Tabloid Science Does a personal approach to scientists’ lives help explain quantum physics? MÉLANIE FRAPPIER
The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science Sheilla Jones Thomas Allen Publishers 323 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780887623318
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ossiping can be great fun. This is why celebrity magazines religiously update us on the lives of Brad and Angelina. But gossip can also be misleading. For example, if I were to infer from the tabloids’ reports of twin births (from Julia Roberts’s to Jennifer Lopez’s to, yes, Angelina Jolie’s), I would conclude that every other birth involves twins. But let’s compare Hollywood stars with the ten men Canadian journalist Sheilla Jones selects in her history of quantum physics, The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science, as the physicists who had the greatest impact on the discipline: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Pascual Jordan. As far as I know, only Heisenberg had twins or, as Pauli put it, managed a “pair creation” (a typical physicist joke: the term “pair creation” refers to the simultaneous production of a particle and its antiparticle). I did not learn about Heisenberg’s twins in The Quantum Ten, probably because Jones only covers the story of quantum physics up to the 1927 Solvay conference where Nobel Prize winners Werner Heisenberg and Max Born solemnly decreed that quantum physics was complete, while Wolfgang and Maria, the twins, were born a decade later. But I did learn a lot more about the personal lives of these ten physicists than I expected. The book’s subtitle does not lie. At the forefront of this tale are the romantic affairs of these physicists (and of their wives), the deaths that darkened their existences—among which are two disturbing murdersuicides—and oppressive parents who made these men awfully talented, yet often awkward characters. Who needs gossip columns when you can get all of this from a history of 20th-century physics? Mélanie Frappier teaches the history of science and technology at the University of King’s College, Halifax, trying to convince her students that, like the rest of the universe, modern science is subject to the uncertainty principle.
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Surprised? I certainly was, for I expected an utterly different book after its provocative introduction, “The Regression of Science,” where Jones claims “theoretical physics is in trouble”—and she is talking here about more serious trouble than Pauli’s drinking binges. More than 80 years after the formalization of quantum physics, the quantum world still bewilders scientists. Admittedly, on its own, quantum physics is weird enough. It talks of a world where corpuscles move like waves and where special pairs of particles, those we call entangled, apparently act instantaneously on one another even when separated by light years. But if you add to this Einstein’s relativity, the other theory modern physics gave us, things get catastrophic. Relativity absolutely prohibits any action at a distance between any particles, entangled or not, for this would imply something propagating faster than light. Unless one is schizophrenic, it is impossible to simultaneously hold both quantum physics and relativity as true descriptions of the world. Some still think that there is hope. Well, sort of. Once worked out, string theory could very well be the leading theory of everything. This is so exciting that we may forget all about the small footnote: “be aware that string theory cannot be experimentally tested.” This, not Einstein’s illegitimate daughter, is the real scandal of physics, as Jones makes clear in her introduction. Think about it: scientific claims that cannot be tested, claims that are about what happens beyond the observable. Arguably, that is called metaphysics (literally “beyond physics”) and metaphysics is philosophy, not physics. As a philosopher of physics, I find this prospect very exciting. But it is also a little scary. Physicists have not dared to express so much confidence in pure thought since the déconfiture of Descartes’ physics, when, from “clear” and “distinct” ideas rather than the muddy sense data Englishmen kept bringing back, the great French philosopher concluded that the Earth was simultaneously at
rest and moving around the sun. Clearly and distinctly moving and at rest at the same time? No wonder physicists are a bit nervous about string theory, which claims that everything we observe is due to the vibrations, in a tendimension space-time, of strings smaller than the smallest particles we know about. As Jones reminds us, even Brian Greene, the famous author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, believes that unless we find the way to experimentally verify string theory, the latter will be nothing more than “an elaborate game of Dungeons and Dragons.” How did physicists get themselves in such a perilous situation? Jones’s hypothesis, and the motivation behind The Quantum Ten, is that it all started with quantum physics. Even Einstein, she says, developed his outrageous relativity theory following the “long-standing” scientific method: 1) developing a hypothesis, 2) expressing it in a mathematical formula that leads to verifiable predictions and 3) experimentally testing the hypothesis. However, Jones argues, physicists soon abandoned Einstein’s approach to physics for one increasingly relying on mathematics and foregoing experiments and, perhaps more importantly, hypotheses. Why? The fundamental reason, Jones proposes, is that at the turn of the 20th century, physicists discovered “a strange new atomic realm with bizarre rules that were impossible to visualize.” The strangeness of quantum phenomena, Jones suggests, forced physicists to rely increasingly on mathematics. How else could one talk, for example, about electrons disappearing from one location only to immediately appear at another? If this is where you generally get cold feet, don’t worry. From Planck’s quantum to the infamous BKS theory to the puzzling uncertainty principle, Jones’s discussion of the scientific landmarks of quantum physics is compelling and clear and will make the most math-phobic people feel they have mastered the most abstract theoretical concepts early 20thcentury physics has to offer. This said, with the help of the engaging explanations in The Quantum Ten, you may very well still conclude that, in the end, quantum physics does not really explain atomic phenomena. You may want to conclude, with Jones, that “for some of the
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