The man who lived upside down
Berlin, 1900 circa.
They say young people have an innate and fierce passion for lighting a fire. However, it’s a simple
fact of life that, as they grow up, they find themselves in the shoes of a fireman.
This is the curious story of a man who lived upside down, setting fire at the Physics establishment
in his middle ages. Who is this rebel iconoclast? Someone will call him “a reluctant revolutionary,”
but for the rest of us, he is the one that threw the doors of 20th-century physics wide open.
Let’s step backward of a decade. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the world's candles were
slowly blowing out. In 1878, Thomas Edison filed a patent application for the first light bulb, which
called for a massive production of electric lights. The first light bulbs were obviously not efficient
so, in the early 1890s, the German Bureau of Standards asked a professor, with a gift for
thermodynamics, to refine them. More efficient meant producing a light bulb that would give out
the maximum brightness for the least electrical power.
The professor in charge of this task is Max Planck. Maybe he should have bought a LED bulb, but
that wasn’t apparently an option by that time.
A light bulb inside contains a filament that is designed to heat up, emitting radiation and thus
producing the light. The first problem Planck faces is to predict how much light a hot thread gives
off.
At that time, the theories of physics came finally to the conclusion that light, the slippery matter, is
a wave, or at least behaves like a wave when you use it in certain experiments.
We owe this discovery to an English scientist who had the nerve to disprove the fallacious theory of
the “corpuscular nature of the light” postulated by Sir Isaac Newton. Incidentally, we are speaking
of the same person who first understood the tricky Egyptian hieroglyphs though someone else —
c’est la vie— was credited for that.
Let’s put aside this scientist for a while. Why do we care that light is a wave? A wave is a variation
that makes characteristic patterns while traveling through space. Each wave has a particular shape
and energy and the distance between peak points is called wavelength.
It turns out that when light radiations are incident on an object, the particles near the surface absorb
those radiations, and start to vibrate. These excited particles then emit radiations to lose the excess
of energy and regain stability. That’s how energy is transmitted at long wavelengths.
The problem begins as the wavelength approaches zero because the intensity of the radiation
approaches infinity. This contradicts the principle of conservation of energy, which is the first law
of thermodynamics.
To put it simply, classical physics believed that energy was sort of violin, and you could get any
sound you wanted out of it, but that wasn’t just true, and nobody knew why.
Max Planck, however, had some thoughts: he supposed that the energy that a light wave can
exchange was not continuous, but rather discontinuous in the form of packets. This stunning idea
stemmed from black body radiation phenomena. What is a black body? In simple terms, a blackbody is an object that absorbs all the radiation falling on it. The black body is so essential to
Planck’s theory as, once it absorbed sponge-like all the radiation, it can also perfectly emit that
energy. Hence, it turns out that a black body will radiate maximum energy when heated to a given
temperature.
According to classical physics, this energy emitted was predicted to be infinite but that was fitting
as a wrongly sized shoe.
This led Planck to the idea that Quantum theory limits energy to a set of specific, discrete values.
This set of values, however, is not continuous but rather increments from one allowed value to
another by small Quantum leaps. To be precise, a Quantum is a difference between two allowed
values in a set.
Given that all atoms on the surface of the heated solid vibrate at a specific frequency, Planck
arranged a model, also known as Planck’s equation. Through experiments of frequencies and
temperature, Planck was finally able to generate a constant, which was named after him as the
Planck’s constant:
Using this constant, he was able to formulate his theory: energy is directly proportional to
frequency. He wrote his equation as:
E = hν
Where E is energy, h is Planck’s constant, and v is frequency.
This was a really bizarre assumption, but it worked!
However, since Planck’s equation couldn’t be applied to anything other than black body radiation, it wasn’t unaccepted until years later when it was successfully applied to other phenomena.
One core concept of the Quantum theory is the wave-particle duality theory, which is evidence that
the subatomic world could not be accurately described with classical physics because they are no
longer applicable at that level. One of the fundamental reasons is that the particles are also waves,
so they do not have a well-defined position in space.
