New Physics and the Mind - 20th-Century Physics

New Physics and the Mind - 20th-Century Physics

Here is a chapter from the book New Physics and the Mind by Robert Paster available at amazon.com

About the Author

Robert Paster earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from M.I.T. and his master's degree in education from Harvard. He has taught mathematics at an alternative high school, worked as a systems analyst, and worked as an actuary at one of the nation's largest insurance companies. During this time he continued to keep up with developments in physics, including physicists' speculative research into developing a Theory of Everything, into new physics phenomena that challenge the standard models of particle physics and cosmology, and into the role in physics of consciousness and the mind. Mr. Paster recently took early retirement as vice president of expense & subsidiary management and resumed his study of physics full-time.

NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND is the synthesis of Mr. Paster's two-year effort researching the historical development and scientists' latest thinking regarding the mind, the brain, cognition and perception, atoms and matter, quantum theory, gravitation, and particle physics.

CHAPTER 1: TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHYSICS

The three great strands of twentieth-century physics were special relativity, general relativity, and quantum physics.

Albert Einstein was the central developer of both special and general relativity, and he also developed important aspects of quantum physics. Time magazine named Albert Einstein the man of the century.

Twentieth-century physics was important to the twentieth century.

Special Relativity

Lonnie is the stay-at-home type, but her twin sister Bonnie is an astronaut. At age 20, Lonnie starts to raise a family while Bonnie goes to visit the planets in a nearby star system.

It’s a long trip for Bonnie and her crewmates, but this trip is taking place with advanced technology allowing travel at very high speeds. Great discoveries are made and, after the long voyage home, Bonnie returns just at her 30th birthday.

Lonnie is 70 years old and greets the returning astronauts at Cape Canaveral with her grandchildren.

Huh?

Lonnie is 70 and Bonnie is 30.

Moving clocks run slow.

This is a fact. A physical reality.

Whether Bonnie is 30 or 31 or 69 or 69.99999 years old when she returns—this is a detail that depends on Bonnie’s exact speed on her voyage.

But Bonnie will be younger than Lonnie when she returns. All contemporary scientists agree with this reality. It’s how the universe works.

Why we don’t notice in our everyday lives that this is how the universe works is because we on earth travel very slowly.

Bonnie would have to travel at over 650 million miles per hour in order for the age difference to be 40 years. She would have to travel over 90 million miles per hour for there to be even a 1% difference in aging.

But just the concept—the idea that Bonnie’s speed has anything to do with how fast time travels for her—sounds absurd.

Perhaps more absurd-sounding is the idea that time is not universal. Time does not flow like a smooth river, second by second, the same everywhere. Time is a local phenomenon whose passage varies with how fast we travel.

There is nothing about this that matches anything from how we experience our everyday lives, but nevertheless it’s true. It’s completely imperceptible to us because we don’t experience speeds of 650 million or even 90 million miles per hour, so we have no intuition for this. We may safely be ignorant of this fact, yet function perfectly normally for our entire lives.

Part of Einstein’s brilliance is evidenced by his being able to draw these conclusions about special relativity simply by thinking about the implications of the speed of light being the same for all travelers. When I’m moving away from an object, the light waves emitted from this object will inevitably be more spread out for me than for someone not moving away from the object, due to my motion away from the object. But because the speed of light is invariable, it is time itself that must spread out.

There’s more to special relativity, of course, and you don’t get college credit for reading these few pages. For example, in addition to time passing more slowly for a fast-moving traveler, length contracts and mass increases. But for our brief overview, we’ll just accept that, if our normal lives took place at 650 million miles per hour, or if we routinely dealt with distances of intergalactic magnitude, we would never have created for ourselves the conceptualizations that we have of distance, time, space, and mass. Our everyday concepts don’t work for scientists who work with the fast-moving particles of the subatomic world, and they don’t work for scientists dealing with the vast distances of the universe. For these scientists, the adjustments developed through special relativity must be made, because special relativity is reality.

