#Helgoland - Carlo Rovelli - Review

                                                                               

If you have read Manjith Kumar's "The Quantum", then Rovelli’s new book, "Helgoland", would appear a paled down version of the former. However this book apparently attempts to explain the complex theory of quantum mechanics from the view point of a specific scientist - Werner Heisenberg- and a particular place. Helgoland is a rocky, barren, windswept island in the North Sea to where the 23-year-old that scientist, a German physicist fled in June 1925 to recover from a severe bout of hay fever and was in need of solitude to think.  Quite ostensibly the author begins the book with lot of historical facts and one such fact that attracted my attention was the Goethes' love and poem for Islam.

The initial address is more philosophical, like everything should be based on what one sees and not on what one assumes to exist.  Reality and Experience thus are important forbearers of these.

There is this astonishing mention of the fact about Neils Bohr being kidnapped in a British Commando raid and taken out of occupied Denmark to England where he was received personally by Winston Churchill. It was probably some sort of exercise in those war-torn era to extracts facts about USA's Nuclear mission as later he was sent back to USA.  The fact that atomic bomb had killed nearly 200000 persons in a fraction of seconds in the first attempts itself is scary.

Schrodinger's scandal is passively mentioned where he was accused of fathering two of his students! His wife would go on to comment "You know it would be easier to live with a canary bird than a race horse, but I would prefer race horse", is bizarre.

With the light touch of a skilled storyteller, Rovelli reveals that Heisenberg had been wrestling with the inner workings of the quantum atom in which electrons travel around the nucleus only in certain orbits, at certain distances, with certain precise energies before magically “leaping” from one orbit to another. Among the unsolved questions he was grappling with on Helgoland were: why only these orbits? Why only certain orbital leaps? As he tried to overcome the failure of existing formulas to replicate the intensity of the light emitted as an electron leapt between orbits, Heisenberg made an astonishing leap of his own. 

He decided to focus only on those quantities that are observable – the light an atom emits when an electron jumps. It was a strange idea but one that, as Rovelli points out, made it possible to account for all the recalcitrant facts and to develop a mathematically coherent theory of the atomic world.   But he kept the question literally open, "Are the laws of nature really not deterministic?" Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors, touch screens and MRI scanners.

For the Plancks' constant without which our Master's degrees are incomplete there is a mention that Planck himself was not sure about it or rather said that without understanding it. You multiply the position by velocity to get an approximate value of it! But from quantum Computer to atomic bomb this factor has come to stay. The simple formula, "xp-px=i", indicates us to look towards the mathematical tables (“matrices”) to predict the electrons’ wave mechanics nature. His work was soon refined by other forward-looking physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac. Quantum theory was sired out of Heisenberg’s observations and Einstein’s earlier relativity theory. When the electron does not interact with anything, Rovelli argues, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity. 

Here are some worthy lines that are quoted directly to preserve the impact:

# "You should never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think"- Neils Bohr said and Schrodinger demonstrated it with his Imaginative Cat experiment

# The debate between Bohr and Einstein went on for years and has become a subject of many books, conferences, themes of seminars and letters. 

# The wave nature of an electron is a real entity in "Many-Worlds" interpretation in addition to real and actual electron - David Bohm

# Doctors cannot evaluate a patients' mind without affecting them!

# The vast world is not made up of scientist in Laboratories or instruments of measurement. What is an observation when there is no scientist observing? - Scientists and instruments are all part of nature. This is referred under a coined word "Qbism".

# The electrons do not follow an orbit because its physical properties are only those that determine how it effects something else, e.g. light that it is emitted when it is interacting. 

# A property may be real only with respect to a stone and may not be to all. 

# The individual is bourgeois fetish - Bogdanov.

#Basics of one science are understandable in other branch of science.

# In the Q world it is made  up of happenings, discontinuous events without permanence - Qbism. 

# Uncertainty principle: We have gathered maximum information about an object but it is still possible to learn something unexpected about it. The is not determined by the past , the world is probabilistic!

