Is Quantum Intuition Possible?

By Kate Becker on Mon, 28 Jul 2014

Quantum physics defies our physical intuition about how the world is supposed to work. In the quantum world, objects resist such classical banalities as “position” and “speed,” particles are waves and waves are particles, and the act of observing seems to change the system being observed
But what if we could develop a “quantum intuition” that would make this all seem as natural as an apple falling from a tree?

Credit: Eliza Sankar Gorton. Baby and book by Evil Sivan/Flickr, Calabi-Yau manifold by Lunch/Wikipedia, adapted under a Creative Commons license.

 

Physical intuition starts developing early, long before we ever encounter Newton’s laws on a blackboard. “Babies have a few skeletal principles that are built in to the brain and help them reason about and predict how objects should act and interact in the world,” says Kristy vanMarle, an infant cognition researcher at the University of Missouri. They understand, for instance, that objects can’t pass through each other, a notion that’s at odds with a quantum effect called tunneling, which allows objects to slip through barriers that, in the classic world, would be impenetrable. Presented with demonstrations in which objects appear to materialize inside closed boxes and pass through solid walls, babies consistently stare longer at these “magic” shows than they do at demos in which boxes act like boxes. Psychologists Susan Hespos (now at Northwestern University) and Renee Baillargeon (University of Illinois) found that this physical intuition kicks in as early as two and a half months, and vanMarle and her colleagues think that it is probably present from birth.

Babies also intuitively grasp that objects exist even when you’re not looking at them, a concept called “object permanence” that goes against the classic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which an object can’t be said to have any definite properties until the moment at which it is observed. Since Jean Piaget first pegged object permanence as a milestone in infant development, psychology researchers have found evidence that ever-younger babies have some sense of it; affirming object permanence seems to be the main theme of peek-a-boo. (To someone who has truly taken quantum physics to heart, perhaps peek-a-boo never gets old.)

These innate notions, plus “elaborations” born from watching and interacting with the world, add up to a sort of “naïve physics” that we all grasp without any formal physics training, says vanMarle.
But what about building quantum intuition after that early mental groundwork has already been laid? Most students don’t begin studying quantum physics until college, when they already have both an intuitive and a formal, or mathematical, toolkit for classical physics.

Some college educators maintain that students should just stick to the math and forget trying to establish a “gut feeling” for quantum mechanics; I’ve argued the same about similarly difficult concepts in cosmology. No less an authority than Max Born, who received the 1954 Nobel Prize for his contributions to the foundation of quantum mechanics, felt that our minds just weren’t up to the task of “intuiting” quantum physics. As he wrote in “Atomic Physics,” first published in English in 1935, “The ultimate origin of the difficulty lies in the fact (or philosophical principle) that we are compelled to use the words of common language when we wish to describe a phenomenon, not by logical or mathematical analysis, but by a picture appealing to the imagination. Common language has grown by everyday experience and can never surpass these limits.”

Lord Kelvin took a similar tack, points out Daniel Styer, a professor of physics at Oberlin College and the author of “The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics“. In his “Baltimore lectures,” a series of talks delivered in 1884 at Johns Hopkins University, Kelvin said, “It seems to me that the test of ‘Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?’ is, ‘Can we make a mechanical model of it?’” By that yardstick, says Styer, all efforts to understand quantum mechanics are doomed to fail.
“The experimental tests of Bell’s inequality prove that no mechanical model, regardless of how intricate or fanciful or baroque, will ever be able to reproduce all the results of quantum mechanics.”
But Kelvin wasn’t talking about quantum mechanics; he was struggling to grasp the theory of electromagnetism. Quantum mechanics doesn’t have a monopoly on mind-blowing, after all; physicists have been upending intuition for thousands of years. “When I teach freshman physics, the thing that’s hard is not that the students are ignorant. It’s that they already know the answer—and it’s wrong,” says Steve Girvin, a physicist at Yale University. Newton’s first law claims (roughly) that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, but tell that to the guy trying to push a moving box full of books across the floor. Our “naïve physics” is actually closest to Aristotle’s 2,300-year-old theories, in which heavy objects fall faster than light ones and objects in motion ease to a stop unless you keep pushing them. Quantum mechanics may seem weird, but to Aristotle, Newton’s laws would have been just as head-spinning.

