Much ado about nothing

international | sci-tech | opinion/analysis Monday February 27, 2006 05:17 by Seán Ryan

The story continues.....

A examination of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. It shows that the Minister for Finance and government in general use quantum mechanics in their dealings with our finances. It also shows how to create matter from nothing. Politicians try to invert this process. An explanation of entropy.

In the beginning, there was a void, God said, 'be' and made the universe and put it spinning around the earth.

And he was well pleased.

Seventeen or so billion years later, up pops Gallileo and throws a big spanner into the works by suggesting that the earth was flying round the sun in accordance with the old Copernican system which had previously been maligned and shelved. The Church seeing God beginning to get pissed off and remembering him getting pissed off before and the flood and stuff, went directly to the bible, giving evidence such as the sun rises and the sun falls, and didn't Joshua command the sun to stand still? The church promptly imprisoned and tortured Gallileo until he recanted.

And again the Lord was well pleased.

Then sometime later, a priest by the name of Newton, discovered gravity and rainbows, and that gravity was the reason for certain, why the earth orbited the sun. Gravity was a force. Newton didn't get into half the shit that poor Gallileo had gotten into for this, times had changed. Despite the Church's saying otherwise it had been noticed that the earth orbited the sun. All that was required was a bit of an explanation stating that the heavens orbiting the earth, oh.. it was so long ago it was not meant to be taken literally, but figuratively whatever the fuck that means. Go figure.

The Lord was not so much pleased this time, as relieved.

Then along came Einstein and ripped the whole thing asunder, showing us that the orbits that Newton had calculated, had left out loads in his calculations, and that in fact, that these calculations can only be worked out to a certain degree of accuracy, they cannot be worked out absolutely, hence there are no absolutes. (This isn't quite how Einstein reasoned it out but it is a consequence of his reasoning.) You can name the degree of accuracy you require but you will always have the option of getting a greater degree of accuracy. Oh and by the way gravity is no longer a force either, it is a warping of the space-time continuum.

Then after telling us, that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe, was that it is comprehensible, Einstein professed his belief in God.

But too late God was off in a sulk somewhere.

Along comes Heisenberg and gives Einstein the bad news about God, He tells Einstein in a caring but firm manner, that God has a gambling problem.

Somewhere in the part of the universe, that is imagination or collective conscious, or somewhere else even, even God must have sniggered.

E=mc2. Says simply that matter (m) and energy (E) are essentially the same stuff and that they are interchangeable and that the speed of light (c) decides the exchange rate.

We know that the speed of light is a big number, so we can see that Energy (E), is equal to what ever amount of matter (m), you have to convert, multiplied by a big number that has already been multiplied by itself(c2), to give a fuckin' huge amount of energy, relative to however small an amount of matter we converted.

The first consequence of this is that we cannot break the light speed barrier, as the faster we get the more energy we have, the energy level at a certain point will act like a nuclear explosion in reverse and reach a critical level and start turning into matter in a chain reaction thus draining the energy required for acceleration and bringing us eventually into a somewhat stable speed that is slower than the speed of light and the light continues on its merry way still at the same speed relative to the poor bastard who tried to catch up with it.

The second consequence of this law is that time is not linear but that it is relative. For instance yes those five minutes being manhandled by the red tape operators in social welfare did last longer. You have just watched a great movie and are amazed to see the titles, yes the 90 minutes really was about a half an hour. What about this instead of saying time is relative how but I say time is irrelevant? No two humans can agree as to the time an event occurred as depending on their distances from the event, the light from the event will reach the two observers at different times giving each of them not only two different events (they both perceive different light) but only an opinion as to when the event occurred as one can only observe an event after it has happened. Therefore when two people fly at each other each may each consider him self at rest and that it's going to be the other fuckers fault because I'm stopped and he's coming at me, or they may consider it from the garda's perspective and will have to do so the day of the court that they each share the blame as each was going towards the other. Ah yes there's nothing quite so deranged as relativity. Relativity is all about different perspectives and opinions.

The third consequence is this the faster you go the slower time gets, your own little relativistic clock may seem to be ticking away normally but ours will tick very slowly.

