in our universe, were closely packed in a container of sorts. We all know that when you do this there will be gaps between the balls; therefore, one could say that space was discontinuous. Of course, I'm saying that the balls and the gaps are so small that we would not be capable of noticing these discontinuities; after all, we seldom notice the discontinuities in compacted soil and there the grains are billions upon billions of times larger than what I am talking about.

Now let me bring you into the twentieth century. In 1900, Max Planck, a professor at the University of Berlin, wondered about why the seemingly applicable equations could not describe accurately the light that comes from, say, a heated poker. After playing around, he got answers that agreed perfectly with experiment by making the assumption that energy, in the form of light, could come off the poker only in discrete packets. He thought that this was a cute way for the equations to give the right answer describing hot pokers, but he didn't really believe that nature behaved this way; and neither did anyone else. It wasn't taken seriously until Einstein decided that packets of energy might be real and thereby showed how shining light on a metal results in the release of electrons. This is called the photoelectric effect; Einstein published his results in 1905, and for this was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. (He never did receive the Nobel prize for his work in relativity for which he is most famous.) One might say that this was the beginning of the insertion of discontinuity into theoretical physics; energy came in little packets, energy did not come in a continuous stream. I guess, that it might have led a few original thinkers to ask; "What else might not be as continuous as commonly assumed under everyday observation?"

Now also in 1905, Einstein published his paper on special relativity. 'Special' meant that he was looking at how things appeared differently to two observers who were moving relative to one another but always at some constant velocity; i.e., he did not consider any acceleration between the systems that he was looking at. That was to come later in 1916 when he published his paper on general relativity, which, in essence, presented a completely different way of looking at gravity; specifically, then he showed that acceleration and gravity were more-or-less synonymous.

Let us stay with special relativity since this, even though it is a special case, has sufficient novelty for a half-hour talk. First let us note, that the theory is universally applicable, but gives measurable results only when things are moving relative to one another at something close to the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. This might not mean much in our everyday lives, but the theory had profound effect on how scientists began to understand the workings of nature. Imagine that you are on an extremely fast-moving train and that you and a person on the other end of a car each decide to light a candle at exactly the same time. Given a signal by a third party in the car, you do this and it appears to everyone in the car the you have succeeded in lighting your candles at exactly the same time. Later, when talking to some people who saw the train go by, they asked why you had lit your candle later than the other person. You are completely taken aback by this question, but it is true. Everyone on the platform noticed that you were not lighting candles at the same time. What this told physicists was that time was not the same for everyone; in fact, that things did not appear to be occurring at the same time for everyone; a particular event did not necessarily occur at the same time for different observers. Time appeared to be a 'funny sort of thing'. Einstein pushed this concept a lot further. He said, and all this was later proven, that when something travels at a high velocity relative to something else, all matter that travels so fast gets heavier and thereby more sluggish; this includes all the gears and stuff inside of clocks and all matter inside human bodies, etc. and thereby clocks tell the time that is felt by all people and all things traveling at whatever velocity they are traveling at. He also showed mathematically that all things, including human bodies shrink in the direction of their motion. All this says that time and space are not the absolutes that they had been conceived to be by Newtonian physics.

