A DAY WITHOUT QUANTUM PHYSICS
The winner of the first I, Write competition is Havana Ide from Howell’s School, Llandaff, GDST (Girls Day School Trust) in Cardiff. Havana explores how the world around us is governed by quantum physics.
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uantum physics is perhaps the most alienating subject area in the scientific world, puzzling an elite group of thinkers for decades. It is the fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at atomic and subatomic scales. Understandably, most people tend to shy away from this area; if even the most renowned scientists like Einstein can’t fully crack the quantum code, why should the average person even bother with quantum physics? This disconnect is perhaps less common in other areas of physics. For example, most people are to some extent aware of the impacts of Newton’s Laws; drivers apply their breaks to slow down their car (an application of Newton’s first law) and footballers kick balls with a greater force to enable a greater acceleration (an application of Newton’s second law). But what most people aren’t aware of is their intrinsic connection to the quantum realm, thinking the theory is very remote and unconnected to their everyday lives. You might well ask yourself, what does a particle accelerator have to do with my existence? Why does it matter that Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive? As a result, many of us realise very little about the applications and tend not to think where quantum mechanics has taken us beyond the physics lab. Let’s imagine a day in your life where the rules of quantum mechanics go awry. This will illustrate that quantum physics isn’t remote and unconnected to your everyday life after all; it is your everyday life. Maybe you use an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. Normally, you could snooze this clock with a tap of a button, wake up to the sound of birds or even the morning news (if the alarm clock is a particularly fancy one). But, despite setting your alarm before you went to
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bed, y o u wake up to light pouring into your room, indicating that you have overslept. ‘Why didn’t my alarm go off?’ Your alarm clock plugs into your wall socket, which gives off an electric current that oscillates exactly 60 times per second, normally keeping time well and waking you up. ‘The plug is faulty’ you assume, getting out of bed to make your way downstairs. Habitually, you switch on your flat screen TV and sit down to watch your favourite breakfast TV programme. As expected, the screen flashes on and you sit back, ready to start your slightly delayed morning. A headline catches your eye: ‘Early data suggests break down of quantum realm, experts in disarray’ The image flickers away suddenly and you are left staring at a black screen. You check the power, try to switch the TV on and off again, and even hit the remote on the table. No luck. ‘First the alarm clock… now the TV’ The image on your TV screen is formed by thousands of illuminated LEDs, a semiconductor material that functions due to the basic principles of energy levels within an atom. ‘Well, I’ll have to catch up on the news tonight. It didn’t seem that important’. With that thought, you get up to make your breakfast. As usual, you pop two slices of bread into your toaster and let it toast for about 3 minutes. Inside the toaster, the heating filament turns from black, to orange and finally to a glowing red colour, nicely heating up your breakfast. You check to see how toasted the
Without quantum physics, a necessity for life on Earth is unable to exist: water.
