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It was a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and the guys I work with gave me a card: one of those 3-d cards where the picture changes as you tip the card. This one showed a beer glass, and as I changed the angle, it started full, then half full, then empty. (I am a glass-half-full kind of a bloke.) I was saying thank you, and I described the beer straight as being like Schrodinger’s beer mug: simultaneously full and empty, and impossible to say which it was.
I got a very blank look back.
You know, I said, like Schrodinger’s cat – neither alive nor dead.
The blank look got blanker.
So I tried to explain Schrodinger’s cat – the thought experiment he used to show the inherent absurdity of quantum mechanics extrapolated into the real world. And I realised how hard it was to explain these things; and how I didn’t really understand it myself. (There is no reason I should; I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician; but I have read popular science books about quantum physics, and I thought I understood it.)
That afternoon, another colleague told how she had taken her young children to the opening of the Edinburgh Science Festival the night before, so I looked at the festival website and saw several talks that interested me; the first was by Marcus Chown – called “Quantum Theory Can’t Hurt Us”, the apposite randomness seemed appropriate. I decided to go along.
The lecture was introduced by Prof Heinz Wolff. This too seemed very apposite: many years ago, as a young teenager interested in science, I went along to talks at the Hampstead Scientific Society, where Heinz Wolff would chair and introduce the meetings. I went to lots of lectures there; one I remember was about relativity (I can’t remember the speaker – it was about 35 years ago, after all!): I recall understanding everything that was said, until I left the lecture theatre, when none of it seemed quite to tie up.
In the lecture theatre of the Royal Scottish Museum, Prof Wolff described exactly the same feeling: he said he had been to lots of talks about quantum theory, and they made sense at the time; but the sense seemed to decay quickly – he estimated the half life of knowledge about quantum mechanics to be about twelve hours. (So I am writing about it now, several days later, to see what I have retained; I took lots of notes – it is how I remember things – but I intend not to look at them at all, until I have finished; and then I’ll tidy this up a bit. They will be the bits in square brackets…)
( What I remember from Marcus Chown's lecture! )
Schrodinger’s beer glass … full.
I got a very blank look back.
You know, I said, like Schrodinger’s cat – neither alive nor dead.
The blank look got blanker.
So I tried to explain Schrodinger’s cat – the thought experiment he used to show the inherent absurdity of quantum mechanics extrapolated into the real world. And I realised how hard it was to explain these things; and how I didn’t really understand it myself. (There is no reason I should; I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician; but I have read popular science books about quantum physics, and I thought I understood it.)
That afternoon, another colleague told how she had taken her young children to the opening of the Edinburgh Science Festival the night before, so I looked at the festival website and saw several talks that interested me; the first was by Marcus Chown – called “Quantum Theory Can’t Hurt Us”, the apposite randomness seemed appropriate. I decided to go along.
* * *
The lecture was introduced by Prof Heinz Wolff. This too seemed very apposite: many years ago, as a young teenager interested in science, I went along to talks at the Hampstead Scientific Society, where Heinz Wolff would chair and introduce the meetings. I went to lots of lectures there; one I remember was about relativity (I can’t remember the speaker – it was about 35 years ago, after all!): I recall understanding everything that was said, until I left the lecture theatre, when none of it seemed quite to tie up.
In the lecture theatre of the Royal Scottish Museum, Prof Wolff described exactly the same feeling: he said he had been to lots of talks about quantum theory, and they made sense at the time; but the sense seemed to decay quickly – he estimated the half life of knowledge about quantum mechanics to be about twelve hours. (So I am writing about it now, several days later, to see what I have retained; I took lots of notes – it is how I remember things – but I intend not to look at them at all, until I have finished; and then I’ll tidy this up a bit. They will be the bits in square brackets…)
( What I remember from Marcus Chown's lecture! )
