Category Archives: Quantum Physics

To make sense of mysteries like quantum mechanics and the passage of time, theorists are trying to reformulate physics to include subjective experience as a physical constituent of the world

By Thomas Lewton

Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza

A WALK in the woods. Every shade of green. A fleck of rain. The sensations and thoughts bound in every moment of experience feel central to our existence. But physics, which aims to describe the universe and everything in it, says nothing about your inner world. Our descriptions of the wavelengths of light as they reflect off leaves capture something but not what it is like to be deep in the woods.

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter. The question is: how? And if we cant explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

There is no question in science more difficult and confusing, says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

It is also one that he and others are addressing with renewed vigour, convinced that we will never make sense of the universes mysteries things like how reality emerges from the fog of the quantum world and what the passage of time truly signifies unless we reimagine the relationship between matter and mind.

Their ideas amount to an audacious attempt to describe the universe from the inside out, rather than the other way around, and they might just force us to abandon long-cherished assumptions about what everything is ultimately made of.

Modern physics

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A new place for consciousness in our understanding of the universe - New Scientist

In this interview, Nicole Yunger Halpern describes her effort to tie quantum physics to the retro-futuristic steampunk genre.

In this episode of Inside Science Conversations Dr. Nicole Yunger Halpern tells host Chris Gorski about what drew her to physics and the how having a liberal arts education makes her a better scientist. She also discusses her upcoming book and the similarities between quantum science and the steampunk genre. Her book, Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday's Tomorrow, comes out on April 12, 2022 but is available for pre-order now.

The show is available on yourfavoritepodcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify. It's also onYouTube.

Here are some excerpts from the interview (full transcript coming soon):

"What really brought me to physics is the tradition of natural philosophy behind physics. I also am fascinated by a lot of the world. And I appreciate having a physicist's toolkit to be able to think about different facets of it, and also to use tools from different disciplines to look at physics itself. ...

"Early in grad school, I realized that this field, what we call quantum thermodynamics often has the same flavor as steampunk. Steampunk is this genre of literature, art and film. It juxtaposes Victorian settings with futuristic technologies like time machines, you mentioned Jules Verne, he was one of the earliest steampunk writers. Captain Nemo's ship is a steampunk technology. So this field has this wonderful sense of adventure together with nostalgia and quantum information theory. ...

"I've been very grateful that a lot of scientists have been really excited about my book, and enthusiastic and looking forward to reading it and have also been really supportive of me personally, when I was writing the book, I admit, I didn't tell any scientists more or less that I was writing the book until I was just about finished, so that I could show this entire time, I've just been my usual productive scientific self. ...

"I think that it's important to tell stories about our science to the general public for multiple reasons. One of it which it is, is it is really beneficial to us. Again, this gave me great ideas, it helped me learn a lot about my own science. And it is exciting. So this has even increased my enthusiasm about my own field."

This is our last episode. Inside Science will no longer produce new content after the end of March 2022. We have six other interviews in this show, and elsewhere on the website and YouTube channel we have an archive full of enjoyable, enlightening science content. Please check out all the episodes of this show on your favorite platform. An appreciation of Inside Science and its long history is also available.

The Inside Science Conversations podcast showcases the human side of science. It's about what makes scientists and researchers tick. We'll cover a wide variety of subjects, from record-breaking running to the hidden history of science. Please, like and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Join us as we talk to researchers and authors about their work, their lives and why science is important for everyone.

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Nicole Yunger Halpern: When Physics Marries the Past to the Future - Inside Science News Service

For the last fifty years, the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has provided the basis for describing the structure and composition of matter. According to the SM, protons and neutrons, which belong to the hadron family of composite particles and are the components of atomic nuclei, consist of elementary particles called quarks which are kept together by a force named Strong Force. (1) No quarks have ever been isolated and studied independently, and their masses are estimated to be comparable to those of baryons, i.e. of the order of 1 GeV/c2. These masses are 100 billion times (10,11) larger than the masses of neutrinos (10-1 to 10-3 eV/c2) (2) which are the lightest by far, as well as the most numerous, particles in our Universe.

Einsteins theory of Relativity (both special (SR) (3,4) and general (GR) (5)) is one of the most remarkable scientific achievements in the history of humanity. SR has been confirmed experimentally thousands of times and there have been also numerous confirmations of GR. Most confirmations refer to macroscopic systems and only recently (6) the amazing strength of SR and GR has been demonstrated inside hadrons, deep in the femtocosmos of the lightest elementary particles, i.e., of neutrinos.

Space contraction, time dilation and mass increase with particle speed are the main features of SR, as the particle speed with respect to an observer, at rest with the centre of rotation, approaches the speed of light c and thus the Lorentz factor , defined from = (1 v2 / c2) 1/2, approaches infinity.