# How can you think that the experiments in a lab made with a little bits of metals and glass can have such significance as to put into a question  ' how the world works'.  We still live at the bottom of deep gravity well.

# The world is not divided into stand-alone entities . It is we who delve with objects for our convenience.

The author gets help in the form of one of the most important texts of Buddhism, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way. Written in the second century by the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna, its central argument is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. It’s a perspective that Rovelli believes makes it easier to think about the quantum world. He may be right, but the words of Niels Bohr still come to mind: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

Brain does not work like we think on seeing. Signals do not travel from eyes to brain, rather they go the other way from the brain to the eyes. (it expects something it knows and previously occurred)  and predicts what the eye should see.  because what would be the point of sending signals towards the brain that do nothing but confirm what it already knows. 

We dream an image of the world based on what we know. The world that we observe is continuously interacting; it is better understood as a web of interactions and relations rather than objects.

Individual objects are summed up by the way in which they interact. If there were an object that had no interactions, no effect on anything, it would be as good as non-existent. Like most other authors views on 'Observation and Interaction', this book made an interesting reading on relativity. 

#Fundamentals:Ten_Keys_to_Reality - Frank Wilczek -Review

This is a book by a Nobel prize-winning Physicist offering ten keys to help in understanding the world in a manner consistent with development of physics in particular and science in general.

Professor Wilczek offers ten “fundamentals” upon which we can build a view of nature consistent with what we have been learning about the universe lately - which is quite a lot. 

Here is the list that makes an interesting topic, to begin with

1. Plenty of Space

2. Plenty of Time

3. Very few Ingredients

4. Very few Laws

5. Plenty of Matter and Energy

6. Cosmic History - Open Book

7. Complexity Emerges

8. Plenty more to see

9. Mysteries remain

10. Complementarity is mind-expanding

The first chapter begins with fundamentals like dealing with GPS, simple laws of nature, organised matter, and a hierarchy of structures like those of planets. The concept of space and matter is discussed, whilst space occupies most. This chapter also mentions how lenses work using the laws of diffraction.

The saying "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once", by Ray Cummings is mentioned (often quoted). Tiny errors in time multiplied by the speed of light can lead to noticeable errors in the distance is what Google Maps has to offer at times (particularly inside Indian towns). Here are some excerpts from the book that is good for most beginners who would want to explore questions in science. 

Only 'atoms and Voids', by Democritus is modified into 'Mass, charge and spin with voids'!

Einstein calling Bohr's (remember their debates) work as the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thoughts.

The Abundance of Cosmic energy reaching the Earth/day is measured as equivalent to a human's 2000 Calories/day energy - which approximately comes to a 100W bulb continuously burning for a year. And a new unit as AHUMEN is coined when 'Watts' becomes 'Joules'.

Three crucial ingredients are considered making life possible on Earth: Temperature, high and low, and intermediate Energy scale. (It is hard to agree when you have so many particles in Physics to counter)

Science often resembles the game of jeopardy where answers suggest what the right questions are!  Studying what happened in the past is like reconstructing the crime survey with the evidence from cases and look for corroborating evidence. 

A chapter devoted to 'Universe' says Cosmic Inflation is justified as the big bang assuming the space as Euclidean or flat - not required by relativity (a hint that relativity is of two types).

Finally, in the last chapter, the author talks about knowing the importance of Science. The chapter deals with the mention of the sensors in animals and humans. While humans have 6 million receptors to identify the incoming molecule in the nose, dogs have ~300 million receptors! Then there is talk about navigation in birds (Chromoprotein), the Strength of spider's net (nanomaterials), and Bee's sensitivity (receptors).

There is a good attempt to explain the recently discovered/confirmed 'Gravitational waves' - space-time tells matter how to move, matter tells space-time how to bend and so space-time is a form of matter! Similarly, Electricity and Magnetism that have complementary effects can be related to 'moving mass' radiating 'gravitational waves' - but there is a quantitative difference. 

Omar Khayyam's couplet on 'Hearts desires' finds a mention without the original quote.

