Quantum rules

I thought I would have a go at explaining something hard using only the kind of words people use the most often. This is not easy, but let us have a go anyway. 

         The idea I am thinking of comes from the world of the very small. If something is really really small, then you can not know both where it is and how fast it is moving at the same time. 

         You can know exactly where it is, but then you have no idea how fast it may be moving. On the other hand, if you know how fast it is moving then you will not know where it is. 

         I really like this idea because you can have a lot of fun with it.

         What would the world be like if this was how larger things worked as well? What would it do to driving? When you are driving, it is important to know both where you are and how fast you are going. 

         You need to know where you are in order to know that you are going the right way and you need to know how fast you are going in order not to get into trouble with the police. 

         Now. 

         Suppose this was not possible. Suppose that you would lose track of where you were the moment you figured out how fast you were going. You could avoid the police stopping you, but you would get totally lost. The other way around is no better. You might find out where you are, but you would not be able to control how fast you were moving. That would not seem very safe.

         What do we learn from this? 

         It is probably good that the really really small does not decide how things work in our every day life. It would be serious trouble!

Written using the up-goerfive text editor, using only the ten hundred most common words. Why don’t you have a go?

Childhood pleasures

Having written a number of short stories involving a slightly misguided inventor I feel compelled to ask: Where do all these mad ideas come from?

            It can’t be that they emerge out of nowhere - just like that - popping in from some extra dimension or something, can it?

            I need to know because they keep bothering me. Once they sneak into the brain they grab hold and refuse to let go, and I am spending far too much time on this.

            I may have had a clue to the mystery quite recently. There I was thinking about some invention or other, and then... all of a sudden I remembered.

            When I was little, probably back in the days when TV was black and white, one of my favourite programmes was a cartoon about a great inventor, Professor Balthazar. I had completely forgotten about that funny little man in his bowler hat, but suddenly he was back.

            Did an internet search to satisfy my curiosity.

            Indeed, three series of adventures were made, starting in the late 1960s, in that powerhouse of animation; Croatia. Broadcasted in a number of countries, including Sweden, to general acclaim.

            At this point I, quite naturally (uhh?), ended up on YouTube where a few of the Professor’s adventures can be found (hint!). Watched them with our then 7-year old and discovered that the stories were still great. The animation is certainly not CGI, but much better off for it. Suddenly the household had a craving for more.

            More inventions.

            More madness.

            Fortunately for us, an Italian company had taken upon themselves to digitally remaster all the old Balthazar episodes. So... we ordered the box set (not cheap, but the best things in life are not always free) and now all our Professorial needs have been satisfied.

            More than satisfied, perhaps, as we can’t help humming the theme tune over and over…

            The Professor’s inventions tend to be on the remarkable side of spectacular. A problem arises, he pushes a lever on his inventing machine, an umbrella opens and shuts a few times and out of a spout drips a few drops of red liquid. These precious red drops have the most amazing ability to create pretty much anything you want, from flying shoes to doorways to other realities where people can live out their fantasies.

            Excellent!

            If, at some point in the future, my daughter decides to start writing stories about an inventive Professor involving more or less reasonable ideas... perhaps she will trace the idea back to this Croatian brilliance of Professor Balthazar. It would be tricky to make such a legacy worthy, but it would certainly be worth trying.

Learning to crawl

This weekend the baby in our house managed to figure out the mysteries of crawling. Can’t say that it has been easy. On the contrary, and there is still some way to go before the technique is perfected. At the moment it is mostly one move forwards and a couple backwards, but...

            For the parents this means that we need to pay unexpected attention. The little person no longer stays where you put her down, and she is suddenly able to reach all sorts of unsuitable things. As soon as you turn your back on her. Put her down on a blanket outside and before you know it she is off the reservation... Eating grass. Good for the digestive system, I’m sure.

            Watching the stubborn repetition is both entertaining and frustrating. The little crawler may get frustrated but at the same time she is absolutely determined to get there. And eventually she does.

            Tells you quite a lot about the importance of persistence.