Thus, upon considering three particles rotating symmetrically on a cyclic trajectory using their gravitational attraction, FG, as the centripetal force, then FG can become surprisingly strong. This is because SR dictates that a particle of rest mass mo has a relativistic mass mo, (3,4) and a longitudinal inertial mass 3mo, equal according to the equivalence principle (6,7) with its gravitational mass 3mo.(7,8) Therefore, using the definition of the gravitational mass in Newtons gravitational law it follows:

FG = Gm2o6 / (3r2) (1)

where r is the rotational radius. To find r and one must also use the de Broglie equation of Quantum Mechanics:

movr = n (2)

This is used to obtain for n=1 and mo43.7 meV/c2, estimated (6,8) from the Superkamiokande measurements, (2) that r0.63 fm and 7.163.109, thus 61.35.1059. Consequently, the rotating speed is very close to c and the gravitational force is, amazingly, according to equation (1), 59 orders of magnitude larger than normal nonrelativistic Newtonian force! (Fig. 1) This force equals 8.104 N, equal to the weight of 100 humans on earth.

In addition to causing such an astounding 6~1059 times increase in gravitational attraction, special elativity also causes an amazing ~ 7.168.109 increase in the mass of the three rotating neutrinos so that the composite particle mass increases from 3(43.7 meV/c2) to the neutron mass of 939.565 MeV/c2 (Fig. 1). Conversely, if the composite particle mass, 3mo, is that of a neutron (939.565 MeV/c2) then the rest mass, mo, of each rotating particle is that of the heaviest neutrino eigenmass, (9) i.e. 43.7 meV/c2, in good agreement with the Superkamiokande measurement of the heaviest neutrino mass. (2) Therefore, special relativity reveals that quarks are relativistic neutrinos and also shows that the neutrino gravitational mass, 3mo, is enormous, i.e. of the order of the Planck mass (c/G)1/2 = 21.7 mg per neutrino! It thus also implies, in conjunction with equation (2), that the gravitational force of equation (1) equals the strong force, c/r2, which is a factor of 137 stronger than the electrostatic force of positron -electron pair at the same distance. (1)

The RLM shows that maximisation of the Lorentz factor leads to enhanced composite particle stability by minimizing 5moc2, which is the potential energy of the rotating neutrino triad (8) and, at the same time by maximising the Lorentz factor and thus also the produced hadron mass m = 3mo = 313/12 (mP1mo2)1/3, where mP1 is the Planck mass (=(c/G)1/2 = 1.22.1028 eV/c2). This simple expression gives, amazingly, a mass value which differs less than 1% from the experimental neutron mass of 939.565 MeV/c2.

Neutrinos are well known to come in three different flavours, i.e. electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. These flavours are obtained by mixing neutrinos from the three mass types (or mass eigenstates), i.e. m3 mass neutrinos (the heaviest), m2 mass neutrinos and m1 type neutrinos (the lightest) for the Normal Hierarchy. Using equation (1) and the experimental hadron masses, we have computed the composite particle mass values plotted in Figure 2. Agreement with the experimental composite mass values is better than 2%. Conversely, one may use the experimental hadron or boson mass values to compute the three neutrino masses. Agreement with the experimental values measured at Superkamiokande (2) is within 5%.

The fact that the gravitational Newton-Einstein equation (1) provides such a good fit to the experimental mass values of hadrons shows that when accounting for special relativity, gravity suffices to describe the strong force. The equally good fit to the experimental mass values of W, Z0 and H bosons shows that relativistic gravity also suffices to describe the weak force. Indeed, in both cases at the limit of large one obtains FG = Gm2 P1 / r2 = G(c / G) / r2 = c/r2 whichis the strong force value. (1) Similarly, for the weak force one also obtains FG = c/r2. One may thus conclude that both the strong and the weak forces have been unified with Newtonian gravity (=1) in the RLM via equation (1). (10,12)

In summary, the RLM reveals that our known Universe is a product of the combination of neutrinos, electrons, positrons, Einsteins relativity, and the dual wave-particle nature of matter, as described by the de Broglie equation of quantum mechanics. (12,13)

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Rotating Lepton Model: Coupling relativity, quantum mechanics and neutrinos for the synthesis of matter - Open Access Government

In last weeks Mind Matters News, podcast, Hinduism and the beginning of the universe, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed Arjuna Gallagher, a Hindu in New Zealand.

The first podcast looked at what the worlds 1.2 billion Hindus generally think about the mind and the second explored the Hindu view of free will and evil.

Gallagher hosts a YouTube channel called Theology Unleashed, which has featured many guests discussing the spiritual dimension of our lives for example, philosopher David Bentley Hart and neuroscientist Mark Solms (along with Egnor).

A partial transcript, notes, Show Notes, and Additional Resources follow:

Michael Egnor: How do Hindus understand creation? Is the universe eternal? Was it created at a moment in the past?

Arjuna Gallagher: One unique and defining feature of Hinduism is definitely the idea of eternity, with cyclical creation and destruction. With regard to the Big Bang, theres this explanation of how creation happens in the Bhagavatam and its pretty intricate. You have Mahavishnu, who is a form of God, lying down on the Causal Ocean and exhaling and inhaling. And with every exhale, all of the universes come out of his body. And with every in inhale, they all come back into all of the pores of his body. These are correlated with the creations and destructions of the material universe.