To get from Aristotle to Newton, you have to be able to imagine a world without friction. Luckily, that isn’t so hard; if you’ve ever played air hockey or laced up ice skates, you can vouch for Newton’s first law.

But what is the quantum equivalent of an air hockey table–an everyday object that provides us hands-on access to quantum physics? If there is one, I haven’t thought of it. Computer simulations may provide the next best thing, and physics educators like Kansas State University’s Dean Zollman are actively developing and testing new software that puts students into a (virtual) quantum world where they can actively manipulate the parameters of quantum systems and see how their tweaks play out.
“It’s certainly easier to be a student of quantum mechanics now that it was when I went through school,” says Zollman. “We had drawings in books, but visualizing things, even twenty-five years ago, was not the way most people went about teaching. And still images are still images—they don’t give you the same feeling, the same kind of understanding, that we really can do these days.”

Perhaps all of this should give us fresh respect for the scientists who discovered and codified the rules of quantum physics. “It was just incredibly difficult for classical physicists to make the leap from that worldview, which was confirmed by the things they saw in the everyday world around them, to understanding the strange implications of quantum mechanics,” says Girvin. “Every student today—90-100 years later—still has to make that same leap.” Each individual who aims to learn modern physics must personally recapitulate thousands of years of discovery.

And at the end of that road? “Practicing, professional people who have been doing this for decades still have arguments about what the results of the experiments will be,” says Girvin. There are no “native speakers” of quantum mechanics. “What is to be done about this?” asks Styer. “There are only two choices. We can either give up on understanding, or we can develop a new and more appropriate meaning for ‘understanding.’ I advocate the second choice.”

“Our minds evolved to find food and to avoid being eaten,” says Styer. “The fact that our minds ‘overevolved’ and allow us also to find beauty in sunsets and mountains, waterfalls and people; allow us to laugh and to love and to learn; allow us to explore unknown continents, and outer space, and (most bizarre of all) the atomic world, is a gift that we neither deserve nor (in many cases) appreciate. That we can make any progress at all in understanding quantum mechanics is surprising. We must not berate ourselves because our progress is imperfect. Instead, we must continue poking around, in joy and in wonder and sometimes in pain, exploring and building intuition concerning this strange and beautiful atomic world.”

Uncertainty principle

From http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

 

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously. For instance, in 1927, Werner Heisenberg stated that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.^[1] The formal inequality relating the standard deviation of position σ_x and the standard deviation of momentum σ_p was derived by Earle Hesse Kennard^[2] later that year and by Hermann Weyl^[3] in 1928:

(ħ is the reduced Planck constant).

The original heuristic argument that such a limit should exist was given by Heisenberg, after whom it is sometimes named the Heisenberg principle. This ascribes the uncertainty in the measurable quantities to the jolt-like disturbance triggered by the act of observation. Though widely repeated in textbooks, this physical argument is now known to be fundamentally misleading.^[4][5] While the act of measurement does lead to uncertainty, the loss of precision is less than that predicted by Heisenberg's argument; the formal mathematical result remains valid, however.

Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused^[6][7] with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems. Heisenberg offered such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty.^[8] It has since become clear, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems,^[4] and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems, and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.^[9] It must be emphasized that measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer.^[10]

Since the uncertainty principle is such a basic result in quantum mechanics, typical experiments in quantum mechanics routinely observe aspects of it. Certain experiments, however, may deliberately test a particular form of the uncertainty principle as part of their main research program. These include, for example, tests of number-phase uncertainty relations in superconducting^[11] or quantum optics^[12] systems. Applications dependent on the uncertainty principle for their operation include extremely low noise technology such as that required in gravitational-wave interferometers.^[13]

House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

By Kevin Drum

Mon Jul. 28, 2014 2:12 PM EDT

 

So what are Republicans in the House of Representatives up to these days? According to Danny Vinik, they just passed a bill that would reduce taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.
I know, I know: you're shocked. But in a way, I think this whole episode is even worse than Vinik makes it sound.

