Experimental Blog #174

Quotations and notes from "The Quantum Ten" - A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science by Sheilla Jones and "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics" - A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World by James Kakalios

From "The Quantum Ten":
"By the 1960s, the fruitfulness of the math-driven theory and experimentation began to wane. There have been no new fundamental laws of nature discovered since the 1970s ..."
" ... modern physicists would say mathematical logic is truth. Indeed, no idea in modern physics can be considered credible until it is validated by mathematical logic."
" ... this fundamental incomprehensibility of quantum physics has become the proverbial elephant in the living room."

"Enter Louis de Broglie. His wave theory assumed that if a wave could be a particle, a particle could also be a wave. And not only did light exhibit properties of wave/particle duality, so did matter."
"He{Einstein} wanted a physical theory that was based on an objective and visualizable external world, not one that was fundamentally probabilistic, acausal, and random."

" .. matrix mechanics precluded visualization ..."
"He{Schrodinger} believed that physics, at the microscopic and macroscopic levels, was intelligible .."
"{Heisenberg} espoused the view that a mathematical truth was the same as a physical truth, and that metaphors or images were to be shunned."

From "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics":
   "There are three impossible things that we must accept in order to understand quantum mechanics:

   Light is an electromagnetic wave that is actually comprised of discrete packets of energy.
   Matter is composed of discrete particles that exhibit a wavelike nature.
   Everything - light and matter - has an "intrinsic angular momentum," or "spin," that can only have discrete values."

"The Schrodinger equation plays the same role in atomic physics that Newton's laws of motion play in the mechanics of everyday objects."
"The Schrodinger equation requires us to know the forces that act on the atomic electrons in order to figure out where the electrons are likely to be and what their energies are."
"What Schrodinger discovered was the quantum analog of Newton's force={mass}x{acceleration}."
"In 1926 Schrodinger was able to mathematically translate one approach{his} into the other{Heisenberg's}, demonstrating that the two descriptions are in fact equivalent."

"Anything bigger than an atom or a small molecule has such a large mass that its corresponding de Broglie wavelength is too small to ever be detected."
 "The quantum descriptions of Schrodinger and Heisenberg accurately account for the properties of a single atom ..."

Experimental Blog # 173

Quotations from "Hidden Attraction" - The Mystery and History of Magnetism by Gerrit L. Verschuur and "The Void" by Frank Close

From "Hidden Attraction":
"  .. gravity, electricity, and magnetism all showed an inverse square law of force .."
"The equations{Maxwell's} describing electric and magnetic phenomena involved time as a parameter, and hence also a velocity. Up to then no one had expected that to understand the nature of lodestone one needed to take time into account."
"The stunning conclusion was that electrical and magnetic forces, under the umbrella of a new description, electromagnetism, traveled at the speed of light."
" ... the original questions about the nature of magnetism led scientists into a new world, a universe filled with electromagnetic waves and electromagnetic phenomena .."
" ..we have created a new world and gained precious new insights into our place in the scheme of things on earth and in the rest of the universe."
" .. astronomical studies of the farthest reaches of the universe depend on being able to detect and interpret electromagnetic waves from space."

"Forming a reasonably correct idea of the atom and of the physics of its behavior allowed a hydrogen bomb, a small-scale version of a star, to be built."
" ... nothing that will ever be discovered in physics will undo the fact that an atomic bomb wiped out Hiroshima. The model of the atom that allowed the bomb to be built was an excellent approximation of the truth."

From "The Void":
"Every student of mechanics meets these laws < > It is certainly true that their application enables us to send spacecraft all the way to Jupiter and by applying the right amount of force at the right time, as dictated by Newton, the craft indeed arrives at its destination."

" ..there is no absolute measure of velocity, < >acceleration is different: its magnitude as measured in all inertial frames is the same."
"Newton's laws of motion < > In 300 years of careful experimentation their only failures are when applied to objects moving near to the speed of light, whence they are subsumed in Einstein's relativity theory, and at atomic length scales, where the laws of quantum mechanics replace them."
"While quantum mechanics makes precise statements about phenomena on subatomic length scales, it does so while ignoring the effects of gravity."
"As the universe expands, space expands but objects held together by electromagnetic forces, such as planets and stars, do not change size < > Electromagnetic radiation has nothing to hold it so its wavelength extends as the universe grows."

Experimental Blog #172

Quotations from "The Infinite Resource - The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet" by Ramez Naam

" ... the most valuable resource we have and that we have ever had is the sum of our human knowledge .. " ".. the continual accumulation of new ideas, new inventions, and new knowledge about the world."

"Worldwide extreme poverty has plunged from more than 35 percent of the world population{ in 1970} to around 5 percent."{in 2005}
"Mobile phones have saturated the developed world, and now reach three quarters of the developing world as well."

" ...our stockpile of knowledge is the one natural resource that has grown over time rather than depleting < > knowledge increases our wealth < > Innovation increases our wealth."
"The physical resources matter. But the change in our knowledge resources - our science, our technology, our continual generation of new useful ideas - has made far more impact over the course of history. Knowledge acts as a multiplier of physical resources, allowing us to extract more value .."

"Farms in the United States use half the energy as they did in 1948, per unit of food produced."
"The energy needed to desalinate seawater has been reduced by nearly a factor of 9 over the last 40 years."{1970 to 2010}
"The limiting factors in mining are innovation and energy, not raw materials."
" .. the vast quantity of raw materials we possess, combined with their nearly infinite reusability, makes the value we can extract from that finite resource nearly limitless."
"To collect enough energy to provide for all of humanity's current needs, using current consumer-grade solar technology, it would take only 0.6 percent of the Earth's land area."
"We could meet the water needs of nine billion people with roughly .001 percent of the energy the sun delivers to our planet."