As somewhat of an aside, I'll say something about what this implication has for space travel. In order to keep a rocket from falling back to earth, its speed must exceed 25,000 miles per hour, which is called the 'escape velocity'. Once it has 'escaped', gravity is quite weak because everything including the earth is so far away. Therefore, it takes relatively little energy to direct the rocket in some direction, and, further, it doesn't take much more energy to speed it up. Now if we direct it towards some huge body, like Jupiter in our Solar System, or a distant star, we, in effect, get this body using its gravity, to accelerate the rocket further. Now we aim the rocket so that it does not fall into the accelerating body and just whizzes past it like a sling shot; and then we aim it at another large body to give it further acceleration. Obviously, we can do this until the speed of the rocket becomes appreciable, perhaps even a significant fraction of the speed of light. Now to make the presentation interesting, let's assume that there is somebody's twin sister on board this rocket, and that after she and the rocket have traveled out some sizable fraction of a light-year (a light-year being the distance that light travels in one year when it travels at 186,000 miles in each second), using the same acceleration techniques, the rocket returns to earth. What will the traveling girl find? Depending upon the actual velocity of the rocket during the trip, she will have aged, but perhaps only a few years. But when she looks around on earth, she finds that everything is unrecognizable, and finally finds out that her twin sister died about 500 years ago. In other words, more than 500 years of time will have elapsed on earth, while only a few years will have passed on the rocket ship. I point out that we have the basic technology to allow one to make such a journey today, but no one has yet volunteered. Similarly, there may be intelligence somewhere out there that already had the technology a few thousand or a few million years ago, and they might be coming our way. An extreme way of putting all this is that time stands still for anything traveling at the speed of light. A light ray or photon, if it could think and sense, would believe that it has traveled instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other; lucky for it that it has no mass, otherwise it would feel awfully sluggish and be going nowhere.

Now let's get back to the chronology of my talk. While there was much activity after 1905 in order to try to make some sense out of Max Planck's suggestion, it took until 1930 before most of the important pieces had fallen into place. Some of the giants in the development of what came to be called 'quantum mechanics' were Bohr, Born, Sommerfeld, Pauli, Jordan, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Dirac.

It is to be noted that Einstein is not included in this list. Somewhat later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the theory was extended to include what is now called QED or Quantum Electrodynamics; for this extension Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga received the Nobel prize. Although I will not describe this theory, I mention this extension because QED is the most precise physics theory ever devised; for any quantity that has been measured and calculated, the quantities agree to about 11 decimal places, or, put another way, to about 1 part in 100 billion; astounding accuracy since neither the measurements nor theory, independently, can be expected to give 100% accuracy. What this accuracy shows is that the overall picture painted by quantum mechanics must have some validity.

Now let me describe one of the early simple experiments that, to say the least, is intriguing. First let's have a gun, something that shoots either electrons or bullets; then some distance in front of it let's place a wall with two slits in it. When I shoot electrons, I'll make the slit openings very small and very close together, a few times larger than the size of the electron, when I shoot bullets, the slits can be larger and much further apart, a few times larger than the size of bullets; then some distance behind the wall, lets place detectors which can detect, and then something that can record the positions of whatever gets detected. To keep the descriptions simple, let's assume that in both cases, the detections can be recorded by light impinging on a photographic film.

First, let me shoot and detect bullets. Even though you probably all know this, I point out that they'll scatter somewhat because they don't all come out of the gun barrel in exactly the same manner. When I close one of the slits, the detectors will show the maximum brightness immediately behind the open hole, with some lesser degree of brightness around this center, falling off quite rapidly. A pattern, typically, what one would call a normal scatter. When I shoot bullets with both slits open, I get similar patterns at the detectors beyond both slits. If I made a large number of trials, if my gun were located exactly between the slits and the slits were of exactly equal size, and if I could count the number of bullets that were detected, I would find out that, on the average, about the same number went through each slit. I would conclude that there was no interference among the bullets that went one way or the other.