This would be all the way back to the Big Bang and then all the way up to the Big Crunch If we were to make the assumption thats talking about what the Bhagavatam is talking about, then those would map onto one another. And then you get further creation from that. It gets quite fantastic from there. Theres Lord Brahma governing. I dont know how much I should get into the explanation of how the cosmos exists.

Michael Egnor: Are these taken generally to be metaphorical or is there a belief that these are substantially real, these explanations?

Arjuna Gallagher: Theres a belief that this is actually how things are going on. If someone wanted to say, This is too fantastic, I cant believe you actually believe this, then my reply would be, Theres actually only one fantastic claim, which is the existence of God. Once youve assumed that God exists, you have a being full of the potencies that are capable of producing all of this. The real fantastic worldview is atheism, where every step is a miracle.

Michael Egnor: I dont subscribe to Hindu theology, Im a pretty mainstream Catholic, but the really crazy stuff is atheism.

Michael Egnor: I dont think any theist is really crazy, meaning that just the existence of anything in itself is a miracle, a remarkable, astonishing thing. Im open to all kinds of ideas, except the idea that there is no God, which I think is crazy.

Michael Egnor: Thereve been a lot of advances in cosmology and in basic physics over the past century. Particularly, for example, in quantum mechanics and general relativity. Is there anything in Hindu theology that reflects on those advances or relates to them?

As an example, Werner Heisenberg, a physicist who was very important in the development of quantum mechanics, commented that the phenomenon in quantum mechanics of a collapse of the quantum wave form that is that quantum systems exist in multiple states of potentiality and with measurement or observation coalescent to a single actuality really is a reflection of Aristotles understanding of change, of potency, and act. That Aristotelian metaphysical perspective was embraced by Thomas Aquinas, so its really part of the Catholic or Christian way of looking at metaphysics. Is there anything that you can think of in modern physics that has a parallel in Hindu metaphysics or Hindu theology?

Note: Werner Heisenberg (19011976) was best known for his Uncertainty Principle and his theory of quantum mechanics. According to the Uncertainty Principle, both the position and momentum of a particle in quantum mechanics can never be exactly known, which was blow to the belief that science can attain an exhaustive understanding of the universe. The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. Goodreads

Arjuna Gallagher: With regard to quantum physics, my favorite explanation is that its like the pixels in a video game that dont render until you actually move the screen there, or maybe it renders a little bit ahead of time so that it can predict where youre going to move and not have any lag. Similarly with quantum physics, if youre not looking at the particle, it hasnt selected a state.

This is done in computer processing and video games to save on computational power, and perhaps something similar goes on with the universe. Of course, we [Hindus] would put the observer in every living entity, not just in humans, so that changes things somewhat. But I guess some living entities arent actually affected by the change in state of certain quantum functions, so the wave state might not change until a human looks at it in many cases.

Im not sure where youd find that in the metaphysics of the tradition. We have this idea of the material energy that God is the largest and the smallest, so hes both containing the universe and inside of every atom in the universe, and everythings going on. [We use] the Sanskrit word shakti for Gods powers and energies. With that, miracles and all sorts of things are possible

But it does seem to make sense because the idea here is that the material universe is meant to deliver sensory experiences to living entities in order to have effects on their consciousness, which ultimately brings them back to God and helps them overcome their selfish desires and so on. If you see the universe as meant for that purpose, then matter could be explained as rather than something out there that exists independently like an algorithm that governs the deliverance of experiences to living entities.

Michael Egnor: It sounds like its an idealism of sorts. What really exists is mental and that the physical is just a state of mind.

Arjuna Gallagher: Yeah. I used to think that idealism meant that things are only existing in minds. But after studying it a little bit more, I think it could be compatible with that Vedic world view There has to be something out there that were both interacting with because we have a shared experience of reality. I guess idealism is just saying that the foundation of whats out there is in the mind of God or something of that sort.

Michael Egnor: I was always fascinated by the consilience of Platos view of forms, that theres a realm in which the ideal representations of things or the ideal act that what were seeing are representations of an ideal actuality that exist in a separate world. Saint Augustine said that separate world was Gods mind, that reality is essentially a thought in Gods mind and that we are thoughts in Gods mind. But of course, being a Thomist, my commentary on that would be, It may very well be that reality is a thought in Gods mind, but God is a Thomist. That explains why Thomism works so well.

Arjuna Gallagher: That does relate to the Hare Krishna view, which is that theres the original, pure spiritual reality which has everything you find here but in a pure state, whereas in the material world where we are, its a perverted reflection. So any kind of form or pleasure or anything you might chase or experience here is a perverted reflection of something that exists in a pure state in the spiritual world.

Michael Egnor: That seems to be a perspective that a lot of religious faiths have. Theres very much an aspect of that in Christianity that theres an ultimate perfection, which is God, and that his creation is a limited version of that ultimate perfection.

Michael Egnor: From your own perspective, Arjuna, or from the perspective of the Hindu faith, what do you think about the intelligent design movement in science in the Western world?

Arjuna Gallagher: I think its awesome. Im a big fan of the Discovery Institute and work like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer and your own work on arguments for consciousness not being caused by the brain.

Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement in the West, gave an argument which a philosopher told me we could call a construction argument: The creator has to have all the qualities of creation, so the creation cant have any qualities that arent found in the creator

This was an argument used in the tradition to argue for the personhood of God. Because I have personal qualities, I have a name, I have a form and so on, therefore, God must also have a name and a form and so on.

He (Prabhupada) also used this argument against atheists, that weve got this material world with all these creatures in it and it has to come from a source of power.

Prabhupada also used an argument he called Life Comes from Life. These rascal scientists Prabhupada would use words like that when they want to tell us things like, Matter explains life, then thats nonsense. He would challenge them, Go in your lab and put some chemicals together and produce life, and then you can come and tell me that life comes from matter.

Note: Prabhupada was echoing Louis Pasteur (18221895), after whom pasteurization is named. Pasteur demonstrated, in a famous experiment in 1862 before the French Academy that life forms come only from other life forms, not from the surrounding environment. The (Latin) phrase used at the time was omne vinum ex vivo or Life comes only from life.

Michael Egnor: Yeah. It seems to me that the better science gets, the more it seems to resemble engineering. Im a big fan of engineering. I like houses and bridges that stay up and things like that. A lot of the theoretical science is absolutely fascinating stuff, but the metaphysical claims made by quite a few scientists the materialist or atheist claims I think are badly misguided.

Arjuna Gallagher: This reductionist world view is really good at a lot of things. Like if you get smashed up on the motorway, theyre really good at putting you back together because musculoskeletal stuff is really mechanical and engineering principles. Reductionism works well for that kind of thing, but they really fail at looking at the bigger picture.

Next: How Hindus see current culture and science issues

Here are the two previous discussions:

What do the worlds 1.2 billion Hindus think about the mind? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviews Hindu Arjuna Gallagher on the similarities and differences between that tradition and Western theism. Egnor and Gallagher discuss the concept of God (or gods) karma, and reincarnation, in light of what we can really know about the world we live in.

and

Understanding the Hindu view of free will and evil Arjuna Gallagher points out that concepts of reincarnation and karma make both problems look very different in the Hindu tradition. Michael Egnor observes that recognition of evil is a strong argument for the existence of God, yet a key source of doubt. Perhaps the topic is simply beyond us.

You may also wish to read: Michael Egnor appeared on the podcast hosted by Arjuna Gallagher, Theology Unleashed, with atheist spokesman Matt Dillahunty Here is a link to all the segments with transcript and notes.

See more here:

What Do Hindus Think About the Big Bang? The Cyclic Universe? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Okay, that's a fascinating idea.Info Dump

Theres no shortage of debate about the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that many physicists believe makes up a large proportion of the total mass of the universe, in spite of never having observed it directly.

Now, a physicist from the UK named Melvin Vopson is raising a startling possibility: that dark matter might be information itself.

He even claims that information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe, reads a press release from the University of Portsmouth, where Vopson is a researcher.

If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it? Vopson asked in the release. My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community.

The paper, published in the journalAIP Advances, suggests an experiment that could test the hypothesis that information is a distinct state of matter alongside solids, liquids, gases and plasmas by using a particle-antiparticle collision to, in theory, erase information from the universe.

We know that when you collide a particle of matter with a particle of antimatter, they annihilate each other, Vopson said in the release. And the information from the particle has to go somewhere when its annihilated.

There are countless theories about dark matter including, its worth pointing out, that it doesnt exist at all so while Vopsons idea is provocative, its best to withhold judgment until he actually manages to test his hypothesis.

But, for what its worth, he seems pretty compelled by the concept.

It doesnt contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics, he said in the release. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting.

More on dark matter:Scientist Says Dark Matter Could Likely Be Incredible Fuel for Spacecraft

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Scientist Says That Dark Matter May Be Information Itself - Futurism

Name:Ehsan Samei

Position:Duke HealthChief Imaging Physicist; Duke University Professor of Radiology, Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Physics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Years at Duke:22

What he does at Duke:Whether its an X-ray, a CT scan, an MRI, an ultrasound or a mammogram, medical imaging is at the heart of patient care.Duke's roughly 500 imaging machines see around 700,000 to 800,000 patients per year. In addition to technologists and radiologists, Duke has around a dozen imaging physicists overseeing the use of these machines and ensuring that, across the entire health system, the technology and techniques are creating the most useful and accurate images. As the Chief Imaging Physicist, Dr. Ehsan Samei leads this group.

Samei also spearheads research in medical imaging, seeing how existing technology can be used to see things in new ways. And as the principal investigator of theCenter for Virtual Imaging Trials, which was created in 2021, hes exploring the capabilities of using virtual patients and virtual machines to speed up the development of potential medical breakthroughs.

The crux of the problem, both in the clinical domain and the research domain, is that imaging is an approximation, not reality, said Samei, who received the2022 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Awardfrom the International Organization for Medical Physics. Its never a perfect rendition of reality, but an approximation. So the question Im working on is, how much of an approximation is it, and can we make a better one?