Do not be frightened by the words used by physicists, as the difference between waves and particles
is much simpler than you might imagine. In essence, a particle has mass, however small. Normally
a particle is not a wave, which is instead a pattern of propagation with measurable parameters such
as amplitude, cycles per second or frequency, energy per unit space or intensity, etc.For example, let’s consider the motion of a tennis ball and the motion of the waves on the sea. In
both cases, a transfer of energy is associated with the motion. However, there is a difference: in the
case of the tennis ball, the energy that the ball carries is located within the volume of the ball itself.
In the case of the waves on the sea, the energy is instead distributed across the wavy surface. The
tennis ball in physical terms is a "particle" type, while the ripples of the sea are "wave" type. It
follows that the particles are localized phenomena while the waves are de-localized phenomena.
What did the Quantum physicists find so amazing? The first is that as we enter the subatomic world,
the fundamental elements of matter are tiny concentrations of energy which have a dual nature: both
waves and particles.
The second is that elements with the wave nature when observed they take on particle behavior. As
strange as it may sound, the observation of Quantum matter influences the matter itself!
Albert Einstein, a former committee and a later detractor of Quantum theory, was eventually deeply
troubled by the implications of these findings. He lately addressed Quantum physics with these
words:
For the Austrian physicist, God had not created the world with dices: once you know the initial
properties of a physical phenomenon, you can grasp them at any time: the principle of cause-effect
rules our Universe and nothing happens on a random basis.
In the end, Einstein tried to refute Quantum theories, confident of being in perfect harmony with
God’s thought; Planck himself, was essentially a conservative person, so he strenuously fought to
the end, to find an acceptable explanation for the fact that energy should emerge in small quantities.
Failing to find it.
In 1944, a bomb during an Allied air raid hit Plank’s house, annihilating all his scientific records
along with his other possessions. He will die shortly after, ill-treated by life yet that won’t put out
the fire that he started to the building of classical physics.
They say young people have an innate and fierce passion for lighting a fire. However, it’s a simple
fact of life that, as they grow up, they find themselves in the shoes of a fireman.
This is the curious story of a man who lived upside down, setting fire at the Physics establishment
in his middle ages. Who is this rebel iconoclast? Someone will call him “a reluctant revolutionary,”
but for the rest of us, he is the one that threw the doors of 20th-century physics wide open.
Let’s step backward of a decade. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the world's candles were
slowly blowing out. In 1878, Thomas Edison filed a patent application for the first light bulb, which
called for a massive production of electric lights. The first light bulbs were obviously not efficient
so, in the early 1890s, the German Bureau of Standards asked a professor, with a gift for
thermodynamics, to refine them. More efficient meant producing a light bulb that would give out
the maximum brightness for the least electrical power.
The professor in charge of this task is Max Planck. Maybe he should have bought a LED bulb, but
that wasn’t apparently an option by that time.
A light bulb inside contains a filament that is designed to heat up, emitting radiation and thus
producing the light. The first problem Planck faces is to predict how much light a hot thread gives
off.
At that time, the theories of physics came finally to the conclusion that light, the slippery matter, is
a wave, or at least behaves like a wave when you use it in certain experiments.
We owe this discovery to an English scientist who had the nerve to disprove the fallacious theory of
the “corpuscular nature of the light” postulated by Sir Isaac Newton. Incidentally, we are speaking
of the same person who first understood the tricky Egyptian hieroglyphs though someone else —
c’est la vie— was credited for that.
Let’s put aside this scientist for a while. Why do we care that light is a wave? A wave is a variation
that makes characteristic patterns while traveling through space. Each wave has a particular shape
and energy and the distance between peak points is called wavelength.
It turns out that when light radiations are incident on an object, the particles near the surface absorb
those radiations, and start to vibrate. These excited particles then emit radiations to lose the excess
of energy and regain stability. That’s how energy is transmitted at long wavelengths.