Imagine if you will that we have advertised a free holiday for two weeks to wild and exotic places and have got all the politicians to flock together for the chance of a freebie, we put them in a rocket ship and accelerate it to relativistic speeds on an orbit around the outer solar system. We would have grown old, lived and died many generations over before they came back with their new tans and stuff and they would try to explain to the new leaders that they had only been gone for two weeks.

Fourth consequence, all matter has a critical threshold, if you get too much of it together it starts turning into energy lots of energy. It would take a shitload of a light element like hydrogen or helium to have a nuclear reaction but hey look at the sun or other stars that's about enough for one (gravity gets taken into account here due to the sheer magnitude of the mass and holds the gigantic nuclear explosion together tightly in the shape of a ball). On the other hand it doesn't take too much for the heavyweights and unstable radioactives like plutonium or uranium, a radioactive substance being a substance with its mass so densely packed that it cannot make up its mind as to whether it is matter or energy, to get a bit of a bang going as can be seen from the demonstration the Americans gave to the Japanese in world war two.

Ok that's the special theory of relativity somewhat explained, now for the somewhat more bizarre general theory of relativity. Keeping in mind that it is the expectation to be overwhelmed that overwhelms more than anything else. Trust yourself to be able to understand, this is the key to both our chains and the cabinet of knowledge with the lovely apple in it that the church and state claim we have no right to bite.

Bite me!

At about the time, when all the bickering started. Einstein was prompted to rethink his earlier special theory and do two things. The first was to remove his fuck up of epic proportions, that of having reintroduced the Aether back into science after it had been laughed out of the building centuries before I speak of course of his universal constant and shall speak of it no more, everyone is entitled to a mistake it's what being human is all about. We plod on as usual until we see the error of our ways.

The removal of this mistake really rammed it home to Einstein that there could be no universal reference point. And that the universe really was a truly relativistic universe in motion and that his theory was both a beautiful and a simple theory and that something so small and fragile could account for such a vast and mighty universe. At least it would have if it could account for gravity.

The second problem was that Einstein kept looking at gravity as a force similar to magnetism and it was just one force too many. The books just would not balance. Someone's been telling fibs he thought to himself. He mused this and let his imagination take him away.

He knew for example that if you jump off the top of a tall building that you will feel weightless. How he knew this I know not, these brainy people do strange stuff.

'Gravity ya bastard, I knew it. You were only pretending to be a force. If you were a force I'd have felt you all the way down until the footpath decelerated me to a cataclysmic state of oblivion. So lets look at what happened, I jumped off the building. I had to keep moving as nothing in the universe stands still now that I've got rid of that fucking constant. Force follows the path of least resistance in a manner similar to the Gardaí and the priesthood and the fact that my consequent motion was more than a right angle to my initial motion. I jumped upwards and outwards and then curved downwards. I just travelled from A to B in a straight line but because we live in a universe where space and time can bend in the presence of mass the straight line becomes a curve'. With but a simple thought he saw the theory that would unite both physics and relativity, the general theory of relativity. It would also unite the dimensions of space and time into logically enough, space-time.

Yes the main thing in order not to view gravity as a force is just make the dimensions of space and time twist and bend together anytime matter is present in order to accommodate it. Well fair enough it wasn't as pretty anymore, some may say but what the hell, it could account for just about every physical law that existed. Not so bad for the little patent clerk who just wanted to have more fun.

Anyway along came Heisenberg and stopped Einstein from ever having fun again. There was a problem with the beautiful theory and the problem was that that sly old bastard gravity was refusing to be quantified.

You see it started like this. Relativity had certain implications that Einstein hadn't as of yet spotted and only later mistrustingly and begrudgingly acknowledged.

The biggest was this, relativity allowed for measurements and stuff to be calculated to any degree of accuracy desired. But what this said in the same breath was that no matter how accurate you thought you were about something that there was always more that you could know, in other words there is always a degree of uncertainty in any information you may have. This meant that no matter what cause could be measured the results of the measurement and the prediction made from it will always differ from the actual event observed unless you are very, very lucky. It was like as if a poltergeist were involved and was moving stuff around. Einstein termed this as spooky action at a distance and declared that God would not play dice with the universe.