After convincing myself that everything was behaving as it should, say 'normally', I finally get the guts to try the same experiment with electrons using an electron gun that I take out of my TV set, my TV screen to act as detectors since this gives off light when hit by electrons, and a camera loaded with regular photographic film to record where the screen lights up. Now I close one of the slits and shoot electrons. Not surprisingly, I find the same sort of pattern on the film that I had noticed when I had fired bullets. So then I leave both slits open. To my surprise, the strike-pattern on my film seems to have little relationship to the location of the two slits; the thing that I notice is that there is a predominant area of light, not behind each slit, but at a point exactly between the two slits, and then there are dark and light gradations on either side, with the light intensity falling off with distance from this center-point between the slits. This looks to me like what is called an interference or diffraction pattern, which results when 'waves' interact. To picture this, for simplicity think of the space between my gun and the slits, and also beyond, being filled with water, and the gun being my hand, making waves. When these waves try to go through the slits, what comes out are waves that seem to come from the two points where the slits are located. These seemingly, now unrelated waves have peaks and valleys. Some distance from the slits, where these waves merge, they will merge is such a fashion as to produce peaks where the peaks reinforce each other, and valleys where the valleys reinforce each other, with varying levels of ups and downs where there is not complete reinforcement or canceling out. So I now say to myself, 'gee, an electron behaves like a wave, while it is moving and going through slits, but then it behaves like a particle when it hits the TV screen'. So I further say to myself: 'I have to learn more about this'. So first I slow down the rate at which my gun shoots electrons and I place detectors at both holes so that I can find out how many and which electrons go through each hole. To my surprise, even when I make my detectors so efficient that they could not possibly disturb the electron in its path, I find that the patterns on my screen are now identical to the patterns made with bullets when both slits were open. It seems what when an electron 'knows' that I know where it is when it reaches the wall (when going through either slit), it will keep going and arrive at the screen as one would normally expect a particle to do. Now I say, okay let's not try to detect which slit each electron goes through but let's try something else. So I reduce the output of my electron gun further so that it emits only one electron every minute. After the first electron is released, I notice a spot on my film; but I can't really tell which hole the electron went through because I need some statistics; but I would think that the electron went through one slit or the other and that after shooting many electrons I eventually I would end up with peak luminescence behind each slit, like the bullet pattern. After all, one would not expect to eventually end up with an interference or diffraction pattern since it take a multiplicity of colliding waves to interfere with each other. So I keep shooting electrons, one every minute and wait around for a week. To my surprise, I then find the interference pattern that I received when I shot electrons out very rapidly, when they could, perhaps, interfere with each other like ocean waves. I have to ask myself: 'What does this mean?' It means that either a specific electron 'knows' where all the previously emitted ones landed, so that it can land in the appropriate place to make an interference pattern, or that all electrons go through both slits at once so that they can interfere with themselves. If you were a physicist making this experiment for the first time, which alternative would you choose; a particle that has 'knowledge' or an elementary particle that has wave characteristics so that it can divide 'itself' and then come back together? Or can you think of something even weirder? A still weirder, and seemingly correct viewpoint, is that the apparent wave is not a material wave like a water wave, but a probability wave whose characteristics give only the probability of finding an associated particle at a particular place. Therefore one can conclude that on the subatomic level nothing really exists unless someone looks at it. This is worth repeating.

What is called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is still the picture accepted by most physicists today, says is that small particles like electrons really are only "probability waves' and that they don't come into existence until somebody 'looks' at them. After a physicist looks at an electron and thereby knows approximately where it is and how it is moving, she can compute the associated probability wave which tells her what the probability is that she might find this electron at a certain location sometime in the future. However, it is to be noted, that she can only calculate the probability of again finding this electron; she can never determine with 100% certainty that the electron will move from say here to a specific there. All this gets sort of wrapped up with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is something that you might have heard of. When one gets down to the microworld, Heisenberg said that if you know exactly where a particle is, you can tell nothing about its movement at that time; or if you don't exactly know where it is, then you can also get some, although not exact, idea as to it movement, which multiplied by its mass is usually called its momentum; that is, the unknown in the position times the unknown in the momentum cannot be smaller than a very small number called Planck's constant. And Heisenberg calculated that the same was true of energy and the time; that is, the product of their uncertainties cannot be less than Planck's constant. On top of the experimental result with the two slits, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle compounds the weirdness, and may, in fact, indicate that continuity, in general, is a myth. When I said earlier that an electron does not come into existence until one looks at it, what did I mean? When a dial says it is there, or when it is registered in someone's consciousness? Similarly, when a physicist decides to measure the location of a particle to a certain accuracy, when does the associated accuracy of a momentum determination get compromised. When an experimental result has been obtained, or when the physicist has decided to do a location experiment rather than a momentum experiment? Is it any wonder that Einstein could never be made to believe the Copenhagen interpretation? Too much probability was involved, and Einstein could not be made to believe that "the old one" shoots dice. I'll carry this interpretation further in a moment, but first I'd like to inject another interpretation made up by Feynman. This is called the 'path integral' interpretation. Feynman said that just before an electron comes to the slitted wall, it sends out 'exploratory or pilot waves' that instantaneously move out along all paths that are possible for the electron to move in, and then, also instantaneously, when it gets back confirming signals, it can add up all the components and thereby find out which path it can take with the least expenditure of an energy quantity called "action". It then takes a path that satisfies this condition. In an actual calculation, things get a little fuzzy, so that again one works with probabilities and comes out with a small spread of possible paths. This interpretation defies common sense even more than the Copenhagen interpretation, and the more simple calculations based on the path integral method give identical results; essentially, perfect agreement with experiments.

