Building Blocks of Reality ~ Part 1

I have just recently watched the documentary 'The Secrets of Quantum Physics (Part 1: Einstein's Nightmare) and thought it would be beneficial to make some notes from the content. So here goes. 

Professor Jim Al-Khalil opens the documentary by saying that “beneath the complexities of everyday life, the rules of our universe seem reassuringly simple”. He provides the examples of a bridge that is supporting his weight, of water flowing downhill and of throwing a stone which flies through the air in a predictable path. So it follows that as a species we are able to say that there is evidence of some components in life which are consistent and predictable; this in turn ignites our curiosity to seek out other certainties by which we can chart and navigate our consensus of ‘reality’. 

The documentary informs that it was about 100 years ago that some of the world’s greatest scientists began to peer into the building blocks of matter and discovered a world of quantum mechanics in which things could be in two places at once, that their fates are seemingly dictated by chance and that reality defies common sense. 

Imagine the level of shock and amazement that must have emerged in those who first began to peer into the realm of the unknown – what was at stake was everything we thought we knew (from a basis of everyday observation and experience). It would seem that the act of observation is itself transient and that what we determine as conclusive or as reality only takes on form after we have concluded that we ‘know’ something; what we determine as ‘reality’ isn’t reality per se, but is a conclusion that we arrive at through our level of observation and our interpretation of events. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of what we now refer to as quantum mechanics, has been quoted as saying ‘everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real” and “anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”. 

In 1890 Germany was a new country, recently unified and hungry to industrialise. The Germans had spent millions buying the European patent for Edison’s new invention, the light bulb (although Edison has been credited as being a genius behind and the inventor of the lightbulb, other people were already working on similar technologies). Furthermore, engineering companies were swift to realise that there were fortunes to be made building street lights for an emerging German Empire. It was this impetus to create a strong foothold upon the world stage and to establish an industrial and economical advantage that would give rise to a scientific revolution – the world of quantum mechanics.
 

It transpires that the light bulb presented something of a problem, in that although engineers knew that if you heated the filament with electricity, it glowed, the physics underpinning this was a mystery. In 1887 the German government invested millions in a new technical research institute in Berlin and in 1900 enlisted the scientist Max Planck to work there. 

Planck and his colleagues built a black-body radiator, a special tube which they could heat to a precise temperature and as a way to measure the colour or frequency of light it produced. Although very bright, red-white light could be produced, there was very little blue. Why is it that little ultraviolet is produced at all, even when we look at things as hot as the sun? This perplexed the scientists of the late 19^th century and they named it the ‘ultraviolet catastrophe’. Planck looked into solving this and found precise mathematical links between the colour of light, its frequency and its energy, although he didn’t understand the connection. 

At this same time, scientists were studying the newly discovered radio waves and how they were transmitted. They discovered that huge voltages would cause sparks to jump across a gap between two metal spheres. By shining a powerful light on the spheres, they could make the sparks jump across more easily, which suggested a connection between light and electricity. 

To understand this phenomenon more, scientists used a gold leaf electroscope. Once this apparatus was charged, an excess of electrons would push two gold leaves apart. The leaves weren’t affected by shining red light (and no matter how bright) upon the metal surface. However, if blue light and rich in ultraviolet was used, the gold leaves immediately collapsed. It was evident from this that light could knock out electrons and remove the static electric charge from the leaves. The puzzle as to why ultraviolet light was so much better at doing this than red light became known as the ‘photoelectric effect’. However, neither the ultraviolet catastrophe nor the photoelectric effect could be understood using the best science of the time, which had put forward that light was a wave. 

The documentary pointed out that if we were to observe how waves in water behave, it would be evident that bigger and more intense waves have more power. If light was a wave, then it would follow that more intensity should knock out more electrons. But in the experiments with the gold leaf electroscope, it didn’t seem to matter how intense the red light was, as it didn’t move the electrons from the metal and yet the weak ultraviolet worked within seconds. Was light more than or something other than a wave?

It was in 1905 that Albert Einstein came up with a new theory to explain the photoelectric effect. He put forward that we have to dismiss the idea that light is a wave and to regard it instead as a stream of tiny particles. The term he used to describe a particle of light as a tiny lump of energy was a quantum. According to Einstein, each particle of red light carries very little energy because red light has a low frequency, so even a very bright red light with many red light particles can’t dislodge electrons from the metal places. Each particle of ultraviolet light carries more energy because ultraviolet is a higher frequency and so a few of them, as with a dim ultraviolet light, are enough to knock the electrons out of the metal plate and collapse the gold leaf. Einstein’s idea helped to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe and Planck’s mystery of the light bulb, in that there was more red than ultraviolet because ultraviolet quanta took considerably more energy to make. 

This marked the beginning of a scientific revolution, in that it demonstrated that a new approach was needed to the kind of physical science that people had previously been engaging with.  However Einstein’s theory left physicists with a paradox that defied common sense.  Light was a wave which explained shadows and bubbles and yet it was also a particle – a quanta which explained the photoelectric effect and the ultraviolet catastrophe.

A few years later and the Western world was in the grip of a cultural revolution marking the birth of modernism; the paradox of light was to become a battleground about the nature of reality itself, with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr on one side and Einstein on the other. What was now in question wasn’t about light but about the particles that make electricity. It had previously been understood that electrons were tiny lumps of matter, small but solid particles. An experiment was carried out at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey whereby they fired a beam of electrons at a crystal and watched how they scattered. What they discovered was that each single electron was behaving like a wave. It was to explore this phenomenon and other theories about light and matter that Niels Bohr and his colleagues created quantum mechanics.

