Taking the quantum leap, p.1
Taking the Quantum Leap, page 1
Taking the
Quantum
Leap
The New Physics for Nonscientists
Fred Alan Wolf
In the fond memory of my father,
Maurice Wolf,
and my mother, Emma Wolf.
Thank you for the gift of life.
Contents
Preface: Six Years After
Introduction
Part I Welcome to the Machine
Chapter 1 The Passive Observer
Dawn of Consciousness
All Is One, All Is Change
The Idea of Discontinuity
Zeno and Moving Things
Zeno’s First Paradox
Zeno’s Second Paradox
Zeno’s Third Paradox
Aristotle’s Attempt to Resolve Zeno’s Paradoxes
Retrospect: The End of Passivity
Chapter 2 The Active Observer
Newton’s Giants: The Age of Reason
Galileo: The First Active Observer
The Continuity of Mechanics
A Conversation with Isaac Newton
The Nightmare of Determinism
An Explanation of Light and Heat… with Something Missing
The Ether Is Missing
The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
The End of the Mechanical Age
Part II When the Universe Jumped
Chapter 3 The Disturbing Observer
The Movement of Reluctant Minds
Averting a Catastrophe with Lumps of Energy
Throwing Stones in a Quantum Pond
The Energy, the Whole Energy, or Nothing at All
The Reluctant Planck
Einstein Draws a Picture: The Photon Is Born
Chapter 4 Quantum Jumps
A Lord Eats a Raisin Pudding Atom
Bohr’s Quantum Atom
Chapter 5 When a Particle Is a Wave
A Prince Imagines a Wave
American Grains of Waves
Schroedinger’s Unimaginable Waves: The End of Pictures
Chapter 6 No One Has Seen the Wind
God Shoots Dice: The Probability Interpretation
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: The End of Mechanical Models
Chapter 7 Resistance to Uncertainty
Part III Is There an “Out There” Out There?
Chapter 8 Complements of the Cosmic House
The Act of Creation: Observation
The Paradoxical Cube
Wave-Particle Duality and the Principle of Complementarity
The Magician’s Choice
The Case of the Vanishing Observer
Newcomb’s Paradox
The Principle of Complementarity: A Recap
Chapter 9 The Case of the Missing Universe
The Devil’s Advocate
The EPR Paradox
Chapter 10 Faster Than a Speeding Photon
Things That Go Bump in the Night
Qwiffs, Flows, and Pops
Chapter 11 Breaking the Unbroken Whole
When Two Become One
I Am This Whole Universe
Imagination’s Architecture: The Qwiff
All or Nothing at All: How to Add Qwiffs
Two Places at the Same Time: Entangling Qwiffs
Schroedinger’s Cat in a Cage
Chapter 12 Nothing Up My Sleeve
The Search for the Unseen Order
Bell’s Theorem: Separate Houses with a Common Basement
We Has Found the Hidden Variables: They Is Us!
Part IV Losing Our Minds
Chapter 13 Consciousness and Parallel Universes
What Kind of Machine Am I?
The Golem: A Machine with Consciousness?
The Mind of Professor Wigner
The Paradox of Wigners Friend
An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes
Chapter 14 Human Will and Human Consciousness
Queerer than We Can Imagine
The Quantum Mechanics of Human Consciousness
A Quantum Mechanical Mind-Body Interaction: Bass’s Model
The Impossible Mission: The Exercise of Human Will
The Atom and “I”: Are Atoms Conscious?
All for One and One for All: Where Is My Mind?
God’s Will and Human Will
Chapter 15 New Ideas in Quantum Physics
Idea One: Taking a Photograph of Another Everett Parallel World
Using a Quantum Computer to Predict the Stock Market
Idea Two: The Future Influencing the Present
An Example: Wheeler’s Choice
Back to the Future: Awareness Before Awareness
What Does This All Mean?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface:
Six Years After
In January of 1986, a group of around two hundred quantum physicists gathered at the World Trade Center in New York City to spend one week discussing just what this strange quantum business means. This meeting, * occurring six years after the publication of the first edition of Taking the Quantum Leap, seemed to me to be an appropriate starting point for the new, updated edition. Attending the meeting reminded me of an earlier time—a time I described in chapter seven—when Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Max Born, Madame Curie, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Hendrik Lorentz, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and several other stars of the quantum discovery (numbering around thirty) gathered at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels in 1927 to discuss the same matter. Things haven’t really changed idea-wise in the ensuing years.
Certainly all of the stars of the 1927 conference have passed on. The last was Louis de Broglie who died in 1986 at the age of ninety-two, plus or minus a year or two. The new stars are surprisingly not many in number even though the quantum has become de rigueur in the twentieth century.