What he loves about Duke:Samei is grateful to have a strong network of colleagues who combine innovative ideas with the collaborative and hard-working spirits needed to push those ideas forward.

What attracted me to Duke is that there are so many brilliant people here, Samei said. I feel that what makes programs and universities worthwhile isnt the project, but the brilliance of the people who actually do the project.

Most memorable day at work:In 2021, Duke became one of the few facilities in the world to acquire a Photon-Counting CT Scanner. For Samei, who had been advocating for Duke to add one, the chance to finally use it tohelp patientswas a thrill. He recalls seeing images with a level of clarity and detail that hed previously been unable to see. And when those images were able to help doctors diagnose patients vexing health problems, it validated the efforts put into bringing the technology to Duke.

You can talk about photon counting and quantum mechanics and all of that stuff, but it only matters when you actually care for the individual and solve their problem, Samei said.

When hes not working, he likes to:Classical music, from such iconic composers as Bach, Schubert and Brahms, is one of Sameis passions. He cherishes opportunities to see live performances, and chances to perform himself. Growing up in Iran, Samei began playing the flute, one of the few instruments small enough to play discreetly in a country where music was banned. More recently, hes enjoyed playing alongside other musicians in semi-professional ensembles.

I used to play a lot more, but now I just dont have the time, Samei said.

Something unique in his workspace:On a shelf inhis office in Hock Plaza, Samei has what looks like a framed record. But a closer look reveals images of bones set within the disc. The item is whats known as abone record.Made in Soviet-era Russia, where western music was strictly banned, these bootleg records often of jazz or early rock n roll were pressed on discarded X-ray slides. A friend gave one to Samei as a gift.

This embodies many of my interests, Samei said. There's medical imaging in there. It has music. And I grew up in Iran during the Islamic revolution when music was banned, so I know that music in itself is an act of resistance.

Lesson learned during the pandemic:Samei gained an appreciation for the periods of time that exist between tasks, meetings and events that define a day. Prior to the pandemic, when offices were full of people and most interactions were in person, these times were when colleagues could chat, or when minds were allowed to wander.

Its amazing how much life happens in the margins, Samei said. On the days when youre going from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting, those margins are gone and your brain doesnt have a chance to recalibrate.

Something most people dont know about him:Samei is an avid runner and has completed five marathons. One of those was the 2013 Boston Marathon, which was remembered for terrorist attack that claimed three lives near the finish line. Samei had completed the course and left the area roughly 45 minutes before the homemade bombs were detonated.

Thankfully my family decided not to accompany me, Samei said. I was incredibly grateful for that.

Is there a colleague at Duke who has an intriguing job or goes above and beyond to make a difference?Nominate that personfor Blue Devil of the Week.

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Blue Devil of the Week: Making the Invisible Visible through Imaging - Duke Today

Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of "Ask a Spaceman" and "Space Radio," and author of "How to Die in Space."

A seemingly harmless, random number with no units or dimensions has cropped up in so many places in physics and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe.

Its name is the fine-structure constant, and it's a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137.

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from.

Watch: The Most Important Number in the Universe

Atoms have a curious property: They can emit or absorb radiation of very specific wavelengths, called spectral lines. Those wavelengths are so specific because of quantum mechanics. An electron orbiting around a nucleus in an atom can't have just any energy; it's restricted to specific energy levels.

When electrons change levels, they can emit or absorb radiation, but that radiation will have exactly the energy difference between those two levels, and nothing else hence the specific wavelengths and the spectral lines.

But in the early 20th century, physicists began to notice that some spectral lines were split, or had a "fine structure" (and now you can see where I'm going with this). Instead of just a single line, there were sometimes two very narrowly separated lines.

The full explanation for the "fine structure" of the spectral line rests in quantum field theory, a marriage of quantum mechanics and special relativity. And one of the first people to take a crack at understanding this was physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. He found that to develop the physics to explain the splitting of spectral lines, he had to introduce a new constant into his equations a fine-structure constant.

Related: 10 mind-boggling things you should know about quantum physics

The introduction of a constant wasn't all that new or exciting at the time. After all, physics equations throughout history have involved random constants that express the strengths of various relationships. Isaac Newton's formula for universal gravitation had a constant, called G, that represents the fundamental strength of the gravitational interaction. The speed of light, c, tells us about the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. The spring constant, k, tells us how stiff a particular spring is. And so on.

But there was something different in Sommerfeld's little constant: It didn't have units. There are no dimensions or unit system that the value of the number depends on. The other constants in physics aren't like this. The actual value of the speed of light, for example, doesn't really matter, because that number depends on other numbers. Your choice of units (meters per second, miles per hour or leagues per fortnight?) and the definitions of those units (exactly how long is a "meter" going to be?) matter; if you change any of those, the value of the constant changes along with it.

But that's not true for the fine-structure constant. You can have whatever unit system you want and whatever method of organizing the universe as you wish, and that number will be precisely the same.

If you were to meet an alien from a distant star system, you'd have a pretty hard time communicating the value of the speed of light. Once you nailed down how we express our numbers, you would then have to define things like meters and seconds.