It would appear that an electron is ethereal and representative of some form of probability event.  If it were a coin spinning, then it would be both heads and tails but if we were to intervene and to stop it spinning by putting a hand on it flat, then it would be one or the other. The moment we observe it with intent to measure it is when it behaves as a particle. To anyone who believes in an objective reality as something which is tangible and can be consistently measured and dissected, any theories about what had been previously been regarded as amongst the commonest and most basic building blocks of reality as instead being ethereal probability particles would be crazy-making; as weird as snapping our fingers and being able to make something appear out of thin air as if by magic! As the Professor in the documentary said, “It’s like there’s a curtain between us and the quantum world and behind it there is no solid reality, just the potential for reality”. This new theory with regards to the nature of electrons became known as the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’. 

Albert Einstein did not favour this interpretation of reality. He has been famously quoted as saying, “Does the moon cease to exist when I don’t look at it?” He and Niels Bohr would debate passionately about whether quantum mechanics meant giving up on reality or not. Then, along with two other scientists, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, Einstein thought they’d found a flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation and it had to do with an aspect of quantum mechanics called ‘entanglement’. Entanglement has to do with the relationship that exists between a pair of quantum particles whose fates are intertwined. If for example, they were created in the same event, it would not matter if there appeared to be any measurable distance between them as many of their properties would be linked. The Copenhagen interpretation says that, in the example of two spinning coins, neither of them is heads or tails. In the case of entanglement, once one coin is stopped and becomes heads, the second coin will simultaneously become tails. This suggested that somehow the two coins had to be communicating instantaneously across space and time. 

Einstein refused to believe this faster than light communication as his theory of relativity said that nothing could travel that fast, not even information. He referred to the phenomenon of apparent communication between two quantum particles as ‘spooky action at a distance’ and claimed that it was a flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein’s theory was that instead of there being any spontaneous occurrence, somehow the destiny of the two quantum particles was already fixed long before we were able to observe them and had instead been hidden from us. 

Einstein did not view quantum particles as being anything like spinning coins that are representative of a field of spontaneous potential or probabilities, but as components of a larger picture of reality that we are simply becoming aware of at any moment of observation. An example would be say, a pair of gloves that are separated into boxes. We wouldn’t know which box contained which glove until we opened one, but would then know instantly that the other box contained the other glove to the set. Neither glove would have been altered by an act of observation; it didn’t demonstrate any spooky action at a distance and preserved his theory that nothing, not even information, could travel faster than light. The only thing that had changed was our knowledge.

Is there an objective reality or not? Does something only come into existence when we look at it, i.e. is the moon not there otherwise, or are we simply turning over pieces and becoming aware of a giant jigsaw in which everything has its place and is inter-related? In the late 1930s, war moved across Europe and many of the leading scientists fled to the United States. The Second World War led to the Cold War and an abundance of American money that was available to invest in continuing research and technologies, together with a new vision of the future took hold.  The philosophical side of things was rendered into having a back seat. The modern electronic age was coming into view and has given us revolutionary telecommunications, lasers and other medical advances as well as nuclear power. Aside from any industrial advantage, the technological leap has been profound not simply in terms of yielding information, but of providing a context by which we are shaping our cultural response and values.

The documentary asserts that quantum mechanics was so successful that most working physicists deliberately chose to ignore Einstein’s objections. The yield that this new industry was generating was so great that for anyone to get in its way brought forward the phrase, “shut up and calculate”, causing for Bohr and Einstein’s debate on the reality of the quantum world to move into having less focus. 

It was whilst working at Harwell, Britain’s atomic research centre, that physicist John Stewart Bell started to ponder on the mystery and questions that quantum mechanics had raised and in particular, the Copenhagen interpretation. He became troubled about the direction that quantum mechanics had taken and said, “I hesitate to think it might be wrong, but I know it is rotten”. In the early 1960s he embarked on a challenge to try and resolve the crisis of how to check without looking if something is or isn’t there and is real. Bell’s Theorem was shown to demonstrate that Einstein’s views on the incompleteness of quantum mechanics and in particular the action of hidden local variables was incorrect. His theories were such that they would have a lasting impact on physics, laying the foundations for quantum information technology, most especially cryptography which has been so greatly prized by the financial services and cyber-security industries. 

To sum this up and what does it mean?

 

In simple terms, why was Bell’s contribution to physics so revolutionary? Because physicists since the time of Newton, had been using concepts from classical mechanics, the field that studied the nature and motion of objects. Classical mechanics had put forward that measurable properties such as position, momentum and acceleration etc. of an object had to be well-defined before it is measured.

An example would be that if you were to pick up a ball and observe that it is red, then you are assuming that the ball was already red prior to your picking it up. Quantum mechanics on the other hand, would argue that a measurable property is not well-defined before you measure it and that it exists in a combination of certain possible states or a field of probabilities; that it is only when you measure it does the combination filter out to just one possible final state. This filtering out of possible states is referred to as ‘quantum decoherence’ or wavefunction collapse. Physicists know that such a phenomenon exists but as to how it works is completely unknown. 

Are we information gatherers or passive travellers moving along pre-ordained pathways? Are we autonomous beings in so far as we are capable of choosing to be at cause in the events of life – our own, others and the planet? Are we literally birthing reality into existence moment by moment or are we waking up to a primordial state of consciousness – are the two mutually exclusive or could both Einstein and Bohr be right?

How does the nature of how we regard ourselves and our purpose shape our motivations and behaviours? How does this in turn impact upon and influence others, both within our own culture and without? What sort of timeline, or field of probabilities, are we creating that will inform and influence future – and if time is not linear, perhaps even previous generations? Are we able to become super-conscious beings, what factors are contingent upon this and how might that change every facet of our experience?