The problem begins as the wavelength approaches zero because the intensity of the radiation
approaches infinity. This contradicts the principle of conservation of energy, which is the first law
of thermodynamics.
To put it simply, classical physics believed that energy was sort of violin, and you could get any
sound you wanted out of it, but that wasn’t just true, and nobody knew why.
Max Planck, however, had some thoughts: he supposed that the energy that a light wave can
exchange was not continuous, but rather discontinuous in the form of packets. This stunning idea
stemmed from black body radiation phenomena. What is a black body? In simple terms, a blackbody is an object that absorbs all the radiation falling on it. The black body is so essential to
Planck’s theory as, once it absorbed sponge-like all the radiation, it can also perfectly emit that
energy. Hence, it turns out that a black body will radiate maximum energy when heated to a given
temperature.
According to classical physics, this energy emitted was predicted to be infinite but that was fitting
as a wrongly sized shoe.
This led Planck to the idea that Quantum theory limits energy to a set of specific, discrete values.
This set of values, however, is not continuous but rather increments from one allowed value to
another by small Quantum leaps. To be precise, a Quantum is a difference between two allowed
values in a set.
Given that all atoms on the surface of the heated solid vibrate at a specific frequency, Planck
arranged a model, also known as Planck’s equation. Through experiments of frequencies and
temperature, Planck was finally able to generate a constant, which was named after him as the
Planck’s constant:
h = 6.626 × 10 −34 J ⋅ s
Using this constant, he was able to formulate his theory: energy is directly proportional to
frequency. He wrote his equation as:
E = hν
Where E is energy, h is Planck’s constant, and v is frequency.
This was a really bizarre assumption, but it worked!
How did we get up to this point?
One core concept of the Quantum theory is the wave-particle duality theory, which is evidence that
the subatomic world could not be accurately described with classical physics because they are no
longer applicable at that level. One of the fundamental reasons is that the particles are also waves,
so they do not have a well-defined position in space.
Do not be frightened by the words used by physicists, as the difference between waves and particles
is much simpler than you might imagine. In essence, a particle has mass, however small. Normally
a particle is not a wave, which is instead a pattern of propagation with measurable parameters such
as amplitude, cycles per second or frequency, energy per unit space or intensity, etc.For example, let’s consider the motion of a tennis ball and the motion of the waves on the sea. In
both cases, a transfer of energy is associated with the motion. However, there is a difference: in the
case of the tennis ball, the energy that the ball carries is located within the volume of the ball itself.
In the case of the waves on the sea, the energy is instead distributed across the wavy surface. The
tennis ball in physical terms is a "particle" type, while the ripples of the sea are "wave" type. It
follows that the particles are localized phenomena while the waves are de-localized phenomena.
What did the Quantum physicists find so amazing? The first is that as we enter the subatomic world,
the fundamental elements of matter are tiny concentrations of energy which have a dual nature: both
waves and particles.
The second is that elements with the wave nature when observed they take on particle behavior. As
strange as it may sound, the observation of Quantum matter influences the matter itself!
Albert Einstein, a former committee and a later detractor of Quantum theory, was eventually deeply
troubled by the implications of these findings. He lately addressed Quantum physics with these
words:
"Quantum physics is worthy of all respect, but an inner voice tells me that it is not the right solution. It would be like believing that the Moon is there, only until we observe it! " (Albert Einstein)
For the Austrian physicist, God had not created the world with dices: once you know the initial
properties of a physical phenomenon, you can grasp them at any time: the principle of cause-effect
rules our Universe and nothing happens on a random basis.
In the end, Einstein tried to refute Quantum theories, confident of being in perfect harmony with
God’s thought; Planck himself, was essentially a conservative person, so he strenuously fought to
the end, to find an acceptable explanation for the fact that energy should emerge in small quantities.
Failing to find it.
In 1944, a bomb during an Allied air raid hit Plank’s house, annihilating all his scientific records
along with his other possessions. He will die shortly after, ill-treated by life yet that won’t put out
the fire that he started to the building of classical physics.
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