Some mention about 'illusions' in the world is followed by a reference to a huge amount of work by Ramachandran's work on brain neurons (and illusions, thus).  A corollary to that effect is how we perceive gold bars which provoke our attention immediately but never are we bothered about the equal amount of gold atoms swimming in the ocean! Then a sleek mention about Noise Cancellation technology pops up and the cosmological constant finds mention with a few Einstein-Bohr debates (Quantum by Manjit Kumar is a leading book on that). 

Science is a fruitful way to understand optical delusion, a kind of prison and the Universe is a strange place and we are all in it together.

Arising curiosity around basic questions, facts, and dazzling speculations, Wilczek investigates the idea that forms our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He explores the history of fundamental science - what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. 

#The_God_Equation - Michio Kaku - Review

The book starts with the need for string theory with assumptions like, What happened before the Big Bang? What lies on the other side of a black hole? Are there other universes and dimensions? Is time travel possible? Why are we here? etc. The author tries to converge over these questions with an imaginary example "if we pluck a rubber band enough times and in different ways, we create all known sub-atomic particles", thus hinting an answer over the answers leading to String theory.

String theory is the theory that would give us the 'theory of everything'. Since he has been working on this over a long period he promises a 'balanced, objective analysis of string theory's breakthroughs and limitations' very soon - at one point we are told that the concern about string theory is the lack of evidence for the required 10 or 11 dimensions. Kaku points out that, if they exist, they should have a small impact on the force of gravity over small distances. He describes an experiment.... where the results are negative, rather than see this as more indication of the doubtful nature of the theory, 

The beginning part has so much repetition of information that can be found from his early writings and thus they make a boring read and you would want to do a 'speed-read, which I did, of course. The killing of Bruno when he expressed that life exists in other parts of the Universe has been mentioned again.

However, a few new things find mention, like "Faradays' cage" the concept of which has been applied to microwave ovens nowadays.  But then the repetition of the Wave spectrum like if the cells of our eyes were as big as a house, we might probably see the radio waves.

Maxwell is thumbed as a scientist who knew too much Mathematics. If Edison and he were asked to measure the volume of a light bulb the latter would use the Geometrical terms to calculate while the former would simply pour water into the bulb and measure the water to disclose the volume occupied.

The other frequent mention is that of the theory of relativity (for novices there is enough matter) and the distortion of space and time to keep the speed of light constant.  And the dent in the fabric of space is explained with a shotput ball over a mattress.

Here are some known facts that get rerun

# The Einstein-Chaplin discussion of celebrity status 

# The GPS has 31 satellites moving in different trajectories is well known (General Theory of relativity)

# The Gravity's pull if weaker results in faster time

# Schrodinger's Cat playing probability

# QED explanation with infinity (minus) infinity gets explained

# Feynmann's ingenuity gets mentioned with his famous story of cracking secrets of the atomic bomb

# Pauli's prediction of Neutrino

# Weinberg's theory and Nuclear forces get going

# Event Horizon telescope is mentioned (obviously owing to the topic)

# What a Dark Star is

# Hawking Radiation and Schwarzchild Radius and

# A lot about Dark Matter and Dark Energy

A slightly new twist is added to the concept of weightlessness in space, which is the actual thing rather than the no-gravity reality. If the rocket fall is the same as the object fall, then no gravity would be felt. (Remember the Newtown's Cannon Ball experiment)

Like a beginner's almanac of science that succinctly details the journey as well as the landmark discoveries and contributions physicists have made, or are making, as they continue their hunt for a theory of everything, the narration proceeds towards quantum reality. (Because, no, unfortunately, scientists haven't found a way to fuse relativity with quantum yet.)

As is typical with his work, Kaku manages to probe comprehensive cosmological concepts with all accessible narration, succinctness, and delicacy, which actually is the reason why one should complete this book. He makes explanations of gravity, quantum, and nuclear forces not only comprehensible to amateurs but compelling too. And he does so without once compromising the density of the subject matter.

Beginning with Newton and Einstein, veering into quantum mechanics, dipping into dark matter, energy, black holes, the book finishes with a perusal of string theory to show how far we've come in our understanding of the physics of the Universe and how far we still have to go. This is thus a very basic book about quantum theory, string theory, and historical physics. 