            You also find out a few things about learning. As humans, we learn partly by repetition and partly by making mistakes. Mistakes teach us how not to do things, sometimes in a very painful way. This is important. Repetition leads to perfection in whatever the pursuit may be.

            For small children this comes natural. The older you get, the harder it becomes to pick up new skills. There are many reasons for this. One may be lack of patience. While a crawling baby keeps getting up after falling over hundreds of times in a row, a grown-up often gives up after the first few attempts. Usually with some feeble excuse like “no more time for this nonsense, more important things to do...”

            Is this the way of the world, or is there something you can do about it? Is there some way that a grown-up can emulate the child? Not by throwing tantrums, but by sticking at tasks that seem impossible until they are mastered.

            What is the key to this?

            Now that I think about it, I recognize that the answer could have to do with stupidity. Not being stupid, but rather not being afraid to look stupid. This never bothered any baby, but it holds back most adults.

            If you want to make progress on something challenging, where mistakes are inevitable, then you must allow yourself to look, and likely feel, stupid.

            You also need to be modest enough to ask for help when you need it. I know that the next step (no pun intended) for our baby will be walking. This will involve the poor parents breaking their backs by propping up a staggering pre-toddler for hours on end. We will look stupid, but see if the baby cares. She’s got walking to master, so can’t be bothered about how we feel about it.             

            As a grown-up there are situations where you need similar support. This is true even for the best of us. In the world of science you see it all the time. Famously, Einstein needed someone to tell him about tensor calculus when he was trying to figure out his new theory of gravity. The trick is to find someone that is able to help, but also to be modest enough to accept that help is needed in the first place. And not be afraid to look stupid...

            So there we are.

            The road to success passes through both repetition and stupidity.

            At least that’s what I keep telling myself...

Unbelievably cool

Absolute zero temperature, at 273 or so degrees below freezing, is supposed to be where things cease to happen. Basically, the temperature of any object is linked to the motion of the atoms of which is made. When averaged over to a larger scale, the energy of atom’s jiggling about becomes the object’s temperature. Absolute zero then, is when all the jiggling stops and pretty much nothing happens.

         It has long been the case that some of the most exciting physics experiments are done at extremely low temperatures. In many cases the laboratory reaches far below the freezing conditions of outer space, which has a temperature of around three degrees above absolute zero due to remnant radiation from the Big Bang explosion that created the Universe.

         At low temperatures funky things happen. Basically, Nature is left with two choices. Either a material freezes to form a solid, like water becoming ice. Or one ends up with a superfluid.

         The classic example of a superfluid is Helium, which undergoes this transition at a temperature not too different from that of outer space. Experiments on this funky liquid have taught us a lot about quantum physics. The reason for this is that a superfluid can be thought of as a large scale quantum system. Usually the quantum regime is relevant on minute scales that are hard to probe, but in the case of a superfluid quantum aspects play a role at scales that can sometimes be seen by the human eye. Now that’s pretty cool.

         In the last couple of decades many other superfluid systems have been discovered. Particularly exciting are the different cold atom gases, involving clouds of a few hundred atoms or so at fantastically low temperatures, where experiments with incredible precision can be carried out. This allows something that was never going to be possible in Helium; studies of much smaller systems where the quantum aspects can be much better resolved. Now that is seriously cool.

         Talking about seriously cool, what says that you can’t go below absolute zero? Could it be that this is an artificial limit we (or rather, very clever people that came before us) have introduced, but in reality Nature does something else at that point? My inclination would be to say no. The notion of absolute zero is just that. Absolute. Perhaps the value we have set for it is wrong, for some reason, but the idea is difficult to argue with. If the temperature is associated with the motion of individual atoms then the zero point ought to be reached when all the motion stops. How can you possibly go beyond that?

         Nevertheless, it was recently reported in the popular science press that experimenters had in fact gone beyond this point. Now, that would have been beyond cool...

         In reality, closer inspection of the work involved shows that the experimenters never claimed such a breakthrough. It was just a typical mis-representation, probably because it sounded cool. It is still an interesting story, and highlights something you may not have thought about. We are all familiar with the feeling of hot and cold. Yet, our understanding of temperature is far from perfect. This is a cool problem to work on!