Posted on 05/27/2012 9:45:37 PM PDT by Windflier
A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see. Featuring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, and Frank Close.
"The Quantum World" is the eleventh installment in the ongoing Symphony of Science music video series.
Track back to source website: Symphony of Science
One for string theory ping list.
“I really think you’ll like it.”
Thanks for trying, but I could not get past the first 30 sec. of the MTV presentation.
I’m too old, I guess, or dumb or senile.
later
Cute video, and I'll use it with my grandsons. But it doesn't take me any closer to really understanding quantum physics.
/johnny
Lolan I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you. There are probably only a dozen people on the planet who really understand QM. And that”s being generous...
I was greatly impressed years ago by an essay of Victor Weisskopf's, Of Atoms, Mountains, and Stars: A study in Qualitative Physics. It's pretty technical actually, but the gist of it was to emphasize the way that quantum laws present themselves to us in the way they shape the qualities of our everyday world, which qualities we are prone to accept as "givens" without questioning their origin. For example, he explores the question, "Why can we see objects?"
There's stuff that I remembered being in there that I don't see, looking at it now. Perhaps these were my own interpolations. For example, the quantum nature of substances, e.g. water. Water has very particular and exact properties everywhere we find it. This is alluded to where he says, "Specific shapes had no justification in the classical physics of particles; quantum mechanics introduced this morphic trait, which is connected with the existence of quantum states with well-defined properties." Yes, I think that's what I remember.
As I said, I was greatly impressed with all this, and I always think of it as a counterpoint to the "exalted stardust" rhetoric. Consider ye well aluminum foil!
Listen to some Beethoven, Mozart, or even The Rivingtons - Papa Oom Mow Mow 2:23
That’s very true. I’m one of them.
Well, in another parallel universe. ;)
No, it doesn't, but that's not the point of the video. The point is to communicate the beauty and wonder of our universe.
I believe that aesthetics is a carrier wave that can provide a bridge for people to explore something as complex as quantum physics. Think of how people in the latter half of the 20th century were inspired to reach for the stars because of the influence of writers of science fiction.
I played a few of these videos for a couple of my kids, and they were spellbound. The artist created an effect on them, and stimulated their interest. I think that's a good thing :-)
... sorry about the ad !
I'm pushing 60 myself, and I understand.
The music isn't necessarily my favored genre, but it's tastefully done, and the artist succeeds at making beautiful lyrics out of the recorded statements of well-known scientists.
Ping
Feynman always said it was a mistake to try and understand it. If you did, you would "go down the drain into a blind alley, from which no one has ever escaped." You just have to accept it.
It was a cute vid, and useful for the 3 to 5 Y.O. crowd that needs that kind of hip stuff.
/johnny
Dude, I'm a frigging cook.
/johnny
But you are talking to a man that couldn't get past matrix form of finite differences on numeric integration.
Cooking school only goes so far. And I took it as far as I can go.
Would you like fries with that? ;)
/johnny
Yeah, but you know things about the culinary sciences that blow me away :-)
I don't understand quantum physics either, but I'm not even trying. I just find the basic concepts fascinating. Like a lot of other scientific subjects that I'll never be fluent with.
And when it's over, I'm going to ask them how many dimensions it requires.
We'll see what the results are.
/johnny
From a PBS Nova special titled, "Time Travel"...
NARRATOR: The leader in this field, Raymond Chiao, has misgivings about Nimtz's interpretations, but even he agrees with part of what Nimtz is saying.
PROF. RAYMOND CHIAO (University of California): In our experiments we have measured that a single photon can tunnel across a tunnel barrier at 1.7 times the speed of light.
NARRATOR: Chiao agrees that quantum mechanical tunnelling allows occasional random photons to break the light speed limit. What upsets him, and the rest of the physics world, is that Nimtz claims to have used it to send information faster than light. That really is taboo.
RAYMOND CHIAO: To have a genuine signal you really have to control the signal, but in, in quantum mechanical tunnelling it's a completely random process. Fundamentally we cannot, we cannot send information with this tunnelling particle.
GUENTER NIMTZ: Yeah, some colleagues are claiming that you cannot send information and then we started to transmit Mozart 40 and this is for instance the original tape. That's what we sent at a speed of 4.7 times the velocity of light and a distance of about 14 centimetre. Whether you can recognize Mozart 40 or not...
NARRATOR: Despite the random nature of the process, Mozart seems to have got through.
RAYMOND CHIAO: The essential question is: what is a signal, or what constitutes information? Has he really sent a signal in the sense of information faster than the speed of light? This is where Professor Nimtz and I part company because we don't really have a rigorous definition of what is information at the quantum level.
GUENTER NIMTZ: Maybe that this is not information for American colleague, but for a German or a British colleague. I think Mozart 40 has some information in it.
(GERMAN)
NARRATOR: Whilst well established in his own field, Nimtz is new to tunnelling and claiming to send Mozart faster than light has brought him perilously close to being called crackpot. His critics cite signal fronts and carrier waves. He counters with a limited bandwidth, but so far he stands alone.
Right or wrong, this leads to an interesting thought experiment, a gerdanken experiment in German. What if you could tunnel a message to the other side of the universe? Going faster than light, the message would
seem to go backwards in time.
http://www.astronomy.net/forums/blackholes2/messages/4289.shtml?show=top
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