It later turns out that playing dice was the biggest understatement ever made. The whole universe turned out to be one big fuckin' massive set of probabilities all causing crazy shit to happen like most of the universe totally ignoring gravity and going hither an' thither all over the shop until you try to catch it do this, then it just freezes and goes back to being relative again. Relative whilst you observed and back doing crazy shit the moment you turned your back. The universe was turning into a really bad acid trip. 'My beautiful theory, Heisenberg has pissed on my beautiful theory'.

Poor Einstein was to spend his days searching for the unifying theory that would unite physics, relativity and Quantum mechanics Into a toe. Theory Of Everything. He was to die in an American hospital, an American citizen, probably telling the nurses and doctors the theory that would have explained creation itself but they didn't have a clue what he was ranting on about because not a one of them understood a word of German.

Heisenberg made a very smart observation with his mind for his mind was the only place in the universe that an observation of this type could be made. He imagined an electron. An electron being the negatively charged thingy that sometimes flies around the nucleus of an atom. Before I tell you what occurred to him let me explain this. Electrons fly around at fucking crazy speeds making our speed merchants look like heroin addicts. Because of this when they crash into each other some interesting stuff happens. Here are some possibilities. Two electrons smack into each other, each losing energy from the impact and pissing off in different directions much the same as our speed merchants. The energy lost is ejected as a small discrete packet of light or as it is otherwise known as a photon. Another possibility is a photon might smack into an electron and if the electrons energy is low it will absorb the photon and piss off in a different direction at a higher energy level. The other possibility is that a photon may impact into an electron with a high energy level absorb and eject another photon in a different direction and you've got it then piss off in another direction with a different energy level.

Knowing all this like the back of his hand Heisenberg made an awe inspiring discovery trying to visualize his speedy little friend.
He realised that to even look at an electron was to hurtle at the very least a single photon of light at the poor electron and smack it off somewhere else. He realised that if he could know the position of an electron he could not know the destination or momentum of the electron after the wallop of the photon that was a consequence of him observing it. The very act of observation disturbed the electron. The uncertainty principle was born.

It is also almost hysterically funny that Einstein should have disbelieved all this in that the only Nobel prize he ever received was not for his work with relativity but for his works on the photo electric effect which deals almost exclusively with electrons and photons.

Not to mention that Einstein postulated parallel universes that he reckoned could be observed or entered via Einstein-Rosen bridges. It later turned that parallel universes are one of the best explanations of quantum mechanics that exists today. It is known as the many worlds theory and I shall discuss it shortly when I get onto things you can do with pets.

I mock fate itself here as despite his many setbacks and inability to see the wood for the trees at times, Einstein was not only able to formulate a system that simplified the universe to its almost simplest and did so from nothing more than a knowledge of philosophy. He then took certain philosophies and reasoned through to their all but final conclusions despite centuries of failure. Not only this he then went away and studied Riemann Geometry (a diabolical but far from impossible form of mathematics that as Einstein later proved were very apt to describe our universe and others) after receiving advice from a friend. (Riemann by the way, first postulated that Euclidian geometry was not apt to measure the geometry of our universe and then proved it.) Einstein using the metric tensor from Riemann geometry, then used this branch of mathematics to fully describe his beautiful theory. To mock Einstein is to be a fool.

Anyways, back to quantum mechanics.

Allow me to say this first, the whole idea of quantum mechanics is to deal with the unknown in terms of probability, and therefore, nobody completely understands it. Otherwise one is saying he knows the unknown. Having said that, it's all pretty simple, if you don't have to do the math, and sure what did we invent computers for, if not this?

I'm only slagging here, the world will always be blessed with and need both the twins, physicists and mathematicians, who often as not, have at each other, for some simple and non-important reasons. They are but a reflection, each of the other, through many universal fundamentals. They are like geometry and algebra.

One of the best explanations for quantum mechanics is this mind experiment proposed by Erwin Shroedinger and is known as Schroedingers cat.

