WHY GOD PLAYS DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE - SMALL THINGS - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You - Marcus Chown

Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You - Marcus Chown (2007)

Part I. SMALL THINGS

Chapter 2. WHY GOD PLAYS DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE

HOW WE DISCOVERED THAT THINGS IN THE WORLD OF ATOMS HAPPEN FOR NO REASON AT ALL

A philosopher once said, “It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.” Well, they don’t!

Richard Feynman

It’s 2025 and high on a desolate mountain top a giant 100-metre telescope tracks around the night sky. It locks onto a proto-galaxy at the edge of the observable Universe and feeble light, which has been travelling through space since long before Earth was born, is concentrated by the telescope mirror onto ultrasensitive electronic detectors. Inside the telescope dome, seated at a control panel not unlike the console of the starship Enterprise, the astronomers watch a fuzzy image of the galaxy swim into view on a computer monitor. Someone turns up a loudspeaker and a deafening crackle fills the control room. It sounds like machine gun fire; it sounds like rain drumming on a tin roof. In fact, it is the sound of tiny particles of light raining down on the telescope’s detectors from the very depths of space.

To these astronomers, who spend their careers straining to see the weakest sources of light in the Universe, it is a self-evident fact that light is a stream of tiny bulletlike particles—photons. Not long ago, however, the scientific community had to be dragged kicking and screaming to an acceptance of this idea. In fact, it’s fair to say that the discovery that light comes in discrete chunks, or quanta, was the single most shocking discovery in the history of science. It swept away the comfort blanket of pre-20th-century science and exposed physicists to the harsh reality of an Alice in Wonderland universe where things happen because they happen, with utter disregard for the civilised laws of cause and effect.

The first person to realise that light was made of photons was Einstein. Only by imagining it as a stream of tiny particles could he make sense of a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. When you walk into a supermarket and the doors open for you automatically, they are being controlled by the photoelectric effect. Certain metals, when exposed to light, eject particles of electricity—electrons. When incorporated into a photocell, such a metal generates a small electric current as long as a light beam is falling on it. A shopper who breaks the beam chokes off the current, signalling the supermarket doors to swish aside.

One of the many peculiar characteristics of the photoelectric effect is that, even if a very weak light is used, the electrons are kicked out of the metal instantaneously—that is, with no delay whatsoever.1 This is inexplicable if light is a wave. The reason is that a wave, being a spread-out thing, will interact with a large number of electrons in the metal. Some will inevitably be kicked out after others. In fact, some of the electrons could easily be emitted 10 minutes or so after light is shone on the metal.

So how is it possible that the electrons are kicked out of the metal instantaneously? There is only one way—if each electron is kicked out of the metal by a single particle of light.

Even stronger evidence that light consists of tiny bulletlike particles comes from the Compton effect. When electrons are exposed to X-rays—a high-energy kind of light—they recoil in exactly the way they would if they were billiard balls being struck by other billiard balls.

On the surface, the discovery that light behaves like a stream of tiny particles may not appear very remarkable or surprising. But it is. The reason is that there is also abundant and compelling evidence that light is something as different from a stream of particles as it is possible to imagine—a wave.

RIPPLES ON A SEA OF SPACE

At the beginning of the 19th century, the English physician Thomas Young, famous for decoding the Rosetta stone independently of the Frenchman Jean François Champollion, took an opaque screen, made two vertical slits in it very close together, and shone light of a single colour onto them. If light were a wave, he reasoned, each slit would serve as a new source of waves, which would spread out on the far side of the screen like concentric ripples on a pond.

A characteristic property exhibited by waves is interference. When two similar waves pass through each other, they reinforce each other where the crest of one wave coincides with the crest of another, and they cancel each other out where the crest of one coincides with the trough of the other. Look at a puddle during a rain shower and you will see the ripples from each raindrop spreading out and “constructively” and “destructively” interfering with each other.

In the path of the light emerging from his two slits Young interposed a second, white, screen. He immediately saw a series of alternating dark and light vertical stripes, much like the lines on a supermarket bar code. This interference pattern was irrefutable evidence that light was a wave. Where the light ripples from the two slits were in step, matching crest for crest, the light was boosted in brightness; where they were out of step, the light was cancelled out.