Here's the background: The child tax credit reduces your income tax by $1,000 for each child you have. It phases out for upper middle-income folks, but—and this is the key point—it phases out differently for singles and couples. The way the numbers sort out, it treats singles better than couples. This is the dreaded "marriage penalty," which is bad because we want to encourage people to get married, not discourage them.

So what did House Republicans do? Naturally, they raised the phase-out threshold for married couples so that well-off couples would get a higher benefit. They didn't have to do this, of course. They could have lowered the benefit for singles instead. Or they could have jiggled the numbers so that everyone got equal benefits but the overall result was revenue neutral.

But they didn't. They chose the path that would increase the benefit—and thus lower taxes—for married couples making high incomes. The bill also indexes the credit to inflation, which helps only those with incomes high enough to claim the full credit. And it does nothing to make permanent a reduction in the earnings threshold that benefits poor working families. Here's the net result:

If the House legislation became law, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that a couple making $160,000 a year would receive a new tax cut of $2,200. On the other hand, the expiring provisions of the CTC would cause a single mother with two kids making $14,500 to lose her full CTC, worth $1,725.

So inflation indexing, which is verboten when the subject is the minimum wage, is A-OK when it comes to high-income taxpayers. And eliminating the marriage penalty is also a good idea—but again, only for high-income couples.
Which is crazy. I don't really have a firm opinion on whether the government should be in the business of encouraging marriage, but if it is, surely it should focus its attention on the people who need encouragement in the first place. And that is very decidedly not the upper middle class, which continues to get married at the same rate as ever.

So we have a deficit-busting tax cut. It's a cut only for the upper middle class. It's indexed for inflation, even though we're not allowed to index things like the minimum wage. And the poor are still scheduled for a tax increase in 2017 because this bill does nothing to stop it. It's a real quad-fecta. I wonder what Paul Ryan thinks of all this?

Third Siberian Crater “Doesn’t Look Like Natural Formation”

Is it possible that someone has been playing a big hoax on us?

Third Siberian Crater “Doesn’t Look Like Natural Formation”

 

OK, this hole definitely needs to be looked into. A third mysterious crater has been found in Siberia. This one was discovered in the Taymyr Peninsula by local reindeer herders who live in the northern village of Nosok.

Map showing locations of the three Siberian craters reported so far.

The area is east of Yamal, where the first crater was reported last week, and northeast of the Taz district where the second one was found. This hole is smaller than those two – about 4 feet in diameter – and observers say its perimeter is perfectly round and the 100-to-300-feet-deep hole is shaped like a cone. According to The Siberian Times, one described it this way:

It is not like this is the work of men, but also doesn’t look like natural formation.

News travels slowly in Siberia. Local residents say the hole was formed on September 27, 2013. Shortly after, Mikhail Lapsui, a deputy of the regional parliament, flew over the area by helicopter and gave this account:

“There is ground outside, as if it was thrown as a result of an underground explosion. Observers give several versions. According to the first, initially at the place was smoking, and then there was a bright flash. In the second version, a celestial body fell there.”

Geologists, ecologists and historians are unable to come to a consensus on the causes of the craters. The prevailing theory on the other two is methane gas releases caused by global warming melting the permafrost. However, the Taymyr crater is far from the gas fields of the Yamal and Taz areas and is smaller, cone-shaped and perfectly formed.

A view inside the Taymyr crater taken by herder who stayed far enough away to not fall in.

Could it have another cause? Marina Leibman, chief scientist of the Earth Cryosphere Institute, says more information is needed.

Undoubtedly, we need to study all such formations. It is necessary to be able to predict their occurrence.”

Especially if it “doesn’t look like natural formation.”