The new conference was in honor of one of the “grand old men” of the present quantum era, Eugene Wigner, who, at the conference, offered his wit and insight but no cigar to anyone. The mystery remains. Schrödinger’s cat still resides living or not in the box that may or may not be filled with cyanide gas. The quantum wave of probability (the qwiff) is still spreading out in space waiting for some unsuspecting observer to “pop” it—altering the probability and suddenly creating an observed reality. Wigner’s friend is still wondering if he or the professor observing him and the quantum system he holds in his hands “popped the qwiff’ and created the reality he so enjoyed when he observed the system himself. And Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s reality paradox still twists the heads of all in attendance who wonder if quantum mechanics is complete and if not, what bizarre theory will be needed to complete it.
And even though John Bell did not attend, his spirit was strongly felt as his theorem echoed through the World Trade Center faster than a speeding photon. New luminaries appeared and offered inventive insights which led to more mysteries.
Daniel Greenberger, the convention chairperson, reminded me of Lorentz, who introduced that famous Solvay 1927 colloquium in Brussels where Einstein announced that he hadn’t really gotten into this quantum business. Greenberger told us that the 1986 conference was the first comprehensive meeting on the quantum to be held in a very long time in the United States. I would venture a guess that this conference was the only one of its kind since 1927.
Greenberger explained that the quantum theory of reality has run counter to the usual theory of science. Normally, after a few decades or so, innovative experimental evidence is accrued that brings to light new phenomena that cannot be incorporated into the existing theory. But this is strongly not the case in the quantum theory. Inventive experimentation has proven that the quantum theory is still valid in spite of its debatable meaning. Quantum theory is correct, and it is as weird as ever.
When I was a student studying quantum mechanics at UCLA, there were certain examples, “thought experiments” as Einstein once coined them, that illustrated the strangeness of quantum mechanics. The famous cat of Schrödinger was one of them. In those days we students would sit in the back of the room listening as our professor explained the paradox, secretly smirking to ourselves, “How silly this all sounds.”* Little did we suspect that hardly thirty years after, the cat would live—and not live—in experiments being carried out at the IBM Research Laboratories in superconducting devices. Instead of a “cat in a box” there is a bit of magnetic flux caught in a tube. However, this isn’t just some tiny bit of magnetism. It is a macroscopic, or large-scale, amount—something that can be realized within the classical world of our everyday senses. And just like the cat who must exist in a ghostly world where it is alive and dead at the same time, this bit of flux must exist on two sides of a barrier simultaneously until some observer takes a peek and then—like the cat—it just pops onto one side of the barrier or the other.
Indeed, one of the major themes of the conference was the realization of quantum weirdness—something that we smirking graduate students hardly ever dreamed would become a reality. Instead of finding quantum mechanics restricted to ever tinier corners of the universe, we physicists are finding its applicability ever increasing to larger and larger neighborhoods of time and space.
Thus it is that six years after the first printing of Taking the Quantum Leap, the quantum has become even more compelling. While 1945 christened the “atomic age,” I believe that a new age is upon us. We are living in an era that properly should be called the “quantum age.” One need only look around at modern technology to see many of its examples. No television set purchased in the U.S. today will work without the tiny quantum of action playing its game. We are living in an age that performance artist Laurie Anderson calls “digital.” We speak of turning on or being turned off. It’s either all or nothing—a quantum of action that results in zero or one, with nothing in between.
A word about what’s new in this edition. I have added a whole new chapter—the fifteenth. There I will tell you some more about two of the novel discoveries that have taken place since the first printing of this book. Since I am most interested in new ideas, the emphasis is on our understanding of these new thoughts. As ever, I shall try to make these concepts comprehensible to even the most scientifically unsophisticated reader. I can’t help but tell you that the major theme of these ideas concerns our understanding of space and time. That old space-time of Einstein ain’t what it used to be. It seems that there may be parallel worlds out there that we will be able to tune to; even in this world the future may be able to reach back toward us and alter our perceptions of reality itself.
If you have already read the first fourteen chapters in the previous edition, don’t worry. This edition hasn’t altered a word. The fifteenth chapter, however, is new and perhaps even stranger than what goes before it. Just what will come of these new ideas, no one knows. The weirdness of the quantum age has still to reach the common world we all live in. But tomorrow is here today, and if these ideas about time and space are correct, we may be reaching an age of miracles as time turns the corner into century twenty-one.
Fred Alan Wolf
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
December 1987
*New Techniques and Ideas in Quantum Measurement Theory, conference held by the New York Academy of Sciences on January 21-24, 1986, in New York City.
* I’m sure readers who pick up this book for the first time are wondering about this famous cat. Just skip ahead to chapter eleven and read all about it.
Introduction
The “quantum leap” to which the title of this book refers is to be taken both literally and figuratively. In its literal sense, the quantum leap is the tiny but explosive jump that a particle of matter undergoes in moving from one place to another. The “new physics”—quantum physics—indicates that all particles composing the physical universe must move in this fashion or cease to exist. Since you and I are composed of atomic and subatomic matter, we too must “take the quantum leap.”
