“Sit up. Good dog!”
“Shake hands. Good dog!”
“Explain the particle-wave duality in quantum physics. Good dog!”
The idea of discussing quantum physics with a dog is no more bizarre than a lot of what happens at the quantum level.
Chad Orzel is a professor of physics at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. His specialty areas are atomic physics and quantum optics. And he has a special dog, Emmy, a floppy-eared, talking shepherd mix who is known as “the queen of Niskayuna” (a Schenectady suburb). She discusses physics with Chad on a regular basis.
You can be prepared for a good scientific romp throughout Orzel’s How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (Scribner/Simon and Schuster, NY 2009; ISBN 978-1-4165-7228-2). Thinking like a dog is a big help
“Quantum physics,” Chad tells Emmy, “has all sorts of weird and wonderful particles. Particles behave like waves and waves behave like particles. Particles are indeterminate until you measure them. Empty space is full of ‘virtual particles’ popping in and out of existence. It’s really cool.”
A Bone To Pick With The Uncertainty Principle
Chad’s mini-lectures usually arise from a problem Emmy is facing. Example: When Emmy has lost her bone, Chad makes a joke about not knowing where it is, but being able to say how fast it’s going. Emmy isn’t amused.
Chad tries to explain that in the quantum world, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes it impossible to know both position and momentum of an object perfectly at the same time.
Emmy’s response: “I think you lost my bone and you’re just trying to weasel out of this by being all confusing.”
Being all confusing, as it turns out, is a good description of what goes on in the quantum world. When Emmy tries to turn the quantum tables on Chad, she still can’t win. Like when Chad has both hands behind his back. One of them is holding a treat. Emmy has to guess which hand is holding the treat before she gets it.
Ah, ha! It’s in both hands, she says. “It’s like that cat in the box. . .You know, the one in the box. With the thing. It’s dead and alive at the same time. In the box.”
That Darned Cat In The Box
That, of course, would be Schrödinger’s cat. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed this paradox in a 1935 "mind experiment" to illustrate the difficulty (if not the absurdity) of applying quantum principles at the everyday scale of the everyday world. Emmy admits she’s not crazy about the idea of the dead cat, but she’s all for having the cat shut up in a box. But on second thought. . .
“Forget Schrödinger’s cat,” Emmy says. “Quantum physics is all about dogs.”
Something is going on in science, and especially in physics, when there are books out there as fun as this one. Maybe this generation of scientists grew up inspired by Carl Sagan describing the universe’s “billions and billions” of phenomena, in the legendary public television series “Cosmos.” Maybe it’s in their genes and inherited from parents (grandparents?) who were hooked on “Watch Mr. Wizard” (Don Herbert) of TV’s black-and-white days in the1950s. “You don’t need a beaker for that [experiment],” Mr. Wizard would tell his lab assistant. “You can use a mayonnaise jar.”
The Dog-gone Particle-Wave Duality
Now, as for the particle wave duality: the concept is fundamental to all of quantum physics. But Emmy wants to apply it as a strategy for catching those bunnies that always elude her on the other side of the pond. “Material particles have wave nature and can diffract around objects,” Emmy theorizes. “If you send a beam of electrons at a barrier, they’ll go around it to the left and the right, at the same time…So I’ll make use of my wave nature and go around both sides of the pond.”
Emmy wants to test her hypothesis on tree before taking on the pond. Unfortunately, Chad has to set her straight. Her wavelength is too short compared with her tree-obstacle to create any diffraction effect. In fact, her wavelength is too short by about 34 orders of magnitude (10-35 vs. 10-1 for the tree). Woof!
You may end up being as puzzled as Emmy if you try to follow all the layers of Chad Orzel’s explanations to completion. But he has a nice knack for offering a comprehensible overview of a concept, before adding complexity. Remember that even Einstein was never comfortable with the probabilistic nature of quantum physics. “God does not play dice!” he famously argued.
But Orzel’s book can definitely shine some light on the murky nature of quantum physics. Now, does that light behave as a particle or as a wave? The answer is up to you and Emmy.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
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