But the fine structure constant? You could just spit it out, and they would understand it (as long as they count numbers the same way as we do).

Sommerfeld originally didn't put much thought into the constant, but as our understanding of the quantum world grew, the fine-structure constant started appearing in more and more places. It seemed to crop up anytime charged particles interacted with light. In time, we came to recognize it as the fundamental measure for the strength of how charged particles interact with electromagnetic radiation.

Change that number, change the universe. If the fine-structure constant had a different value, then atoms would have different sizes, chemistry would completely change and nuclear reactions would be altered. Life as we know it would be outright impossible if the fine-structure constant had even a slightly different value.

So why does it have the value it does? Remember, that value itself is important and might even have meaning, because it exists outside any unit system we have. It simply is.

In the early 20th century, it was thought that the constant had a value of precisely 1/137. What was so important about 137? Why that number? Why not literally any other number? Some physicists even went so far as to attempt numerology to explain the constant's origins; for example, famed astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington "calculated" that the universe had 137 * 2^256 protons in it, so "of course" 1/137 was also special.

Today, we have no explanation for the origins of this constant. Indeed, we have no theoretical explanation for its existence at all. We simply measure it in experiments and then plug the measured value into our equations to make other predictions.

Someday, a theory of everything a complete and unified theory of physics might explain the existence of the fine-structure constant and other constants like it. Unfortunately, we don't have a theory of everything, so we're stuck shrugging our shoulders.

But at least we know what to write on our greeting cards to the aliens.

Learn more by listening to the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, available oniTunesand askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

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Life as we know it would not exist without this highly unusual number - Space.com

The Bohr model, introduced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913, was a key step on the journey to understand atoms.

Ancient Greek thinkers already believed that matter was composed of tiny basic particles that couldn't be divided further. It took more than 2,000 years for science to advance enough to prove this theory right. The journey to understanding atoms and their inner workings was long and complicated.

It was British chemist John Dalton who in the early 19th century revived the ideas of ancient Greeks that matter was composed of tiny indivisible particles called atoms. Dalton believed that every chemical element consisted of atoms of distinct properties that could be combined into various compounds, according to Britannica.

Dalton's theories were correct in many aspects, apart from that basic premise that atoms were the smallest component of matter that couldn't be broken down into anything smaller. About a hundred years after Dalton, physicists started discovering that the atom was, in fact, really quite complex inside.

Related: There's a giant mystery hiding inside every atom in the universe

British physicist Joseph John Thomson made the first major breakthrough in the understanding of atoms in 1897 when he discovered that atoms contained tiny negatively charged particles that he called electrons. Thomson thought that electrons floated in a positively charged "soup" inside the atomic sphere, according to Khan Academy.

14 years later, New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford, Thomson's former student, challenged this depiction of the atom when he found in experiments that the atom must have a small positively charged nucleus sitting at its center.

Based on this finding, Rutherford then developed a new atom model, the Rutherford model. According to this model, the atom no longer consisted of just electrons floating in a soup but had a tiny central nucleus, which contained most of the atom's mass. Around this nucleus, the electrons revolved similarly to planets orbiting the sun in our solar system, according to Britannica.

Some questions, however, remained unanswered. For example, how was it possible that the electrons didn't collapse onto the nucleus, since their opposite charge would mean they should be attracted to it? Several physicists tried to answer this question including Rutherford's student Niels Bohr.

Bohr was the first physicist to look to the then-emerging quantum theory to try to explain the behavior of the particles inside the simplest of all atoms; the atom of hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms consist of a heavy nucleus with one positively-charged proton around which a single, much smaller and lighter, negatively charged electron orbits. The whole system looks a little bit like the sun with only one planet orbiting it.

Bohr tried to explain the connection between the distance of the electron from the nucleus, the electron's energy and the light absorbed by the hydrogen atom, using one great novelty of physics of that era: the Planck constant.

The Planck constant was a result of the investigation of German physicist Max Planck into the properties of electromagnetic radiation of a hypothetical perfect object called the black body.

Strangely, Planck discovered that this radiation, including light, is emitted not in a continuum but rather in discrete packets of energy that can only be multiples of a certain fixed value, according to Physics World.That fixed value became the Planck constant. Max Planck called these packets of energy quanta, providing a name to the completely new type of physics that was set to turn the scientists' understanding of our world upside down.

What role does the Planck constant play in the hydrogen atom? Despite the nice comparison, the hydrogen atom is not exactly like the solar system. The electron doesn't orbit its sun the nucleus at a fixed distance, but can skip between different orbits based on how much energy it carries, Bohr postulated. It may orbit at the distance of Mercury, then jump to Earth, then to Mars.

The electron doesn't slide between the orbits gradually, but makes discrete jumps when it reaches the correct energy level, quite in line with Planck's theory, physicist Ali Hayek explains on his YouTube channel.

Bohr believed that there was a fixed number of orbits that the electron could travel in. When the electron absorbs energy, it jumps to a higher orbital shell. When it loses energy by radiating it out, it drops to a lower orbit. If the electron reaches the highest orbital shell and continues absorbing energy, it will fly out of the atom altogether.