Using his “double slit” apparatus, Young was able to determine the wavelength of light. He discovered it was a mere thousandth of a millimetre—far smaller than the width of a human hair—explaining why nobody had guessed light was a wave before.

For the next two centuries, Young’s picture of light as ripples on a sea of space reigned supreme in explaining all known phenomena involving light. But by the end of the 19th century, trouble was brewing. Although few people noticed at first, the picture of light as a wave and the picture of the atom as a tiny mote of matter were irreconcilable. The difficulty was at the interface, the place where light meets matter.

TWO FACES OF A SINGLE COIN

The interaction between light and matter is of crucial importance to the everyday world. If the atoms in the filament of a bulb did not spit out light, we could not illuminate our homes. If the atoms in the retina of your eye did not absorb light, you would be unable to read these words. The trouble is that the emission and absorption of light by atoms are impossible to understand if light is a wave.

An atom is a highly localised thing, confined to a tiny region of space, whereas a light wave is a spread-out thing that fills a large amount of space. So, when light is absorbed by an atom, how does such a big thing manage to squeeze into such a tiny thing? And when light is emitted by an atom, how does such a small thing manage to cough out such a big thing?

Common sense says that the only way light can be absorbed or emitted by a small localised thing is if it too is a small, localised thing. “Nothing fits inside a snake like another snake,” as the saying goes. Light, however, is known to be a wave. The only way out of the conundrum was for physicists to throw up their hands in despair and grudgingly accept that light is both a wave and a particle. But surely something cannot be simultaneously localised and spreadout? In the everyday world, this is perfectly true. Crucially, however, we are not talking about the everyday world; we are talking about the microscopic world.

The microscopic world of atoms and photons turns out to be nothing like the familiar realm of trees and clouds and people. Since it is a domain millions of times smaller than the realm of familiar objects, why should it be? Light really is both a particle and a wave. Or more correctly, light is “something else” for which there is no word in our everyday language and nothing to compare it with in the everyday world. Like a coin with two faces, all we can see are its particlelike face and its wavelike face. What light actually is is as unknowable as the colour blue is to a blind man.

Light sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a stream of particles. This was an extremely difficult thing for the physicists of the early 20th century to accept. But they had no choice; it was what nature was telling them. “On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we teach the wave theory and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays the particle theory,” joked the English physicist William Bragg in 1921.

Bragg’s pragmatism was admirable. Unfortunately, it was not enough to save physics from disaster. As Einstein first realised, the dual wave-particle nature of light was a catastrophe. It was not just impossible to visualise, it was completely incompatible with all physics that had gone before.

WAVING GOODBYE TO CERTAINTY

Take a window. If you look closely you can see a faint reflection of your face. This is because glass is not perfectly transparent. It transmits about 95 per cent of the light striking it while reflecting the remaining 5 per cent. If light is a wave, this is perfectly easy to understand. The wave simply splits into a big wave that goes through the window and a much smaller wave that comes back. Think of the bow wave from a speedboat. If it encounters a half-submerged piece of driftwood, a large part of the wave continues on its way while a small part doubles back on itself.

But while this behaviour is easy to understand if light is a wave, it is extremely difficult to understand if light is a stream of identical bulletlike particles. After all, if all the photons are identical, it stands to reason that each should be affected by the window in an identical way. Think of David Beckham taking a free kick over and over again. If the soccer balls are identical and he kicks each one in exactly the same way, they will all curl through the air and hit the same spot at the back of goal. It’s hard to imagine the majority of the balls peppering the same spot while a minority flies off to the corner flag.

How, then, is it possible that a stream of absolutely identical photons can impinge on a window and 95 per cent can go right through while 5 per cent come back? As Einstein realised, there is only one way: if the word “identical” has a very different meaning in the microscopic world than in the everyday world—a diminished, cut-down meaning.