What is finally saturating is the mention of God, true to its title. Kaku warrants the proof of starting the Universe by a 'Starter', which is just the God - not the one that is mentioned in the Bible (only for the purpose of obeisance) or any other holy book, but the one which has Cosmological origin and mechanistic logistic propagation into infinite time. 

#Homo_Deus- Yuval Noah Harari - Review

Something I read last year, but forgot to review- so I am posting the abstract of reviews

At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have felt like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other. But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google – the search engine, not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behavior. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.

The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms – the ones that we have built – can do it far more efficiently than we can. That’s what Harari means by the “uncoupling” of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that’s not true anymore. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, called it an “automaton” (or what we would call a robot). Its robotic quality is the source of its power and also its heartlessness: states don’t have a conscience, which is what allows them sometimes to do the most fearful things. What’s changed is that there are now processing machines that are far more efficient than states: as Harari points out, governments find it almost impossible to keep up with the pace of technological advances. It has also become much harder to sustain the belief – shared by Hobbes – that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings.

We are just at the start of this process of data-driven transformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stop it. Homo Deus is an “end of history” book, but not in the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stop. Rather the opposite: things are moving so fast that it’s impossible to imagine what the future might hold. In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully about what the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in. That’s history: a sequence of events in which human beings play the leading part. But the world of 2100 is at present almost unimaginable. We have no idea where we’ll fit in, if at all. We may have built a world that has no place for us.

Given what an alarming thought this is, and since we aren’t there yet, why can’t we do more to stop it from happening? Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in charge of their fate was never much more than a leap of faith. Real power always resided with networks. Individual human beings are relatively powerless creatures, no match for lions or bears. It’s what they can do as groups that have enabled them to take over the planet. These groupings – corporations, religions, states – are now part of a vast network of interconnected information flows. Finding points of resistance, where smaller units can stand up to the waves of information washing around the globe, is becoming harder all the time.

Some people have given up the fight. In place of the founding tenets of modernity – liberalism, democracy, and personal autonomy – there is a new religion: Dataism. Its followers – many of whom reside in the Bay Area of California – put their faith in information by encouraging us to see it as the only true source of value. We are what we contribute to data processing. There is potentially a huge upside to this: it means we will face fewer and fewer obstacles to getting what we want because the information needed to supply us will be instantly accessible. Our likes and our experiences will merge. Our lifespans could also be hugely extended: Dataists believe that immortality is the next frontier to be crossed. But the downside is obvious, too. Who will “we” be anymore? Nothing more than an accumulation of information points. Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals with the power of the state. That won’t be necessary for the coming century. As Harari says: “The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.”

Corporations and governments will continue to pay homage to our individuality and unique needs, but in order to service them they will need to “break us up into biochemical subsystems”, all of them permanently monitored by powerful algorithms. There is a dystopian political aspect to this, too: the early adopters – the individuals who sign up first to the Dataist project – will be the only ones with any real power left and it will be relatively unchallenged. Gaining entry into this new super-elite will be incredibly hard. You’ll need heroic levels of education plus zero squeamishness about marrying your personal identity with intelligent machines. Then you can become one of the new “gods”. It’s a grim prospect: a small priestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source of knowledge, and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vast schemes. The future could be a digitally supercharged version of the distant past: ancient Egypt multiplied by the power of Facebook.

If intelligence and consciousness are coming apart then this puts most human beings in the same situation as other animals: capable of suffering at the hands of the possessors of superior intelligence. Harari does not seem too worried about the prospect of robots treating us like we treat flies, with violent indifference. Rather, he wants us to think about how we are treating animals in our vast industrialised farming systems. Pigs unquestionably suffer when living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated from their young. If we think this suffering doesn’t count because it is not allied to higher intelligence, then we are building a rod for our own backs. Soon the same will be true of us. And what price our suffering then?