No, Earth Wasn’t Nearly Destroyed by a 2012 Solar Storm

By Clara Moskowitz | July 25, 2014 |  

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

  

---

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

 

Yes, a large glob of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun did just miss us two years ago, as news organizations have feverishly reported over the past few days, following a NASA press release. At the time, scientists were hugely relieved it flew by Earth and missed us entirely. If it had hit, the coronal mass ejection (CME) could have decimated power grids on the ground and sizzled satellite electronics in space, causing widespread communications and electricity blackouts. It would not, however, have destroyed the entire planet (unless you equate the loss of the internet with the end of existence).

Solar storms are a real threat, however, and we might not be lucky enough to dodge the next one.  Our sun is currently in the middle of its “solar maximum,” a period of especially high magnetic activity—the root cause of solar storms and CMEs. So far, we’ve avoided major trouble from our nearest star this year, and physicists are even pondering why this cycle appears to be unusually quiescent. But solar activity is hard to predict, and no one knows when the next tempest might erupt.

In the August 2008 issue of Scientific American, astrophysicists Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green argued that better solar forecasting is a must. If another major CME hits Earth, similar in scale to the superstorm of 1859, the infrastructure damage could be catastrophic, they write, but an early warning would help mitigate damage. The authors lay out a plan for steeling Earth against future solar attacks by reinforcing power grids and shielding satellites, and by improving our ability to predict solar storms through improved sun monitoring. For more on what we should be doing to protect ourselves, check out the article (subscription required) here:

Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm

About the Author: Clara Moskowitz is Scientific American's associate editor covering space and physics. Follow on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

RestoringHistory.US

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Mosab Hassan Yousef (Son of Hamas Founder) tells the truth about Hamas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KakxXN5Z-XI

New theory says the Universe isn't expanding — it's just getting fat

George Dvorsky

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George Dvorsky

Filed to: Cosmology

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Conventional thinking says the Universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. But theoretical astrophysicist Christof Wetterich says it's not expanding at all. It’s just that the mass of all the particles within it is steadily increasing.

Top Image: T. Piner.

We think the Universe is expanding because all the galaxies within it are pushing away from one another. Scientists see this as the redshift — a kind of doppler effect that happens when atoms emit or absorb light. We see these frequencies as appearing in the red, an indication that mass is moving away from us. Galaxies exhibit this redshift, which is why scientists say the Universe is expanding.

But Wetterich, who works out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, says the characteristic light emitted by atoms are also governed by the masses of the atoms’ elementary particles, particularly their electrons.

Writing in Nature News, Jon Cartwright explains:

If an atom were to grow in mass, the photons it emits would become more energetic. Because higher energies correspond to higher frequencies, the emission and absorption frequencies would move towards the blue part of the spectrum. Conversely, if the particles were to become lighter, the frequencies would become redshifted.

Because the speed of light is finite, when we look at distant galaxies we are looking backwards in time — seeing them as they would have been when they emitted the light that we observe. If all masses were once lower, and had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look redshifted in comparison to current frequencies, and the amount of redshift would be proportionate to their distances from Earth. Thus, the redshift would make galaxies seem to be receding even if they were not.

Work through the maths in this alternative interpretation of redshift, and all of cosmology looks very different. The Universe still expands rapidly during a short-lived period known as inflation. But prior to inflation, according to Wetterich, the Big Bang no longer contains a 'singularity' where the density of the Universe would be infinite. Instead, the Big Bang stretches out in the past over an essentially infinite period of time. And the current cosmos could be static, or even beginning to contract.

Whoa. That is a radically different picture of the Universe than what we're used to.

Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to test this. Well, at least not yet.

But Wetterich says his theory is useful for thinking about different cosmological models. And indeed, it may offer some fresh insights into the spooky dark energy that's apparently pushing the Universe outwards at an accelerating rate.

The Big Rip Theory says the universe could end in tearsThe Big Rip Theory says the universe could end in tearsThe Big Rip Theory says the universe could end in

Some say the universe will end with a new Big Bang. Others say the cosmos will eventually succumb…Read moreRead on

Read the entire study — which has not yet been peer reviewed — at arXiv: “A Universe without expansion.” But as Cartwright notes in his article, other physicists are not hating the idea.