Everything is Connected - Sean Carroll on Brian Cox's Quantum Leap
Earlier this week, we were treated to rock star physicist Brian Cox explaining how everything in the universe is connected via the Pauli exclusion principle. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it so you’re up to speed.
The clip was from his “A Night With The Stars” televised lecture, which is something that would never make it on TV in the US, and that is sad.
In it, he rubbed a diamond and postulated that the PEP demanded that any changed energy states in the electrons in that chunk of carbon would be transmitted to all other electrons in the universe, so as to have no two in the same energy state. He’s a great speaker, but many people have accused him of screwing up in this demo.
Sean Carroll has the best write-up of why Cox’s take is a bit off on his blog, Cosmic Variance. It’s long, and made of words, but you’ll learn something fantastically interesting if you read it. The take-home:
In terms of explaining the mysteries of quantum mechanics to a wide audience, which is the point here, I think the bottom line is this: rubbing a diamond here in this room does not have any instantaneous effect whatsoever on experiments being done on electrons very far away. There are two very interesting and conceptually central points worth making: that the Pauli exclusion principle helps explain the stability of matter, and that quantum mechanics says there is a single state for the whole universe rather than separate states for each individual particle. But in this case these became mixed up a bit, and I suspect that this part of the lecture wasn’t the most edifying for the audience. (The rest of the lecture still remains pretty awesome.)
Physics, theoretical or otherwise, is a cruel and confusing mistress. I’m glad there’s people like Brian and Sean so that we get to have these conversations.
Previously: I translate Brian Cox’s voice and it’s funny.
We have landed on a world where the faint sun glints off methane lakes, seen stars the size of cities spin hundreds of times a second, and taken photographs of light from the beginning of time that has journeyed for over thirteen billion years to reach us. This is true wonder, with the power to deliver a dizzying feeling, the craving for which might be seen as the very definition of what it means to be human.
I sure wish there was a Google Street View for the world’s coastal oceans.
Oh wait! There is! Behold the SeaView underwater virtual tour project! It’s incomplete right now, but the stuff that’s currently up shows how awesome this is going to be when it’s all done. The world’s coastal oceans are our canary in the coal mine of climate change. Through careful observation of the changes they are undergoing we can get an idea of how climate is affecting marine biology.
Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?
This might be a horrifically stupid question but how does a leap year work? Like, with space and the time it takes to make a revolution around the sun? I thought that’s what determined the length of our days, so every four years do we wobble off our axis? Also, you’re blog is the most informative and interesting blog, ever!
Not horrifically stupid at all. Leap years are pretty odd.
You’ve gotta realize that leap years are purely man-made. They don’t have to exist. Without them, the Earth would continue to orbit around the sun for the foreseeable future, with no care of how long it took to do so. But people care. We care. We have seasons, calendars, birthdays … our cultural milestones depend on a nice orderly calendar. At least for most of human history, anyway.
Leap years exist because the Earth actually takes ~365.25 days to orbit the sun. If we didn’t correct for this, our calendar would be off by several hours every year. So we add a day to make up for it, assuring that equinoxes, seasons and other human calendar comforts proceed without confusion. Can you imagine if all of a sudden December was during springtime? Santa would get sweaty.
Here’s the rules for determining a leap year:
- The year is evenly divisible by 4, AND
- If the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is NOT a leap year, UNLESS
- The year is also evenly divisible by 400. Then it is a leap year.
So 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 will not be. This is because the orbit is a little less than 365.25 days when you start carrying out the decimals.
In closing, thank you. I’m glad you think this is the most interesting blog ever!
Would you guys all get horribly bored if I had a week where I did nothing but answer questions from my inbox?
Maybe like 4 days.
I need an intern.
Q:I really enjoy this blog a lot! It's awesome knowing there are other people out there that care about science as much as I do c:
What if I care about it MORE than you? Because I care about it a lot. Wanna have a contest?
:)
Thanks! Together we can restore wonder to the world.
Q:"Without Hertz, we wouldn’t have wi-fi, iPhones, radio, Kinect, remote controls for our TVs or really anything that sends a signal to something else." This sentence that you posted yesterday has been playing on my mind. Are you sure that without Hertz that radio waves would not have been discovered? Do you think this much time could have passed without the discovery of radio waves? Are there any holes in science where something should have been discovered already but hasn't?
I don’t mean for it to sound exclusive, as if he found it and therefore no one else would have, ever. That isn’t how discoveries like this work. Just look at Edison and Tesla’s War of Currents! He had countless competitors, and had Hertz not accomplished what he did, no doubt someone else would have.
But it would sure sound strange to describe a radio frequency in “kilo-johnsons” wouldn’t it? I’m glad it was Hertz.
Q:I don't understand how would a loose cable cause this experiment to be wrong? The cable was anticipated to have a 60 nanosecond delay right? If the cable was loose the delay could have been longer say for example 75 nanoseconds. Wouldn't that just mean that the neutrinos traveled faster than previously thought?
Your logic is correct, but there is a second possible error in the timing equipment that would have the effect of “slowing” the neutrinos down after it’s corrected for.
BBC has more details on the errors. Basically, these sources of error only provide possible ways that the experiment could be off. It will still take replication and analysis by other labs to either nail the coffin shut or pry it open.
Sorry neutrinos, just doin’ my job!
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/faster-than-light-neutrino-result-apparently-a-mistake-due-to-loose-cable.ars
He also checked his plugs, every time.
(via sincerelyscience)
1963 NASA concept for a lunar landing module.
WHAT IS THIS?!
A lunar landing module for ANTS?!
The lunar landing module needs to be at least … THREE TIMES bigger than this!!
This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky was stitched together from 37,000 images by a first-time astrophotographer.
I was gonna blog about that awesome record-setting, super-sized panoramic sky photo going around ourdashboards today, but I had this nagging sense of deja vu. And sure enough, I found it in my archives from 10 months ago.
But seriously, go enjoy it again. It’s so fantastic and informative. The guy quit his job, traveled 60,000 miles and he had never done anything like this before.
(via jtotheizzoe)
neuromatic replied to your photo: How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star? …
It’s cool we got this.
Maybe we could build a budget version, like instead of a “Death” Star, make it a “Hurts Really Bad” Star.
The Honda Civic of planetary destroyers.
How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star?
Any guesses?
In 2012 dollars?
How about 13,000 times the world’s GDP? Yep.
Certified Science Ninja - Member Since 2010