The ratio between the energy of the electron and the frequency of the radiation it emits is equal to the Planck constant. The energy of the light emitted or absorbed is exactly equal to the difference between the energies of the orbits and is inversely proportional to the wavelength of the light absorbed by the electron, according to Ali Hayek.

Using his model, Bohr was able to calculate the spectral lines the lines in the continuous spectrum of light that the hydrogen atoms would absorb.

The Bohr model seemed to work pretty well for atoms with only one electron. But apart from hydrogen, all other atoms in the periodic table have more, some many more, electrons orbiting their nuclei. For example, the oxygen atom has eight electrons, the atom of iron has 26 electrons.

Once Bohr tried to use his model to predict the spectral lines of more complex atoms, the results became progressively skewed.

There are two reasons why Bohr's model doesn't work for atoms with more than one electron, according to the Chemistry Channel. First, the interaction of multiple atoms makes their energy structure more difficult to predict.

Bohr's model also didn't take into account some of the key quantum physics principles, most importantly the odd and mind-boggling fact that particles are also waves, according to the educational website Khan Academy.

As a result of quantum mechanics, the motion of the electrons around the nucleus cannot be exactly predicted. It is impossible to pinpoint the velocity and position of an electron at any point in time. The shells in which these electrons orbit are therefore not simple lines but rather diffuse, less defined clouds.

Only a few years after the model's publication, physicists started improving Bohr's work based on the newly discovered principles of particle behavior. Eventually, the much more complicated quantum mechanical model emerged, superseding the Bohr model. But because things get far less neat when all the quantum principles are in place, the Bohr model is probably still the first thing most physics students discover in their quest to understand what governs matter in the microworld.

Read more about the Bohr atom model on the website of the National Science Teaching Association or watch this video.

Heilbron, J.L., RutherfordBohr atom, American Journal of Physics 49, 1981 https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.12521

Olszewski, Stanisaw, The Bohr Model of the Hydrogen Atom Revisited, Reviews in Theoretical Science, Volume 4, Number 4, December 2016 https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/asp/rits/2016/00000004/00000004/art00003

Kraghm Helge, Niels Bohr between physics and chemistry, Physics Today, 2013 http://materias.df.uba.ar/f4Aa2013c2/files/2012/08/bohr2.pdf

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The Bohr model: The famous but flawed depiction of an atom - Space.com

We don't know who came up with common core math. We hate it so much, as a matter of fact, that we're not even going to bother looking up where it came from. It sucks, it's hard, and everybody hates it.

Luckily, politicians in Idaho are thinking about replacing it. This is lovely, because over 300,000 Idaho students are being taught common core, and we're not here for it.

We're here to help. We've come up with a list of studies that aremucheasier to understand than common core. Let's dive in:

Why study numbers when you can study the behavior of matter and energy on a subatomic level? Quantum physics (or quantum mechanics, if you're nasty) is one of the most difficult areas of study in all of math and science. And yes, it's way easier to comprehend than common core.

Numbers are boring, right? It definitely sounds way easier to learn a 2,000-year-old dead language that is no longer in use. Think of how fun it'd be to converse with your friends out in public in Sanskrit so no one can understand you! Still easier than common core.

Seriously, how do they work?

Sure, relationships are hard, until you compare them to common core. Then it's easy!

See? Who needs common core when we have been provided all these other amazing options? Here's to hoping Idaho comes to its senses and replaces this devil math with something more palatable.

Like, literally anything.

Idaho's top twenty-five high schools ranked from 25-1.

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Idaho Wants To Replace Common Core. We Have Some Ideas. - KIDO Talk Radio

Within mathematics, there is a vast and ever expanding web of conjectures, theorems and ideas called the Langlands program. That program links seemingly disconnected subfields. It is such a force that some mathematicians say itor some aspect of itbelongs in the esteemed ranks of the Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the top open questions in math. Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has even dubbed the Langlands program a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics.

The program is named after Robert Langlands, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Four years ago, he was awarded the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for his program, which was described as visionary.

Langlands is retired, but in recent years the project has sprouted into almost its own mathematical field, with many disparate parts, which are united by a common wellspring of inspiration, says Steven Rayan, a mathematician and mathematical physicist at the University of Saskatchewan. It has many avatars, some of which are still open, some of which have been resolved in beautiful ways.

Increasingly mathematicians are finding links between the original programand its offshoot, geometric Langlandsand other fields of science. Researchers have already discovered strong links to physics, and Rayan and other scientists continue to explore new ones. He has a hunch that, with time, links will be found between these programs and other areas as well. I think were only at the tip of the iceberg there, he says. I think that some of the most fascinating work that will come out of the next few decades is seeing consequences and manifestations of Langlands within parts of science where the interaction with this kind of pure mathematics may have been marginal up until now. Overall Langlands remains mysterious, Rayan adds, and to know where it is headed, he wants to see an understanding emerge of where these programs really come from.

