Physicists thing that they’re clever as hell.
Just look at that guy; thinks he’s got it all figured out.
(Bonus points for guessing who the physicist is!)
Now, I’m not talking about clever in the sense that they can figure stuff out. Most scientists are pretty good at that. No, what I’m talking about is “clever” in the sense of being funny.
See, physics is actually filled with little in-jokes and references that physicists think are just terribly cute, and all of them have to deal with stuff you can’t even see.
Quarks are tiny, tiny, tiny particles that, as far as we know, make up pretty much everything. Quarks, like electrons, protons, balls, cats, and street signs, have properties. Unfortunately for us, only some of these properties are ones that we’re already familiar with, like charge and mass.
So, to help characterize and classify these things, they’re broken up into types. Now, a normal person might say that there are three types of quark, and he’d be right for the most part (though I have no clue what business a normal person might have knowing things about quarks). But a physicist isn’t a normal person. They can’t have nice, simple, straightforward “types” of quarks. Instead, quarks have “flavors”.
Before you get excited, these aren’t delicious flavors either. There are 6 flavors of quarks. The first two are called “up” and “down”. Simple enough… The next two are “strange” and “charm”. Now, these are slightly weirder names. Strange quarks were named because they were exhibiting strange properties. I can’t fault them yet, but charm? Who calls a flavor of quark charm? There’s not even a reason for it! Anyway, anyway the last two went through a bit of an identity crisis for a while. At first, they were “truth” and “beauty”, because they decided it would be funny to keep with their naming scheme of non-physical concepts. But eventually the names changed to “top” and “bottom”. These names might seem oddly normal compared to strange, charm, truth, and beauty, but fear not. The name change to top and bottom wasn’t for (entirely) sane reasons. You see, occasionally, when talking about quarks in various conditions, the term “bare” comes up. And someone noted, at some point, that “bare bottom” was much funnier than “bare beauty”. Yes, anatomy jokes. That’ll totally show those literary critics that you can be witty!
Ever hear the phrase “You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!”? Well, you’ll be happy to know that if that phrase describes you, physicists have made it waaaaaaaaaay easier to explain yourself. Atoms are small. Really really small. Bigger than quarks, but way smaller than anything you can properly imagine. To study these things, nuclear physicists have to shoot stuff at the nuclei of these atoms. Now, a really big nucleus is about 10 femtometers across, which is about 10-14m. So, the area a really big nucleus takes up, is about 10-28m2 in area. If you’re already groaning, you’ve figured out that this area was termed a “barn”. To make it even worse, there’s an extended terminology surrounding it. So, now, thanks to some nonsensical naming conventions, you can explain how hard it would be to hit the broad side of a barn, lodge, or even a tardis.
I’m fairly sure that your eyes work, and if not, I’m glad that you don’t get to hear this in my gravelly-yet-monotone voice. Since your eyes most likely work, I don’t think it will be necessary to direct you to my previous post here, so I shall continue where I left off.
Modern Physicists may be quoted as saying that things may not exist at all times. Let that sink in a bit. Things; you, me, your soda; may not consistently exist, according to some. That is a very fundamental level of “being” upon which they have decided to cast doubt. It is troublesome to me, because these are people that represent not just my field of study, not just my major but to a great many people, they represent science as a whole.
To be clear, there are reasons for thinking this way. All theories must be consistent with reality. What we observe, we have to assume to be true, tacitly. All of our formulations and models must, in the end, agree with all aspects of what we observe. If reality doesn’t work the way that we’ve predicted, we need a damn good reason to keep that prediction around. In physics, the theories are tested with experiments. These experiments are done very very carefully. If an experiment contradicts a theory, the theory is wrong. What is particularly interesting, is that the theories that make people claim these outlandish things do agree with the experiments that have been devised.
***ADVANCED SCIENCE WARNING***
The infamous Double-Slit Experiment illustrates several basic tenets of quantum theory. The experiment goes a little like this:
Scientists set up a laser and shine it at a tiny slit in a screen. On the other side, they set up a backdrop to see the results. As the laser passed through the slit, they found that it diffracted, and the backdrop had a neat little pattern on it.
<= Like this one!
Next, they set up the laser to shine through a double slit, which is nothing more than two slits that are very close to one another. The scientists turned on the laser, and got a different pattern!
<= This one!!!
Now, you may notice that the second pattern is a lot like the first one, but has lots of little bright and dark spots. Well, these are areas of constructive and destructive interference, respectively. This all works because light predominantly acts like a wave.
Well, scientists weren’t quite done with their experiment yet. So they wheel out their electron gun (which is not quite as badass as it sounds, sadly), and shot electrons, one at a time, at the single slit target. One electron goes through, then another, then another, and soon scientists could see that the same diffraction pattern they saw with the laser was appearing on the backdrop.
Even though they had just demonstrated that electrons can have wave-like properties, the scientists weren’t done yet. They took down their single slit target and put up their double slit target. The fired up their electron gun, and one… at… a… time… fired little electrons at it to see what would happen. Several tense minutes later, they had their results: a backdrop with the double slit diffraction pattern on it! Hooray!
This made someone in the group pause for thought. Think about it from the electron’s perspective. You’re flying along, and suddenly you fly through a slit. Being tiny as you are, this causes you to diffract and fly off in a slightly different direction. What should eventually appear is two distinct single slit diffraction patterns. One for each slit in the screen. With the laser, the light could interfere constructively or destructively to form the bright and dark spots. But electrons can’t do that. It seems that electrons could somehow “sense” the second slit, even though it never interacted with it.
There’s several more parts to this experiment that pretty much sequentially blew the minds of scientists, but for now the bottom line is this. The only way for the electron to act as it did is if it interacted with both slits. Since an electron is primarily particulate, the only way it could interact is by travelling through both slits.
An entire mathematical framework was built up around this idea. At its core is the idea that the electron has a wavefunction, and until the wavefunction is collapsed by a measurement, it is in some murky, ill-defined state where it has somehow traveled through both slits in the screen. What is even more problematic is that in order for that to be the case, the electron cannot have a defined path.
Let me say that again: according to the only explanation these scientists had, THE ELECTRON CANNOT HAVE A DEFINED PATH! This means that the electron cannot be said to exist at any particular point along any particular path. Between start and finish, it may or may not exist in any particular place at all!
***END ADVANCED SCIENCE WARNING***
Welcome back all of you who skipped down! The point of all of this is that standard quantum mechanics is a theory that perfectly agrees with experiment, but doesn’t follow some basic logical tenets. Scientists have been very careful in their experiments and produced very particular results, and standard quantum mechanics can explain each of these results splendidly. But at the end of the day, we’re still left with a theory that casts doubt on the very nature of existence.
The most unfortunate part, in my humble opinion, is that there are other formulations of quantum mechanics that also agree with experiment. They, like the standard, perfectly agree with the observations of scientists and experiments. Unlike the standard, they allow for particles that exist at all times in a specific and well-defined way. They have a few problems, but are as glaring as the contradiction of that most obvious observation: THINGS EXIST!