Now let me get down to the real interesting stuff, that which really bothered Einstein. Consider two particles that had interacted either by just bumping into each other and scattering, or by being ejected from an atom because of radioactive decay. Now, after these particles have flown apart for some time, and thereby increasing the distance between them (and let's say without interacting with any other particles in the interim), a physicist decides to make measurements on one particle. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle comes into play, but quantum mechanics also says that because of their initial interaction, these particles are somehow correlated. Let me try to get the point across by using common terms to simplify the picture. Let's say that both particles have height and weight and that in combination, from the initial reaction, we know that their combined height must equal 100 inches and their combined weight 100 pounds, but either can have any weight within these bounds. Also, we know that quantum mechanics, says that we cannot measure both characteristics simultaneously. So with this knowledge in hand, our physicist measures the height of one particle and finds that is 60 inches tall. Immediately, he knows that the height of the other particle must be 40 inches. Now let's say that another physicist, in collaboration, somehow followed the trajectory of the other particle and decides to make measurements on it, shortly after our first physicist made his height determination. First he tries to measure the weight; but he finds that he gets nothing but incomprehensible answers; therefore, he tries to measure its height, and lo and behold, he finds it to be 40 inches. After the two physicists have done this experiment many times, they decide to compare notes. What they find is that if one first measures the height of one particle, the other can never get results trying to measure the weight of the other particle. Similarly, when weight is first measured on one particle, it becomes impossible to measure the height of the other particle. Furthermore, when the measurable quantities are measured, the combined results always add up to 100 units. The only thing that they can conclude is that the particles are somehow connected or they must have been sending messages between themselves. This seems a bit hairy, so they delve somewhat further into their results and take into account the differences in time between the making of their measurements. What they then conclude is that the particle first measured has to send a signal that travels faster than the speed of light in order to contact the second particle prior to the time when the second physicist makes his measurement. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; but this is the only way to explain the results if they are not connected and are sending messages. I point out that these experiments have been carried out and this is the conclusion arrived at. Now extending this conclusion and elaborating somewhat, let's say that we wait a long time after the particles have initially interacted, many years, so that the particles are near opposite ends of the universe, many light- years apart. Now, we have to, sort of, assume the impossible; that these particles interacted with no other particles on their way. This is not a completely phony assumption, since small elementary particles, the neutrinos, can do this. What our laboratory results and the interpretation of quantum mechanics tell us is that when someone decides to make a specific measurement on a particle or to look at it in a certain way, her decision will affect the characteristics of a previously correlated particle even if that particle is at the other end of the universe. Think about this for awhile. What this really says is that the characteristics of all particles in the universe are determined by their past history, by the characteristics of the other particles that they have interacted with during their lifetime. Electrons, for example, each have individual characteristics, but they seem to be the same, probably, because they all had similar interactions with other particles during their lifetimes; but might there not be slight differences and that this is the reason for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? This conclusion leads me to say, ah ha, isn't this just like the way people are characterized? Aren't the characteristics of each of us determined by all the previous interactions that we have had from birth up to the present? Aren't we all different even though we are to a large extent the same? How cute! The microcosm seems to behave like everyday reality. Since we, and everything else in the universe, are composed of micro-things, particles or whatever, we can no longer look at things as being outside of ourselves; everything seems to be related in a very basic manner. There seems to be no thing that is 'separate'. While I state this apparently all-pervasive picture, I also point out that what occurs at the micro-level should never be assumed to carry over into our macroscopic world. At the micro-level one might find extraordinary things happening with quite reasonable probability; but, almost always, similar extraordinary behavior at the macro-level is forbidden because the probability of occurrence can be calculated to be essentially zero, although not absolutely so. Apparent "miracles" at the micro-level, do not imply "miracles" at the macro-level! A sub-micro-particle might travel to the other end of the universe without something getting in its way; but this is hardly possible for a human being, or even a bacteria.