In the figurative sense, taking the quantum leap means taking a risk, going off into an unchartered territory with no guide to follow. Such a venture is an uncertain affair at best. It also means risking something that no one else would dare risk. But both you and I are willing to take such risks. I have risked writing this book and you, a nonphysicist, have risked picking it up to read. My colleagues warned me that such an undertaking was impossible. “No one could understand quantum physics without a firm mathematical background,” they told me.
For the scientists who discovered the underlying reality of quantum mechanics, the quantum leap was also an uncertain and risky affair. The uncertainty was literal. A quantum leap for an atomic particle is not a guaranteed business. There is no way to know with absolute certainty the movements of such tiny particles of matter. This in fact led to a new law of physics called the Principle of Indeterminism. But such new laws were risky, and the risk was to the scientists’ sanity and self-respect. The new physics uncovered a bizarre and magical underworld. It showed physicists a new meaning for the word order. This new order, the basis for the new physics, was not found in the particles of matter. Rather, it was found in the minds of the physicists.
Which meant that physicists had to give up their preconceived ideas about the physical world. Today, nearly eighty years after the discovery of the quantum nature of matter, they are still forced to reconsider all they had previously thought was sacrosanct. The quantum world still holds surprises.
This book presents both the history and the concepts of the new physics, called quantum mechanics. The most abstract concepts, those least grounded in common experience, are presented imaginatively. In this way, what was literal is presented figuratively. The thread of history and imaginative concepts runs throughout the narrative. Thus I hope to reach even the most mathematically unskilled among my readers.
Let me give an example. Quantum physicists discovered that every act of observation made of an atom by a physicist disturbed the atom. How?
Imagine you have been invited to tea. Surprise: the tea is given by extremely tiny elves! You will have to squeeze into their little elfin house. Welcome in anyway. Watch your head, though—the rooms aren’t very high. Watch your step, too—elves only need tiny furniture to sit in. Be careful … oh well, too late. You just stomped a tiny teacup out of existence.
Peering into the world of atoms and subatomic particles is like looking into such an elfin house, with one additional distraction: every time you look in, you must open a door or shutter, and in doing so, you shake up the delicate little house so badly that it appears in total disorder.
Moreover, not only are the elves tiny, they are very temperamental. Walk into their house with a chip on your shoulder or feeling just plain lousy and the little people behave very badly toward you. Smile and act nice and they are warm and sparkly. Even if you aren’t aware of your feelings in the matter, they are. Thus when you leave their little home, you may have had a good or bad time and not realize how much you were responsible for your experience.
If you now add that all you can observe are the results of such actions (i.e., opening and closing elf house doors, shaking up elf houses, breaking cups, etc.), you soon begin to wonder if what you are looking at is really a normal elf house or something entirely different. To some considerable extent, observations within the world of atoms appear equally bizarre. The meagerest attempt to observe an atom is so disruptive to the atom that it is not possible even to picture what an atom looks like. This has led scientists to question what is meant by any convenient picture of an atom. A few scientists hold to the belief that atoms only exist when they are observed to exist as fuzzy little balls.
In their reluctant attempts to describe the world of tiny objects like atoms and electrons (tiny particles contained within an atom and carrying an electrical charge), physicists devised quantum mechanics. The discovery of the new physics is the story of their adventure into the magical world of matter and energy. Their attempts were reluctant because each discovery made led to new and paradoxical conclusions. There were three paradoxes.
The first paradox was that things moved without following a law of mechanical motion. Physicists had grown accustomed to certain basic ideas concerning the way things move. There was an invested “faith” in the Newtonian or classical mechanical picture of matter in motion. This picture described motion as a continuous “blend” of changing positions. The object moved in a “flow” from one point to another.
Quantum mechanics failed to reinforce that picture. In fact, it indicated that motion could not take place in that way. Instead, things moved in a disjointed or discontinuous manner. They “jumped” from one place to another, seemingly without effort and without bothering to go between the two places.
The second paradox involved scientists’ view of science as a reasonable, orderly process of observing nature and describing the observed objectively. This view was founded on the conviction that whatever one observed as being out there was really out there. The idea of objectivity being absent from science is abhorrent to any rational person, particularly a physicist.
Yet quantum mechanics indicated that what one used to observe nature on an atomic scale “created” and determined what one saw. It is like always seeing light through a set of colored filters. The color of the light depends on the filter used. Yet there was no way to get rid of the filters. Physicists don’t know what the filters are. Even the most basic idea of matter, the concept of a “particle,” turns out to be misunderstood if one assumes that the particle has properties totally independent of the observer. What one observes appears to depend upon what one chooses to observe.
In itself, that is not paradoxical. But the total picture of the observed, drawn from the sum of observations, appears to be nonsensical. Consider another example.