Catch a cat (in your mind) and put him in a box that is both lightproof and soundproof. In fact make it a box where you will never be able to ascertain the contents short of actually looking in the box.

In this box, is an interesting mechanism. Every half second it switches on and then for the next half second it switches off, and so forth. A circuit is attached to a pressure sensitive mat, that is in front of a bowl of milk.

Should the mat be stepped on whilst the switch is in the on position, the mechanism will mix an odourless and tasteless, fatal poison, in with the milk.

Should the switch be off when the mat is stepped on the mechanism will be disabled and the milk will remain poison free.

Anyway Tiger is in the box and you don't know whether he's alive or dead, hence the reason for doing this experiment in your mind, who says animal experimentation has to be cruel?

What can you say about Tiger before you look in the box?

Tiger is dead, or Tiger is alive. This is not really telling you what Tiger is though. It only describes what Tiger could be not what he is, I mean tiger could have teleported out of the box and into the Oireachtas to give a speech, for all you know.

There is but a simple solution, such a simple solution that it will change the way you look at things forever, should you not have previously encountered it. The cat is both alive and dead, he is in a superposition and intersection of states he can also be referred to as neither alive nor dead, or to put it another way Tiger is one pretty fucked up pussycat until you look into the box.

This seems to be a silly thought, this superposition of states but this is actually the way the universe works and much more apparently so beneath the atomic level.

Before I go further I must talk of a trick an electron can do that is a consequence of the uncertainty principle.

Remember if you cannot have complete knowledge of the flight of an electron then you can pick any point, any time in space and say that there is a probability that there is an electron there. From this it is possible to derive that an electron can be anywhere in the universe at any given time and in the next instant can be anywhere else in the universe. If an electron is in one part of the universe and then disappears and reappears anywhere else faster than light could have travelled in space between the two points then this is known as quantum tunnelling. The universe goes from relativity to probability. Yes the position of an electron in our universe is not governed by relativity but by probability. This also allows for breaking the light speed barrier without interfering with the laws of relativity. It would also suggest that probability and gravity have some fundamental in common.

Imagine if you will that the electron is a massive cloud that permeates the whole of the universe at once. Now imagine the electron is a tiny minute particle that only occupies a tiny area of space. Now imagine that you cannot observe the cloud, that you can only observe part of it and thus create the particle image when you try to observe the whole cloud. The electron is everywhere and anywhere to a degree of certainty, until you observe it as being somewhere. This collapses the cloud or wave into a particle. This duality is known as wave particle duality and this brings me nicely to the many worlds theory.

The many worlds theory is a very simplistic idea that probably gives one of the best explanations of quantum theory.

It is as simple as this; imagine one of the tough choices you have made in your life. Imagine what your life would be like now if you had not chosen as you did. Now look at it this way, you are in this universe and you are the way you are, as a consequence of this choice you made, in another universe there is another you, that is different than you in that he or she chose different.

Now imagine a universe that splits into the amount of outcomes for every possibility that the universe presents itself with and imagine a you that splits into every possible consequence that could effect you or any subsequent event that could effect every subsequent you and so on and so on.

In one universe you are standing trial for killing poor Tiger in cold blood.

In another Tiger is alive, content even, and has no idea of the shit you pulled with the box.

In yet another Tiger did teleport and is meowing frantically to anyone who will listen about Irish cats being stuffed into boxes or baskets. He warns them about the eggs and tells them that the Irish economy is in a superposition of states and that it is both alive and dead in its little basket, and that chance plays a big part in deciding which state the economy is in when making an observation. It is but a matter of time. Hedge your bets!

Couple this with the following and you have a pretty good insight in how our universe works at a pretty fundamental level.

The more information you have the better your chances of making probability work for you. For instance, if in a three horse race you have put the dole on number 2. Now, suppose I pick number three. If neither of us has any knowledge of either horse, then we both have the same chances of winning. Now imagine just as the race starts I shoot number 2 in the back of the head. With the extra information that I have now I can tell that my odds of winning are astronomically better than yours. So you see quantum mechanics is also similar to politics in action.

Lets talk of a man called Hendrik Casimir.

