Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Part Three of the book concludes with Chapter Eleven, “Quantum Time.”

Excerpt:

This distinction between “incomplete knowledge” and “intrinsic quantum indeterminacy” is worth dwelling on. If the wave function tells us there is a 75 percent chance of observing the cat under the table and a 25 percent chance of observing her on the sofa, that does not mean there is a 75 percent chance that the cat is under the table and a 25 percent chance that she is on the sofa. There is no such thing as “where the cat is.” Her quantum state is described by a superposition of the two distinct possibilities we would have in classical mechanics. It’s not even that “they are both true at once”; it’s that there is no “true” place where the cat is. The wave function is the best description we have of the reality of the cat.

It’s clear why this is hard to accept at first blush. To put it bluntly, the world doesn’t look anything like that. We see cats and planets and even electrons in particular positions when we look at them, not in superpositions of different possibilities described by wave functions. But that’s the true magic of quantum mechanics: What we see is not what there is. The wave function really exists, but we don’t see it when we look; we see things as if they were in particular ordinary classical configurations.

Title notwithstanding, the point of the chapter is not that there’s some “quantum” version of time that we have to understand. Some people labor under the impression that the transition from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics ends up “quantizing” everything, and turning continuous parameters into discrete ones, perhaps even including time. It doesn’t work that way; the conventional formalism of quantum mechanics (such as the Schrödinger equation) implies that time should be a continuous parameter. Things could conceivably change when we eventually understand quantum gravity, but they just as conceivably might not. In fact, I’d argue that the smart money is on time remaining continuous once all is said and done. (As a small piece of evidence, the context in which we understand quantum gravity the best is probably the AdS/CFT correspondence, where the Schrödinger equation is completely conventional and time is perfectly continuous.)

However, we still need to talk about quantum mechanics for the purposes of this book, for one very good reason: we’ve been making a big deal about how the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, but wave function collapse (under the textbook Copenhagen interpretation) is an apparent counterexample. Whether it’s a real counterexample, or simply an artifact of an inadequate interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a matter of much debate. I personally come down on the side that believes that there’s no fundamental irreversibility, only apparent irreversibility, in quantum mechanics. That’s basically the many-worlds interpretation, so I felt the book needed a chapter on what that was all about.

Along the way, I get to give my own perspective on what quantum mechanics really means. Unlike certain parts of the book, I’m pretty happy with how this one came out — feel free to correct me if you don’t completely agree. Quantum mechanics can certainly be tricky to understand, for the basic reason that what we see isn’t the same as what there is. I’m firmly convinced that most expositions of the subject make it seem even more difficult than it should be, by speaking as if “what we see” really does reflect “what there is,” even if we should know better.

So I present a number of colorful examples of two-state systems involving cats and dogs. Experts will recognize very standard treatments of the two-slit experiment and the EPR experiment, but in very different words. Things that seem very forbidding when phrased in terms of interference fringes and electron spins hopefully become a bit more accessible when we’re asking whether the cat is on the sofa or under the table. I did have to treat complicated macroscopic objects with many moving parts as if they could be described as very simple systems, but I judged that to be a worthwhile compromise in the interests of pedagogy. And no animals were harmed in the writing of this chapter! Let me know how you think the strategy worked.

At the foot of an active volcano 900 miles from the South Pole, Tom Leard leads a fearless band of men and women over a battlefield of frozen sea, beneath a relentless sun. Ash billows out from the peak behind them as they approach their enemies, who stand staggered across the barren stretch of ice, clad in black from head to toe.

“Don’t let them in your heads,” Leard tells his motley crew of carpenters, engineers, and service workers. “We’re the underdogs, but if we support each other, we can win.”

Here, on a January day in Antarctica’s frozen McMurdo Sound, Leard and company have come for the latest installment of a decades-long tradition: A rugby match, played between the American and New Zealand research bases, on a field of sea ice 10 feet thick.

Just a few miles away, scientists lead some of the world’s most exotic research projects, taking advantage of the extreme conditions on Earth’s coldest, driest and iciest continent. After a long week studying cold-adapted bacteria or the diving physiology of elephant seals, the scientists and staff take Sunday off to relax. But this is no ordinary Sunday.