In the microscopic domain, it turns out, identical things do not behave in identical ways in identical circumstances. Instead, they merely have an identical chance of behaving in any particular way. Each individual photon arriving at the window has exactly the same chance of being transmitted as any of its fellows—95 per cent—and exactly the same chance of being reflected—5 per cent. There is absolutely no way to know for certain what will happen to a given photon. Whether it is transmitted or reflected is entirely down to random chance.

In the early 20th century, this unpredictability was something radically new in the world. Imagine a roulette wheel and a ball jouncing around as the wheel spins. We think of the number the ball comes to rest on when the wheel finally halts as inherently unpredictable. But it is not—not really. If it were possible to know the initial trajectory of the ball, the initial speed of the wheel, the way the air currents changed from instant to instant in the casino, and so on, the laws of physics could be used to predict with 100 per cent certainty where the ball will end up. The same is true with the tossing of a coin. If it were possible to know how much force is applied in the flipping, the exact shape of the coin, and so on, the laws of physics could predict with 100 per cent certainty whether the coin will come down heads or tails.

Nothing in the everyday world is fundamentally unpredictable; nothing is truly random. The reason we cannot predict the outcome of a game of roulette or of the toss of a coin is that there is simply too much information for us to take into account. But in principle—and this is the key point—there is nothing to prevent us from predicting both.

Contrast this with the microscopic world of photons. It matters not the slightest how much information we have in our possession. It is impossible to predict whether a given photon will be transmitted or reflected by a window—even in principle. A roulette ball does what it does for a reason—because of the interplay of myriad subtle forces. A photon does what it does for no reason whatsoever! The unpredictability of the microscopic world is fundamental. It is truly something new under the Sun.

And what is true of photons turns out to be true of all the denizens of the microscopic realm. A bomb detonates because its timer tells it to or because a vibration disturbs it or because its chemicals have suddenly become degraded. An unstable, or “radioactive,” atom simply detonates. There is absolutely no discernible difference between one that detonates at this moment and an identical atom that waits quietly for 10 million years before blowing itself to pieces. The shocking truth, which stares you in the face every time you look at a window, is that the whole Universe is founded on random chance. So upset was Einstein by this idea that he stuck out his lip and declared: “God does not play dice with the Universe!”

The trouble is He does. As British physicist Stephen Hawking has wryly pointed out: “Not only does God play dice with the Universe, he throws the dice where we cannot see them!”

When Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 it was not for his more famous theory of relativity but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. And this was no aberration on the part of the Nobel committee. Einstein himself considered his work on the “quantum” the only thing he ever did in science that was truly revolutionary. And the Nobel committee completely agreed with him.

Quantum theory, born out of the struggle to reconcile light and matter, was fundamentally at odds with all science that had gone before. Physics, pre-1900, was basically a recipe for predicting the future with absolute certainty. If a planet is in a particular place now, in a day’s time it will have moved to another place, which can be predicted with 100 per cent confidence by using Newton’s laws of motion and the law of gravity. Contrast this with an atom flying through space. Nothing is knowable with certainty. All we can ever predict is its probable path, its probable final position.

Whereas quantum is based on uncertainty, the rest of physics is based on certainty. To say this is a problem for physicists is a bit of an understatement! “Physics has given up on the problem of trying to predict what would happen in a given circumstance,” said Richard Feynman. “We can only predict the odds.”

All is not lost, however. If the microworld were totally unpredictable, it would be a realm of total chaos. But things are not this bad. Although what atoms and their like get up to is intrinsically unpredictable, it turns out that the unpredictability is at least predictable!

PREDICTING THE UNPREDICTABILITY

Think of the window again. Each photon has a 95 per cent chance of being transmitted and a 5 per cent chance of being reflected. But what determines these probabilities?

Well, the two different pictures of light—as a particle and as a wave—must produce the same outcome. If half the wave goes through and half is reflected, the only way to reconcile the wave and particle pictures is if each individual particle of light has a 50 per cent probability of being transmitted and a 50 per cent probability of being reflected. Similarly, if 95 per cent of the wave is transmitted and 5 per cent is reflected, the corresponding probabilities for the transmission and reflection of individual photons must be 95 per cent and 5 per cent.