I could go on and talk about many other things, but I suspect that what I have already said is more than enough for a non-theoretical-physicist to absorb in one morning. But, in closing, let me just mention a few things that you might have heard about.

All the elementary particles may be made of strings that started out in 9 or 10 spatial dimensions, wherein 6 or 7 of these dimensions are folded in on themselves so that we cannot appreciate them. Also, this superstring theory says that each fundamental particle is simply a specific harmonic of a vibrating string.

Our Universe is not the only universe, there maybe a zillion out there with varying laws of physics and basic constants of nature. Such universes can develop from black holes that exist in our Universe, or there may be other mechanisms. In this grand variety of universes, Darwin's theory seems to apply. Only some of the universes are capable of repeated propagation and the most prolific are those that pass on survival characteristics to their progeny. These surviving universes seem to be long-lived ones, capable of reproduction and therefore they have the characteristics necessary for the support of 'life'. Since these universes exist in dimensions that we cannot see since our vision is limited by the velocity of light, we can only postulate that they exist, we cannot interact with them. Also, some may exist in the dimensions that are apparently rolled up in our universe, but may not be in other universes. All this leads to a grandiose Universe, or Multiverse, which is evolving, and probably had no beginning and will have no ending. In all of this conjecture, if the world emerged from nothing, as I will soon discuss, probably through 'chaos' which I haven't touched upon, and works by chance, what role can there be for an omniscient creator?

And lastly, I point out something that has nothing to do with theoretical physics, it has to do strictly with observations. As far as astronomers can determine, when they try to add up quantities that have meaning for our universe as a whole, they always come up with a number that is nearly zero. What is the total energy in our universe (meaning energy plus the mass as given by E = mc²)? --- It appears to be zero. What is the total electric charge in our Universe? --- The pluses seem to cancel out the minuses to produce zero. What is the angular momentum contained in our universe? --- Things seem to be rotating one way or the other so as to cancel each other out. And I could go on with all the other basics, but let me just state the conclusion that everything seems to add up to NOTHING. This is pretty much what most theoretical physicists conjectured to be true after Paul Dirac, in 1930, hinted that what we call a perfect vacuum is really a very dynamic place where particles and their counterparts, antiparticles or antimatter, are continually produced in profusion and are subsequently, usually, but not always, rapidly annihilated. Particles, and perhaps even universes, arise from nothing and eventually go back into nothing.

I hope that this gives you some idea about the 'weirdness' of our universe, and the nature of the physics profession. While these physics activities seem 'out-of-this-world', isn't it amazing that such thinking has led to all of our technological advances ranging from mechanical and electrical machinery, and electronic devices, to chemistry, and, more recently, to our understanding of basic biology and medicine? Also, it appears that now, more than ever, physics is pointing the way for philosophy. Many philosophers believe that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, and the nature of consciousness, are manifestly two of the deepest mysteries of all. Some theoretical physicists now advocate the view that these mysteries may be linked. Frankly, I have my doubts about this.