The Langlands program has always been a tantalizing dance with the unexpected, according to James Arthur, a mathematician at the University of Toronto. Langlands was Arthurs adviser at Yale University, where Arthur earned his Ph.D. in 1970. (Langlands declined to be interviewed for this story.)

I was essentially his first student, and I was very fortunate to have encountered him at that time, Arthur says. He was unlike any mathematician I had ever met. Any question I had, especially about the broader side of mathematics, he would answer clearly, often in a way that was more inspiring than anything I could have imagined.

During that time, Langlands laid the foundation for what eventually became his namesake program. In 1969Langlands famously handwrote a 17-page letter to French mathematician Andr Weil. In that letter, Langlands shared new ideas that later became known as the Langlands conjectures.

In 1969 Langlands delivered conference lectures in which he shared the seven conjectures that ultimately grew into the Langlands program, Arthur notes. One day Arthur asked his adviser for a copy of a preprint paper based on those lectures.

He willingly gave me one, no doubt knowing that it was beyond me, Arthur says. But it was also beyond everybody else for many years. I could, however, tell that it was based on some truly extraordinary ideas, even if just about everything in it was unfamiliar to me.

Two conjectures are central to the Langlands program. Just about everything in the Langlands program comes in one way or another from those, Arthur says.

The reciprocity conjecture connects to the work of Alexander Grothendieck, famous for his research in algebraic geometry, including his prediction of motives. I think Grothendieck chose the word [motive] because he saw it as a mathematical analogue of motifs that you have in art, music or literature: hidden ideas that are not explicitly made clear in the art, but things that are behind it that somehow govern how it all fits together, Arthur says.

The reciprocity conjecture supposes these motives come from a different type of analytical mathematical object discovered by Langlands called automorphic representations, Arthur notes. Automorphic representation is just a buzzword for the objects that satisfy analogues of the Schrdinger equation from quantum physics, he adds. The Schrdinger equation predicts the likelihood of finding a particle in a certain state.

The second important conjecture is the functoriality conjecture, also simply called functoriality. It involves classifying number fields. Imagine starting with an equation of one variable whose coefficients are integerssuch as x2 + 2x + 3 = 0and looking for the roots of that equation. The conjecture predicts that the corresponding field will be the smallest field that you get by taking sums, products and rational number multiples of these roots, Arthur says.

With the original program, Langlands discovered a whole new world, Arthur says.

The offshoot, geometric Langlands, expanded the territory this mathematics covers. Rayan explains the different perspectives the original and geometric programs provide. Ordinary Langlands is a package of ideas, correspondences, dualities and observations about the world at a point, he says. Your world is going to be described by some sequence of relevant numbers. You can measure the temperature where you are; you could measure the strength of gravity at that point, he adds.

With the geometric program, however, your environment becomes more complex, with its own geometry. You are free to move about, collecting data at each point you visit. You might not be so concerned with the individual numbers but more how they are varying as you move around in your world, Rayan says. The data you gather are going to be influenced by the geometry, he says. Therefore, the geometric program is essentially replacing numbers with functions.

Number theory and representation theory are connected by the geometric Langlands program. Broadly speaking, representation theory is the study of symmetries in mathematics, says Chris Elliott, a mathematician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Using geometric tools and ideas, geometric representation theory expands mathematicians understanding of abstract notions connected to symmetry, Elliot notes. That area of representation theory is where the geometric Langlands program lives, he says.

The geometric program has already been linked to physics, foreshadowing possible connections to other scientific fields.

In 2018 Kazuki Ikeda, a postdoctoral researcher in Rayans group, published a Journal of Mathematical Physics study that he says is connected to an electromagnetic duality that is a long-known concept in physics and that is seen in error-correcting codes in quantum computers, for instance. Ikeda says his results were the first in the world to suggest that the Langlands program is an extremely important and powerful concept that can be applied not only to mathematics but also to condensed-matter physicsthe study of substances in their solid stateand quantum computation.

Connections between condensed-matter physics and the geometric program have recently strengthened, according to Rayan. In the last year the stage has been set with various kinds of investigations, he says, including his own work involving the use of algebraic geometry and number theory in the context of quantum matter.

Other work established links between the geometric program and high-energy physics. In 2007 Anton Kapustin, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Edward Witten, a mathematical and theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, published what Rayan calls a beautiful landmark paper that paved the way for an active life for geometric Langlands in theoretical high-energy physics. In the paper, Kapustin and Witten wrote that they aimed to show how this program can be understood as a chapter in quantum field theory.

Elliott notes that viewing quantum field theory from a mathematical perspective can help glean new information about the structures that are foundational to it. For instance, Langlands may help physicists devise theories for worlds with different numbers of dimensions than our own.

Besides the geometric program, the original Langlands program is also thought to be fundamental to physics, Arthur says. But exploring that connection may require first finding an overarching theory that links the original and geometric programs, he says.

The reaches of these programs may not stop at math and physics. I believe, without a doubt, that [they] have interpretations across science, Rayan says. The condensed-matter part of the story will lead naturally to forays into chemistry. Furthermore, he adds, pure mathematics always makes its way into every other area of science. Its only a matter of time.

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The Evolving Quest for a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics - Scientific American