This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit. But as Harari would probably be the first to admit, it’s only intelligent by human standards, which are nothing special. By the standards of the smartest machines, it’s woolly and speculative. The datasets are pretty limited. Its real power comes from the sense of a distinctive consciousness behind it. It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart. Harari cares about the fate of animals in a human world but he writes about the prospects for homo sapiens in a data-driven world with a lofty insouciance. Homo Deus makes it feel as if we are standing at the edge of a cliff after a long and arduous journey. The journey doesn’t seem so important anymore. We are about to step into thin air.

I end this with a quote that was so meaningful.

"I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.” — Montesquieu

#The_Invention_and_Discovery_of_the 'God Particle' - HIGGS - Jim Baggot #Review

The significant discovery of the Higgs boson has been one of the principal reasons why physicists, and chemists alike, were so excited about the LHC; and thus, within the scientific community the announcement was a cause for a major celebration indeed. For most of the general public, however, while the announcement was certainly intriguing, there were many basic questions yet to be answered: Just what was the Higgs boson, and why had it been labeled the God particle? Why were physicists expecting to find it, and what did the discovery really mean?

Jim Baggott's book 'Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle'' is a kind of remedy to this situation and provides the necessary context that the general public needs in order to understand the discovery of the Higgs boson and what it all means.

The bridge with Chemistry is in the beginning with Dirac's theory on combining Quantum Theory with Einstein's Special relativity (also his work on non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle makes a mention). The author thus says that if one wanted to study high energy particle collisions one needed to climb mountains - that would mean the presence of more such particles over the high mountains (and also the efforts).

When hosts of particles were being discovered during 1932-47, naming turned out to be a big task and Baggot comes out with the chronology of how they were named. 

Baggott first takes us through the history of the development of the Standard Model (which theory the Higgs boson is a part). He begins with the discovery that atoms are made up of the more elementary particles of electrons, protons and neutrons. And then takes us through the discovery of the still more fundamental particles of quarks, leptons and bosons, and the 4 fundamental forces that govern these particles: gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. As with most authors of such Physics writings, there is the account of Weinberg-Salam theory with SU(2)xU(1) that always flies above my head.  But then there is good ending to it that enters the mind to satisfaction of the theory. 

There is a funnier part in between the chapters that made an interesting reading. The incident relates to the Physicist Veltman who entered an elevator in the last so that the weight exceeded the limit for the elevator to take off. Not relenting to this hang-on, he asked one of the persons inside to press the 'ON' button as soon as he would command that. Saying that he jumped into the air inside the Lift. Lo, the elevator worked out. If a person falls freely he will not feel his weight.

The Feynman quote that a proton-proton collision is like smashing two pocket watches together to see how are they put together also made an interesting insight.

While we know that the atom is 99% empty, the revelation that pulling a quark from interior of nucleon is done with the creation of anti-quark whose immediate pairing leads to a meson, makes a sensible answer to the vast emptiness we have been visualizing.  This is further explained with the fact that the mass of 2 up-quark is 4.5 - 9.9 MeV and the rest of the proton mass comes from the energy of Gluon fields inside the proton whose mass comes out to be 938 MeV!

For instance, and of crucial importance here, is that--after learning of the 3 types of elementary particles, and the 4 basic forces-- we learn that there was a problem with the then-current theory regarding the masses of the elementary particles- in that the 4 forces alone were simply unable to account for it. In order to overcome this difficulty, some physicists postulated that there must be a charged field pervading space, since such a field appeared to be the only appealing way to solve the mass mystery. This field was called the Higgs field.

A part of the book warranted fast reading as it was with the funding allocation and political deliberations.

A $15 billion project in the end it took 2 decades of untiring efforts by armies of physicists, engineers, construction workers etc. About 10000 tonnes of liquid Nitrogen and 150 tonnes of Liquid Helium ( A leakage of Helium alone caused a damage to about 53 magnets) was pumped into the LHC magnets that ran across 27 Km and was commissioned by August 2008, with the discovery of the Higgs particle by 2012 with more than 100 authors contributing to it! Used by Weinberg and Salam to account for electro-weak symmetry breaking this boson is having a spin 0 and a mass of about 125 GeV

This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that he gave it a nickname: the God Particle. Good read above all.