General Relativity

It gets weirder.

If you think of planets as giant masses revolving around the mass of the sun, held in place by gravitational force, you’ve got it wrong.

What’s actually happening is that the sun reshapes space. Gravitational waves emanate from the sun and change the shape of space around it. For millions of miles around the sun, space is not shaped with a north-south dimension at ninety degrees to an east-west dimension at ninety degrees to a vertical dimension. Space is curved. And the planets float effortlessly, taking the path of least resistance through this curved space.

Now this may actually sound to you like a distinction without a difference. After all, what’s the practical difference between a universe in which planets are held in place by gravitational force, and a universe in which the force of gravity is propelled at light speed via gravitational waves which reshape space?

Not much, it turns out. But there are differences, and they were first observed by precise measurements of perturbations in the orbit of the planet Mercury about the sun, and by similarly precise measurements involving phenomena that can be observed only during a solar eclipse, when measurements matched general relativity’s predictions for the bending of light. Only after many decades of additional observation has near-unanimity been reached on the existence of gravitational waves.

Again, no college credit for this summary description. But the important point for this book’s perspective is that—to understand the universe—we have more strange and counterintuitive concepts to absorb, for example a concept that the force of gravity is propelled in waves throughout the universe, reshaping space and time, and setting up the motions and interactions among the planets, the galaxies, all matter.

This understanding will not help you in your everyday life. In fact, your day will go just fine if you don’t make any adjustments at all for either general relativity or special relativity. This is because we obtain only a very refined degree of additional accuracy by introducing relativity’s corrections: Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century classical physics is good enough to point you in the right direction to get to work or to the grocery store, and you will not have to be concerned with the very small discrepancy that has been created between your wristwatch and those of the people you encounter. But relativity’s adjustments do make our measurements of time and space just a bit more accurate, and perhaps more importantly they give us a truer understanding of how the universe works.

Unifying the Forces

What’s key about this for this book is how much focus has been placed during recent decades on the force of gravity. Throughout the twentieth century, physicists have been obsessed with the creation of a unified force theory, and it is gravity that has proven the most troublesome force to unify with the other forces.

Four forces exist in the universe—the electromagnetic force, the weak and strong forces that operate within the structure of atoms, and the force of gravity.

Back in the nineteenth century, physicists had an even earlier success at this, unifying the force of electricity and the force of magnetism, by showing that these two forces are actually the “same” force, the electromagnetic force.

Now this is odd, because common sense—our common basis for understanding the universe—tells us that electricity and magnetism are not the same thing. They’re different. One goes through wires, and the other involves magnets and iron filings.

But the point is that we’re just not understanding the universe correctly if we continue to think that electricity and magnetism are different forces.

The physicist’s perspective is that electricity and magnetism are best understood as dual aspects of a single phenomenon, modeled mathematically as interacting fields, moving in tandem, electricity producing magnetism, and magnetism producing electricity.

With electricity and magnetism unified, physicsts focused on unifying electromagnetism and gravity. But then two additional forces were identified within the physics of atomic particles—the strong force and the weak force—increasing from two to four the number of basic interactions of the universe that physicists are now challenged to unify.

So why the obsession? What’s so important about unifying the forces, creating a physical framework in which there is only one force?

The answer is the big bang.

If the universe began as a miniscule point that has been expanding for fourteen billion years—well, what was in that miniscule point? There couldn’t have been room in there for four forces (so the thinking goes, loosely expressed). There must have been just one force, whose manifestations varied (especially as experienced through our simple senses) as the universe expanded (and cooled). So let’s figure out how it can be that these four forces can all be understood as one. Let’s move backward in time to the big bang.

Now you may not be convinced that the only conclusion we can draw from the fact of the big bang is that there exists only one, unified force. You may not even be convinced of the fact of the big bang. But the fact is that, as the twentieth century ended, physicists had come very close to achieving a consensus view—within the standard model of particle physics—on how it is that all the forces except gravity are unified. This consensus view is called the Grand Unified Theory, and we’ll be discussing in more depth the mainstream view of the extent of Grand Unification. It’s certainly been a great achievement of physics and mathematics to have gotten so far during the past century.

