A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics

James Higgo 1999

What is Quantum Physics? That's an easy one: it's the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means 'discrete amount' or 'portion'. Max Plan ck discovered in 1900 that you couldn't get smaller than a certain minimum amoun t of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit. Why is it weird? Niels Bohr, the father of the orthodox 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum ph ysics once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it". To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experi ments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, Schroedinger's Cat. Two Slits The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a ligh t through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a s ingle photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled t hrough both slits at once. Light Bulb Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random directio n. Erwin Schroedinger came up with a nine-letter-long equation that correctly pr edicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point. He envisaged a kin d of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from t he filament. Once you look at the photon, this 'wavefunction' collapses into the single point at which the photon really is. Schroedinger's Cat In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cy anide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an isolated electron and determi nes whether it is 'spin up' or 'spin down' (it can have either characteristic, s eemingly at random). If it is 'spin up', then the bottle is opened and the cat g ets it. Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. T he question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated an d you opening the box. Nobody has actually done this experiment (to my knowledge ) but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.

If you dare to think about it (you're not really supposed to), you have to belie ve one of the following things:

MENU Your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles - or Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once - or The universe is splitting, every Planck-time (10 E-43 seconds) into billions of parallel universes - or The universe is interconnected with faster-than-light transfers of information ---Full English Breakfast Coffee or Tea These are the results of the different interpretations of quantum physics. The i nterpretations all compete with each other. Otherwise respectable physicists can get quite heated about how sensible their pet interpretation is and how crazy a ll the others are. At the moment, there's about one new interpretation every thr ee months, but most of them fit into these categories.

What does it mean? The meaning of quantum physics is a bit of a taboo subject, but everyone thinks about it. To make it all a bit more respectable, it is better to say 'ontology' than 'meaning' -- it's the same thing. There are several competing interpretatio ns and the one thing they all have in common is that each of them explains all t he facts and predicts every experiment's outcome correctly. Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) This is the granddaddy of interpretations, championed by the formidable Niels Bo hr of Copenhagen university. He browbeat all dissenters into submission (with th e notable exception of Einstein) at a Brussels conference sponsored by a man cal led Solvay in 1927. Bohr thereby stifled the debate for a generation or two. The CI has a bit of a cheek calling itself an interpretation, because it essenti ally says "thou shalt not ask what happens before ye look". He pointed out that the Schroedinger equation worked as a tool for calculating where the particle wo uld be, except that it 'collapsed' as soon as you took a peek. If anyone asked w hy this was, he would say, "shut up and calculate" (or he might as well have don e).

When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that con sciousness and particle physics are inter-related, and you rush off to write a b ook called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. More recently, Henry Stapp at the University of California has written papers su ch as On Quantum Theories of the Mind (1997). Stapp's central thesis is that the synapses in your brain are so small that quantum effects are significant. This means that there is quantum uncertainty about whether a neuron will fire or not - and this degree of freedom that nature has allows for the interaction of mind and matter. What happens to the cat? You're not allowed to ask. Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) The various paradoxes that the Copenhagen Interpretation gave rise to (famously Schroedinger's cat, and Einstein's dislike of "spooky action at a distance") led others to keep on trying to find a better interpretation. The simplest was put forward by a student, Hugh Everett, in 1957. He simply said that the Schroedinger equation does not collapse. Of course, everyone laughed a t him, because they could see that the photon, for example, was in just one plac e when they looked, not in all possible places. But after a couple of decades, t his issue was resolved with the concept of decoherence - the idea that different universes can very quickly branch apart, so that there is very little relations hip between them after a tiny fraction of a second. This has led to what should strictly be called the 'post-Everett' Interpretation , but is still usually called MWI. It is now one of the most popular interpretat ions and has won some impromptu beauty contests at physics conferences. Unfortun ately it means that billions of you are splitting off every fraction of a second into discrete universes and it implies that everything possible exists in one u niverse or another. This comes up with its own set of hard-to-digest concepts, s uch as the fact that a 500-year-old you exists in some universes, whereas in oth ers you died at birth. In 1997, Max Tegmark at Princeton University proposed an experiment to prove tha t MWI was correct. It involved pointing a loaded gun at your head and pulling th e trigger. Of course, you will only survive in those universes where the gun, fo r whatever reason, fails to go off. If you get a misfire every time, you can sat isfy yourself -- with an arbitrarily high level of confidence -- that MWI is tru e. Of course, in most universes your family will be weeping at your funeral (or possibly just shaking their heads and muttering). What happens to the cat? It's dead in half the subsequent universes and alive in the other half. Pilot Waves, Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order David Bohm (1917-1992) was a very brilliant physicist and that's why people went along with him when he came up with an elegant but more complicated theory to e xplain the same set of phenomena (normally, more complicated theories are disqua lified by the principle known as Ockham's Razor). Bohm's theory follows on some original insights by Prince Louis de Broglie (1892 -1987), who first studied the wave-like properties of the behaviour of particles in 1924. De Broglie suggested that, in addition to the normal wavefunction of t he Copenhagen Interpretation, there is a second wave that determines a precise p osition for the particle at any particular time. In this theory, there is some ' hidden variable' that determines the precise position of the photon.