To get agreement between the two pictures of light, the particlelike aspect of light must somehow be “informed” about how to behave by its wavelike aspect. In other words, in the microscopic domain, waves do not simply behave like particles; those particles behave like waves as well! There is perfect symmetry. In fact, in a sense this statement is all you need to know about quantum theory (apart from a few details). Everything else follows unavoidably. All the weirdness, all the amazing richness of the microscopic world, is a direct consequence of this wave-particle “duality” of the basic building blocks of reality.

But how exactly does light’s wavelike aspect inform its particle-like aspect about how to behave? This is not an easy question to answer.

Light reveals itself either as a stream of particles or as a wave. We never see both sides of the coin at the same time. So when we observe light as a stream of particles, there is no wave in existence to inform those particles about how to behave. Physicists therefore have a problem in explaining the fact that photons do things—for instance, fly through windows—as if directed by a wave.

They solve the problem in a peculiar way. In the absence of a real wave, they imagine an abstract wave—a mathematical wave. If this sounds ludicrous, this was pretty much the reaction of physicists when the idea was first proposed by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in the 1920s. Schrödinger imagined an abstract mathematical wave that spread through space, encountering obstacles and being reflected and transmitted, just like a water wave spreading on a pond. In places where the height of the wave was large, the probability of finding a particle was highest, and in locations where it was small, the probability was lowest. In this way Schrödinger’s wave of probability christened the wave function, informed a particle what to do, and not just a photon—any microscopic particle, from an atom to a constituent of an atom like an electron.

There is a subtlety here. Physicists could make Schrödinger’s picture accord with reality only if the probability of finding a particle at any point was related to the square of the height of the probability wave at that point. In other words, if the probability wave at some point in space is twice as high as it is at another point in space, the particle is four times as likely to be found there than at the other place.

The fact that it is the square of the probability wave and not the probability wave itself that has real physical meaning to this day causes debate about whether the wave is a real thing lurking beneath the skin of the world or just a convenient mathematical device for calculating things. Most but not all people favour the latter.

The probability wave is crucially important because it makes a connection between the wavelike aspect of matter and familiar waves of all kinds, from water waves to sound waves to earthquake waves. All obey a so-called wave equation. This describes how they ripple through space and allows physicists to predict the wave height at any location at any time. Schrödinger’s great triumph was to find the wave equation that described the behaviour of the probability wave of atoms and their like.

By using the Schrödinger equation, it is possible to determine the probability of finding a particle at any location in space at any time. For instance, it can be used to describe photons impinging on the obstacle of a windowpane and to predict the 95 per cent probability of finding one on the far side of the pane. In fact, the Schrödinger equation can be used to predict the probability of any particle, be it a photon or an atom, doing just about anything. It provides the crucial bridge to the microscopic world, allowing physicists to predict everything that happens there—if not with 100 per cent certainty, at least with predictable uncertainty!

Where is all this talk of probability waves leading? Well, the fact that waves behave like particles in the microscopic world leads unavoidably to the realisation that the microscopic world dances to an entirely different tune than that of the everyday world. It is governed by random unpredictability. This in itself was a shocking, confidence-draining blow to physicists and their belief in a predictable, clockwork universe. But this, it turns out, is only the beginning. Nature had many more shocks in store. The fact that waves not only behave as particles but also that those particles behave as waves leads to the realisation that all the things that familiar waves, like water waves and sound waves, can do, so too can the probability waves that inform the behaviour of atoms, photons, and their kin.

So what? Well, waves can do an awful lot of different things. And each of these things turns out to have a semi-miraculous consequence in the microscopic world. The most straightforward thing waves can do is exist as superpositions. Remarkably, this enables an atom to be in two places at once, the equivalent of you being in London and New York at the same time.

1 Another interesting characteristic of the photoelectric effect is that no electrons at all are emitted by the metal if it is illuminated by light with a wavelength—a measure of the distance between successive wave crests—above a certain threshold. This, as Einstein realised, is because photons of light have an energy that goes down with increasing wavelength. And below a certain wavelength the photons have insufficient energy to kick an electron out of the metal.