You may be thinking: aren’t physicists getting a bit carried away here, in calling Grand Unification something that seems more properly called “Three-Quarters Unification”? After all, “Grand Unification” is unifying only three of the four known forces.

Maybe you’re right if this is what you’re thinking. But if so, physicists have paid a price for this overstatement: what will they call it when gravity too is brought into the unification? Their answer to that is the “Theory of Everything.” That’s what physicists are striving for as they work to unify all of the forces, including gravity.

We’ll have a lot more to say about Everything. But first we have the third and strangest strand of twentieth-century physics.

Quantum Physics

For much of the twentieth century, physics has focused on quantum physics, the physics of the very small, the physics operating inside the atom.

The thrust of quantum physics is that physical phenomena are not continuous phenomena, but instead take place in very small but discrete increments—that is, quanta. These quanta cannot be isolated with certainty or specificity, but instead we can say only where they’re likely to be. In fact, quantum physics—through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—tells us that there are limits on how much we can know: the more accurately we can locate a quantum particle’s position, the less we are able to know about another core characteristic of the particle, its momentum.

Quantum physics is incredibly accurate, and not just about the limitations of our knowledge. The equations that probabalistically point to the physical world’s quanta have given us another great leap in our accuracy of measurement of space, time, matter, and other physical phenomena. Because of quantum physics’ accuracy, we have made great advances in chemistry, biology, electronics, and other applied sciences: lasers, bar code readers, compact disc players, global positioning devices, DNA, genetic engineering, microsurgery, semiconductors, nuclear energy, superconductors, spectral lines, the stability of the atom—all have applications that are due to the great accuracy of the equations of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is also about subatomic particles—identifying and ultimately observing the particles that make up matter. And also the particles—gravitons, photons, gluons, W and Z bosons—that transmit the four forces. (Most physicists would probably prefer here the terminology: gluons are the exchange particles of the strong interaction, W and Z bosons are the exchange particles of the weak interaction, and so on. But in this book we’ll tend to use slightly less technical language—transmit the forces—where we can.)

There is another strand of quantum physics, with numerous interpretations, some philosophical, perhaps even mystical. Quantum physics stretches our understanding of reality. It is, in some interpretations, filled with dualities and contradictions. Matter emerges from then disappears into a great quantum vacuum. Particles can’t both be and be known to be. Matter shifts from existing to only having the potential to exist. The act of measurement distorts what’s being measured. Human consciousness seeps into the discussion of quantum physics. Our human acts affect what is true at the quantum level.

With coming up to a century of effort, much has been done to demystify quantum physics. It’s not all dualities and contradictions, and in fact these won’t be useful concepts for us to proceed with. For this book, we’ll need to know that quantum physics has important deterministic elements and important nondeterministic elements.

In the mathematics of quantum physics, the state function—the formula for how the state of a quantum particle evolves over time—changes in two different ways. Deterministicaly, by continuous causal evolution, one step triggers a next step triggers a next step. This is in contrast to the second way in which the state function can change, the nondeterministic element of quantum physics—collapse at measurement.

In quantum physics, multiple possibilities exist—are superposed—and it is not until observation (or, synonymously for this purpose, measurement) that the state function collapses to just one of these actualities. Without observation or measurement, the superposed (multiple) possibilities proceed in parallel, but deterministically.

Parallel realities are not reduced to a single path until observation triggers a quantum jump. This is without question bizarre. It seems far distant from a scientific view of the world and leads to basic questions, which we’ll touch on in Chapter 5, about the nature of reality.

Quantum physics’ nondeterministic elements are probabalistic (Einstein referred to them, dismissively, as God throwing dice): when quantum physics’ probabalistic phenomena are observed, we don’t know in advance what we’re going to see; we know only what we might see and how likely each possibility is.

