Excerpt
Albert Einstein may be the most recognizable of the great men associated
with this level of scientific achievement. Every school child can quote the
famed formula E=mc2 but many are not aware that the 1921 Nobel Prize
for Physics was awarded to Einstein for his work on photo electric effect.
The Awards Council deemed his Theory of Relativity “too controversial.”
To compound the matter, movies and the entertainment world of the
day parodied this brand of science as comic caricatures and undoubtedly
evil geniuses. Like Einstein, they often had halos of wild hair and spoke
with foreign accents.
Since those early days, quantum mechanics has infiltrated other
scientific disciplines such as chemistry, electronics, and information science.
Theories have been revised, quantified and reformulated, so unless you have
a passion for the journey, it is difficult to keep up. Even the language tends
to mislead us into thinking this is so vast as to be unimaginable.
You might note how the public attitude towards quantum mechanics
has been skewed. Take the phrase quantum leap; in common usage this
refers to a very large jump between things. In fact, the actual meaning
of quantum leap is a shift from the tiniest thing to the very next tiniest
thing—in other words, it is the tiniest leap that is possible in reality.
The absolute opposite of popular understanding. All quantum means is
the specification of a quantity, whether it deals with energy or physical
phenomena.
Another anomaly that always makes me laugh is the idea that all
this started with a Big Bang. What a strange name to give to the origin
of our world. We conveniently forget that there can be no sound without
atmosphere. Therefore, to be accurate, no atmosphere—no bang.
Logically, it must have started with a ‘Big Nothing.’ The problem is
that the so-called beginning wasn’t even the beginning, because gravity
already existed. It is far less spectacular in these terms—an example of
how words are corrupted in use.
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In 1922, the year following Einstein’s award, Niels Bohr received
the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the structure of atoms. There
was collegial disagreement between the two scientists…