"China is now the world's leader in renewable energy."
" .. China is acting more aggressively against climate than we are, even though the problem is one of our making."

"Per terawatt hour of energy produced, coal kills an estimated 161 people worldwide. Nuclear, even after adding up all the potential future deaths attributed to every nuclear accident that has ever occurred, comes in at less than one-tenth of a death per terawatt hour."

" .. GM{genetically modified} crops have already reduced insecticide usage, reduced insecticide poisoning, encouraged soil conservation, reduced usage of the most dangerous herbicides like atrazine, reduced pollution of drinking water with herbicides, increased profits for developing world farmers trying to pull themselves out of poverty, and moderately increased yields."

"The average resident of the United States used one-third less oil in 2011 than in 1972."

Experimental Blog # 171

Quotations from "Dot Complicated" - Untangling Our Wired Lives by Randi Zuckerberg

"Now five billion people around the world have their own mobile phones, and about a billion of those are smartphones with access to the Internet, e-mail, and all the amazing apps that are available today."

"I follow a simple mantra. Work. Sleep. Family. Friends. Fitness.
 Pick three."

Two of the author's online behavior rules for children are:
   #3. Only add "friends" online if you also know them in real life.
   #5. If you're going to put something in writing, make sure you would be comfortable if it was reprinted in a newspaper.

"... about the trend of social media "shaming" and how it's gotten wildly out of hand."
"One tweet, one photo, one blog post is now all it takes for people to lose their jobs, their reputations, and their credibility."
"When you shame-post someone, it can have serious effects on that person's life."

"Now the ability to broadcast to everyone is universal, and the wildest dreams of the craziest futurists from the 1990s are a reality. Today everyone is a journalist, everyone is an art gallery, everyone is a newspaper, a magazine, and a wire service, all in one.
   And everyone is a mini media empire."

Experimental Blog # 170

Quotations and notes from "The Electronic Silk Road" - How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce by Anupam Chander

"If an event in cyberspace occurs both "everywhere and nowhere" < >, whose law governs?"
"Despite public perception to the contrary, the United States actually exports far more services{counting both electronically mediated and other services} than it imports. The United States had a net surplus in commercial services trade of $187 billion in 2011, < > India imported < > almost as much as it exported < > in 2011 ..."

"Who makes the rules that govern the ways that Facebook connects a seventh of humanity < > a community of a billion people."
"More than 80 percent of Facebook users lie outside the United States." Does this mean that there are about 200 million users of Facebook in the USA?!

"Even while Chinese factories have made that country the capitol of outsourcing in manufacturing, China has greatly lagged India in the outsourcing of services."

"The desire to liberalize the flow of goods across borders in service of efficient production has at times been insufficiently attentive to the rights of workers and the health of the environment.

"Trade has made and remade the world for millennia. The addition of services to global trade will remake the world yet again."

Experimental Blog # 169

Quotations from "Einstein's Mistakes" - The Human Failings of Genius by Hans C. Ohanian

"Einstein's theories of relativity rest on foundations first laid by Galileo - the special theory rests on Galileo's discovery of the  relativity of motion, and the general theory rests on Galileo's discovery of the equal rates of acceleration of freely falling bodies. Furthermore, both the special and the general theories incorporate and extend Newton's laws, and both incorporate Maxwell's equations."

   "In 1861, Maxwell finished assembling all the laws of electricity and magnetism in a system of four equations, Maxwell's equations. He discovered that these equations imply the existence of electromagnetic waves consisting of oscillating electric and magnetic fields that are created by oscillating electric charges."

"Einstein was not the discoverer of E=mc{squared}. The equation was known several years before Einstein < > The equation played only a marginal role in the discovery of nuclear fission and the development of the atomic bomb. < > The first complete proof of E=mcc was not found by Einstein, in 1905 or at any other time. It was found by Max von Laue, in 1911."

   "Einstein's mistakes did not affect his rank because they did not prevent him from making his groundbreaking discoveries."
"How much of an advantage did Einstein gain over his colleagues by his mistakes? Typically, about ten or twenty years. < > other physicists would have discovered the theory of general relativity some twenty years later, via a path originating in relativistic quantum mechanics."
" ...if Einstein had not discovered his equations for the gravitational field in 1915, then quantum theorists would certainly have discovered them in the mid-1930s, some twenty years later."
"In the absence of Einstein, all these discoveries would have been made somewhat later - mostly by an entirely different path - and physics today would have been pretty much the same as it is."

Experimental Blog # 168

Quotation from "Relativity" - The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein, translated by Robert W. Lawson, Introduction by Roger Penrose, Commentary by Robert Geroch, and a Historical Essay by David C. Cassidy

Quotations from the commentary by Robert Geroch:

"There are many other methods to measure "the length of a moving rod."
"There is considerably less reason to believe that these various methods must all agree in this realm. In fact, according to relativity theory they do not. For each different method there will be a factor - which can be calculated within special relativity .. . For one method ... might always yield precisely the rest-length of the rod; and for some other method ... the rod ... would be deemed to have lengthened rather than shortened.
   Thus "moving objects contract" is not a very good summary of what is predicted by special relativity."

   "Similar remarks apply to "time dilation." There are numerous experiments the results of which deserve to be called the "elapsed time" between two events; and different experiments will generally yield different answers. Einstein's time dilation refers to one particular choice of an experiment."