Herndrik was a Dutch physicist who never received the fame his discovery warranted. Hendrik discovered that a vacuum was anything but empty. In the first place it was pretty obvious that a vacuum had to contain something for to be completly empty was to be in violation of entropy and relativity in that nothing is an absolute state and of course this is not allowed.

Hendrik discovered by moving two plates very close together so close in fact that conventional science would have said at the time that the gap between the plates was too small to allow matter to exist in the gap. Hendrik found otherwise and changed the way we looked at the universe forever.

Hendrik found virtual matter. Virtual matter is matter that is constantly being created. (Virtual, in this case meaning nearly but not quite). It does not disobey the laws of conservation of matter because this virtual matter does not exist long enough to be observed.

Remember our friend and speed freak the electron. Well Hendrik discovered virtual electrons and their opposites virtual positrons (same as electrons but with a positive charge).

He found that virtual matter was created in pairs of opposites like these.

The virtual electron and the virtual positron can each appear anywhere in the universe and upon appearing will immediately seek each other out and collide and cancel each other out as if they never existed, this is called annihilation.

Now jump forward to near the close of the second millennium and into the beginning of the end to the search for the key to creation. Stephen Hawking gazes into the universe that is his mind and sees that fundamental particles and their behaviours can influence and even determine astronomical effects. He names his new science Quantum Cosmology and amongst other wondrous things proposes a way to turn a virtual particle into a real particle.

For those of you who got bored and are skimming this means he figured out how to create matter from nothing.

God said be and it was. And even more miraculously Stephen managed to secure a long overdue apology from the church over its treatment of Gallileo.

It was quite simple in the end. If the positron were caught by a black hole it would annihilate with an electron inside the singularity and thus leave its partner the virtual electron to continue as an actual electron.

Here's another strange consequence of relativity, light can be affected by gravity. Anyway if our sun were 3 times bigger no light would escape from it because the force of gravity would be too great. Imagine our sun if it were three times bigger.

Any matter that came within a certain range, known as the Schwarzchild Radius, or more commonly, as the Event Horizon, would be swallowed up, by the star, and could not escape the irresistible gravity. Not even light can come from beyond the Event Horizon. Beyond the event horizon the laws of our universe break down. As I said at the start all laws break down at some point, well here's the melting pot for the lot and who knows maybe even entropy too but I doubt it. This kind of star is called a Black Hole (It's more a muddy brown really). Anything this behemoth of celestial bodies swallows is for all intents and purpose gone from our universe and isn't coming back. A point where the rules all break down, like inside a Black Hole is called a singularity. Singularities are like virtual particles they are in a superposition of states neither in nor out of our universe. Stuff can go in but cannot go out. Like time, travel is permitted only in a singular direction. To come out would require you to travel faster than the speed of light and as we know trying to do so is the ultimate way of gaining weight which has the effect of trapping you in the singularity all the more.

Black holes, can be seen to break the laws of our universe because of the paradoxes they introduce. For instance it is theoretically possible to add enough mass to a black hole, so that gravity could accelerate any other mass attracted to it well beyond the speed of light. As we know traveling at even close to these speeds converts energy into mass. This is to create matter from nothing and is similar to the idea of the big bang.

Anyway a virtual positron is unlucky enough to appear inside or at the Event Horizon and is beyond seeking its suicidal twin the virtual electron. The virtual positron annihilates with an electron inside the Black Hole and is no more.

The virtual electron is now free to act as an electron and go about smacking other electrons and shooting light at stuff. The Black Hole has been boiled off somewhat, this form of matter creation is known as Hawking Radiation. Hawking Radiation could be seen as entropy acting in a black hole.

Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, the only law we have discovered that has shown no breaking point thus far. It is about energy first and foremost. Heat is conducted from hot to cold only. If you sit on a big ice cube you will not get cold you will lose heat. Heat will flow from your body to the ice cube and melt it. The cold will not travel from the ice cube up to you. You will feel cold because you gave away your heat or your energy.

This seems a simple enough law and it is but its implications and ramifications are astounding nonetheless.

The background radiation we observe everywhere in our universe (the echo of the big bang) is only a few degrees above absolute zero and is getting colder.