Sadly, John von Neumann (1903-1957) wrote a paper in 1932 proving that this theo ry was impossible. Von Neumann was such a great mathematician that nobody bother ed to check his maths until 1966, when John Bell (1928-1990) proved he'd bodged it and there could be hidden variables after all -- but only if particles could communicate faster than light (this is called 'nonlocality'). In 1982 Alain Aspe ct demonstrated that this superluminal signaling did appear to exist, although D avid Mermin then showed that you could not actually signal anything. There is st ill some argument about whether this means very much. Bohm's theory was that the second wave was indeed faster than light, and moreove r it did not get weaker with distance but instantly permeated the entire univers e, acting as a guide for the movement of the photon. This is why it is called a 'pilot wave'. This theory explains the paradoxes of quantum physics perfectly. But it introduc es a new faster-than-light wave and some hidden mechanism for deciding where it goes -- to create an 'implicate order'. That's quite a lot of extra baggage, and scientists like to travel light. Worse still, Bohm went on to become a mystic, identifying his 'implicate order' with Eastern spirituality and spawning books l ike Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics . That's heretical behaviour in the eyes of any decent physicist. What happens to the cat? It's either dead or alive, of course! Consistent Histories The Consistent Histories interpretation, put forward by Robert Griffiths in 1984 , works backwards from the result of an experiment, arguing that only a few poss ible histories are consistent with the rules of quantum mechanics. It's an inter esting idea but not very popular because it still doesn't explain how a particle can go through two slits and interfere with itself. Roland Omn s, in The Interpre tation of Quantum Mechanics (1994) wrote down 80 equations in a single chapter a nd came to the conclusion that the 'consistent histories' interpretation was pre tty much the same as Copenhagen, with a few knobs on. What happens to the Cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask. Alternate Histories The Alternate Histories Interpretation is quite different, being similar to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, but with the insistence that only the actual outcome is the real world and the ones we're not in don't actually exist. Unfortunately this gets us right back to their being some kind of 'collapse'. What happens to the cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask. Time Reversibility Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a genius who developed a new approach to quantum mechanics. He formalised its crowning achievement, Quantum Electrodynamics, whi ch is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised. He also developed the Fe ynman Diagram, which represents the interaction of two particles as the exchange of a third particle. This diagram has time on one axis and space on the other a nd the interaction can be viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse tim e. An electron, on its way from point A to point B, can bump into a photon. In the diagram this can be drawn as sending it backwards not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which sends it forward in time again,

but in a different direction in space. In this way, it can be in two places at o nce. There is little doubt that a Feynman diagram offers the easiest way to predict t he results of a subatomic experiment. Many physicists have seen the power of thi s tool and taken the next step, arguing that reverse time travel is what actuall y happens in reality. Victor Stenger of the University of Hawaii argues strongly for this ontology in his forthcoming book. Of course, for a layman, it is hard to understand why a photon bounces around in such a way that it appears in two s lits at once. What happens to the Cat? It is both dead and alive simultaneously. We don't see this because of the macroscopic 'measurement problem'. Transactional Interpretation Like Stenger's, John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation relies on the fundame ntal time-symmetry of the universe. He argues that particles perform a kind of ' handshake' in the course of interacting. One sends out a wave forward in time, a nd another sends one out backwards in time. What happens to the Cat? Ermm... Gremlins A new interpretation, presented for the first time here, is that there are littl e green gremlins hovering around, going backwards and forwards in time, shaking hands and collapsing with mirth as they poke and prod subatomic particles in a w ay they calculate most likely to confuse us. This explains all of the observed e xperimental results, but it does introduce gremlins, and the need for a further theory about why they should want to confuse us. Using the principle of Ockham's razor, this interpretation will probably not find much popularity among the sci entific community although it may be the basis for a new religion. Watch this sp ace. What happens to the Cat? Depends on what the gremlins think will confuse us most .