In his new book ‘Helogland’, physicist Carlo Rovelli reveals how a young man’s self-imposed exile on a remote Atlantic island changed the world forever.
, Rovelli begins at Heisenberg’s “Eureka!” moment before taking us gently by the hand on an entertaining dash through the world of quantum physics. Which is … what?“Quantum physics is simply the description of how small things, like atoms, behave,” Rovelli explains from his home in France, where he leads the quantum gravity group at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille.
Newton was a young and brilliant loner, who mathematised everything around him, leading to breakthroughs in optics, colour and the nature of light. Twenty years on from the apple incident, and after being prodded by fellow astronomer Edmond Haley about the nature of comets, Newton dug deep into gravity and threw himself into the mathematics of the entire universe.
, opens with the line: “The following paper contains so much of a speculative and hypothetical nature, that I have thought it more fitted to for the pages of theMaxwell, however, knew a good idea when he heard one. He translated Faraday’s words into mathematical equations. The Maxwell-Faraday fields replaced Newton’s empty space, and we still use those equations today to describe all electrical and magnetic phenomena, from building an aerial to understanding the sun.
In 1901, Planck called his packets of energy “quanta” . He didn’t believe they actually existed; it was only ever a maths trick to get a solution. No one, least of all Planck, was keen to disagree with the Maxwell-Faraday fields: they worked beautifully.lichtquant Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum theory.
Germany’s Werner Karl Heisenberg built on Bohr’s work, and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the creation of quantum mechanics”.Forget everything, the young scientist told himself. Measure only what we can observe and assume nothing, including Bohr’s model . Strange things were afoot inside that atom. Nothing was behaving according to the rules of nature. Sub-atomic particles could be nowhere and everywhere at once. And observing them seemed to change their behaviour.
“This discovery,” says Rovelli, “has changed our understanding of physical reality in a substantial manner: physical reality is not made of objects having well-defined properties , but rather it is made by objects that have properties only in the moment they interact with one another.”says from his home in Virginia, “is the fact that when you describe these possible states the system can be in, prior to making a measurement, it is simultaneously in all the possible states.
Once you go further out or closer in, physics changes. Quanta may seem unnatural, but then perhaps nature is not as it appears. First posited by US physicist Hugh Everett in the late 1950s, MWI envisions our physical universe as just one of infinite parallel worlds that continually spin off from each other. While they all exist in same space and time they are completely whole and independent of our reality. Hollywood and sci-fi authors love this concept.On the surface it would seem that the quantum world doesn’t follow the rules of nature: that is cause and effect.
The processing power would be massive and the ramifications include unhackable communication and precision time-keeping.
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