Today’s match is the 26th in the series—which New Zealand leads, 25-0. Zero is also the number of ‘tries’—rugby’s equivalent of touchdowns—the Americans have scored in the history of the rivalry, which is the southernmost rugby game in the world.

Nearby McMurdo Station, operated by the United States, is home to over 1,000 summertime residents, a few dozen of whom have donned red, white and blue uniforms in support of their country. McMurdo is the largest station on the continent, far larger than neighboring Scott Base, which houses fewer than 100 New Zealanders—but that doesn’t stop New Zealand from fielding a winning team year after year.

Text and photos by Chaz Firestone. Click through for more photos and the rest of the story.

In the latest episode of the ongoing Google-Beijing dispute, Google’s attempt to bypass Chinese censors by sending Chinese users of its search engine to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site seems to have failed.

Within 24 hours of the rerouting, Beijing has clamped down, restricting mainland users’ access to the uncensored content on the Hong Kong site. Mainland Chinese users on Tuesday could not see uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either disabled searches for objectionable content completely or blocked links to certain results [The New York Times]. Earlier, the Chinese government described Google’s move to redirect users to the Hong Kong site as “totally wrong.”

The clash comes two months after Google and China began a bitter standoff over internet censorship on the mainland. Instead of exiting the country entirely, Google has taken on Beijing by defying its censorship controls and sending mainland users to its Hong Kong site, where censorship rules are more lenient.

While the move seemed provocative, Google’s founders at first seemed to think that this redirection would be acceptable to the Chinese government. “We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,” Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident” [The New York Times]. Google said that while the search operations were being redirected to Hong Kong, it would continue to host its maps and music search service in China. However, it now seems that the company misjudged the Chinese government’s mood.

After Google’s big move yesterday, people visiting Google.cn were immediately rerouted to Google.hk. Within the Hong Kong site, there were links to Google’s search engine in simplified Chinese, most commonly used by mainland Chinese Internet users, as well as links in traditional Chinese, which is commonly used in Hong Kong. The simplified-Chinese service viewable in Hong Kong looked much like Google.cn, with links to products Google only offers in the mainland, such as its free music search service [The Wall Street Journal].

Google’s current gamble is risky. Despite its size and global popularity, in China the search site is second in popularity to local search engine Baidu, whose stock has soared in the aftermath of the dispute. Google also has to consider whether it would be willing to run afoul of the Chinese authorities completely and turn its back on 400 million internet users and potentially billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Finally, analysts hope this tussle between a corporation fighting for its own interests and an authoritarian government doesn’t endanger already strained diplomatic relations between China and the United States.

Governments on both sides chimed in on the latest developments. The White House said it was disappointed that China and Google could not agree on how to do business together, while Beijing rushed to declare that despite the current spat, China still welcomes foreign investors and businesses. Within Google’s China offices, employees said they were confident that the research and development office wasn’t going to be shut down anytime soon. However, they did say they were worried that the Chinese government would block Google.cn entirely, which would keep mainland Internet users from accessing features like Google video, music, and maps which all use that address.

Beijing Internet entrepreneur and author of the technology blog digicha.com, Bill Bishop, called those fears well founded. He said on Tuesday that Google’s withdrawal amounted to “an amazing public slap in the face to the Chinese government.” “The Chinese are very serious about pushing their soft-power agenda,” he said. “Google just put a big hole in that sales pitch, and I think they know that. So the idea that Google can take out its search business and leave everything else, and China will just forgive and forget — that’s very much not how the Chinese government works” [The New York Times].

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80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
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Image: Flickr/ pamhule

Here at MIT, we're doing a science journalism boot camp this week on food. And I've already picked up my first troublesome factoid: Hamburgers that look well done, observes J. Glenn Morris, Director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, aren't necessarily safe. In his lecture this morning, Morris observed that while cooking meat at a temperature of 160 degrees kills pathogens like the dangerous E. coli 0157:H7, 25 percent of hamburger patties will appear cooked at lower temperatures than that. Therefore, not only are rare or medium rare patties not necessarily safe to eat, but even a brown color shouldn't inspire full confidence. In truth, you need a food thermometer to be sure you've got a well cooked hamburger. And nobody whips those out before digging in at a fast food or pubby food restaurant. I know I don't, and I eat a lot of hamburgers. Or at least, I used to. More technical details here.