Quantum physics correctly predicts that, when the position of a particle is repeatedly measured or observed, we will not come up with the same answer every time, but instead will come up with a range of answers whose likelihood is predicted by the Schrödinger equation for the quantum wave function, a central equation of quantum physics. This amazing equation incorporates both the parallel deterministic time evolution of the superposed quantum possibilities, and also each quantum possibility’s probability that it is how the quantum system will collapse upon observation.

There are a number of interpretations of quantum physics—interpretations of reality—which we will be discussing later on. Schrödinger himself did not accept that physical phenomena are not real until they are observed, and he developed the somewhat gory thought experiment—now referred to as Schrödinger’s cat—to demonstrate the absurdity of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Schrödinger’s cat is unobserved in an enclosure in which the cat may or may not have died from poison gas, and it was Schrödinger’s intention to show the absurdity of the cat’s living or dying being indeterminate until the lid is opened and the cat observed. Schrödinger, with Einstein, rejected the Copenhagen interpretation’s observer-dependent reality, and preferred a realist interpretation, in which the cat’s fate is real even before it is observed.

When Is Classical Physics Good Enough?

For many purposes, classical physics is good enough. That is, our physics is accurate without introducing quantum corrections. After all, those high school physics tests had very precise answers to questions about blocks sliding down inclined planes and planets in motion.

There is no quantum indeterminancy in physics’ macroscopic events and objects. Macroscopic events can be correctly described without worrying about the submicroscopic uncertainties of the quantum world. At the macroscopic level, unlikely quantum possibilities cancel each other out and events transpire according to classical Newtonian physics, with relativistic corrections, if needed, but without quantum corrections.

The dividing line between classical physics and quantum physics is traditionally drawn somewhere between macromolecules (complex molecules) on the classical side, and atoms, electrons, and photons on the quantum side. So proteins and cells can be treated classically. And the brain, even at the level of the single neuron, is subject only to classical physics, not to quantum physics, in the view of most neurobiologists and other scientists. There are minority views on this subject among physicists, however, and we’ll be discussing this whole topic in depth later in this book.

The central quantum phenomenon—the collapse of the wave function, or the quantum jump—occurs when we observe or measure a quantum process, resulting in the forcing of the quantum hand. A quantum system, when observed or measured, turns over its cards; it can no longer reside in a world in which it can be many things (each with its own probabiltity). When we observe or measure, the quantum card becomes specific.

This central quantum phenomenon has many names, many ways of labeling it and thinking about it. It is called the reduction or the collapse of the wave function. It is also called the quantum jump or the quantum leap or the quantum transition. It is quantum decoherence: the cohered probabilities, layered one on top of each other in quantum superposition, decohere to create classical properties. It is the migration from the sum over histories, in which all quantum possibilities accumulate, to a single classical event or particle. It is “popping the qwiff.”

Physics’ Contradicting Strands

At the deepest and smallest scales, quantum physics contradicts general relativity. General relativity’s reshaping of spacetime through the force of gravity is a smooth reshaping. But the submicroscopic world of quantum physics is a cauldron of possibility: the quantum forcing of hand is discrete and discontinuous at the quanta of space and time.

Unlike general relativity’s picture of a smooth and continuous reshaping of spacetime at all levels, there is nothing smooth about the quantum view of spacetime. Gravity again rears its head as the mysterious force: general relativity has permitted us to understand gravity’s influence on the great masses and distances of space, but general relativity seems to contradict quantum physics when gravity is brought down to the scale of the smallest worlds of the elementary particles.
Click here to look inside more of NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND.

Or click below to go to Amazon.com's NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND page: Search inside. Browse sample pages. Explore similar items. Reviews. Discussions. Tags. Statistically improbable phrases.


NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND, although aimed at the general reading public, is intensively researched and sourced. See NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND for the endnotes associated with this excerpt, as well as for a complete bibliography of the works referenced throughout NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND.