Uncertainty

2012’s NYI also brought with it the uncertain experience of finding myself in a relationship.  Quantum physics remained on my mind and they mixed into what follows.  (For some more background, see this post: The Quantum Moment).
The course also examined Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen.  It describes a meeting between the two atomic physicists, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, during World War II.  Bohr, a Jew in occupied Denmark; Heisenberg, working with the Germans.  Former colleagues, now separated by The War.

The meeting went badly, and its purpose was never understood.  Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen?  To advance the German nuclear program?  To warn the Allies of it?  To try to sideline the development of atomic weapons by both sides?  The play explores this question, Bohr and Heisenberg going through “several drafts of the paper”, so to speak.
One theme of the play, is that decisions—like the particles—can perhaps not be understood until after the fact.  That the act of analyzing and observing them can change them (see the work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus).
We read the play, and watched the PBS movie version. I find it rather melancholy.  The score behind it is one of those beautiful sorrows that adds to the mood (based, incidentally on Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, D. 960 2nd movement, which Heisenberg briefly plays in the film).  The final dialogue is no less hollowing than Macbeth’s “tomorrow” soliloquy.

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Uncertainty

We've all felt it, right? The gnawing uneasy excitement, spinning around in our head, our stomach, our chest. You like someone. Do they like you back? Mathematicians might call it a "Nash Equilibrium" (dimming the likelihood of a "yes" answer for them): no one is willing to say anything, because neither is sure of what the other is thinking. Each person thinks they are making the right choice by staying silent. But together, it's the wrong one.
What if the answer is yes? But no one could break the silence?
Then again, what if the answer is no?
Either way, the relationship is going to change forever if you go for it. Do you?

The Quantum Moment

2012’s NYI included a seminar on the metaphors of quantum physics.  Why are quantum physics metaphors (like Schrodinger’s Cat, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Parallel Worlds) surprisingly common, more than you’d expect since quantum physics is relatively obscure subject matter for the public at large?  This is the question we tried to tackle with Robert Crease, the author of a book on this, called The Quantum Moment.

This post is background for another post on Uncertainty and Relationships. 

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Perhaps one of the most surprising findings in quantum physics is from the so-called double-slit experiment.  Understanding the results will alter your entire understanding of reality.

If you’re not familiar with it, an illustrated explanation is here.  Very briefly, if you shine a laser at a card with two parallel slits cut in it, you would expect to see two corresponding lines of light behind it (say, on a piece of paper), representing the two lines cut in the card. 

But what you actually get is a pattern of interference: packets of light going through one slit interfere with the ones going through the other slit (and vice versa), and so you get multiple bands of dark and light, where they cancel each other out or add on to each other.  So the light behaves not like “particles” (each going through its own slit) but like “waves” (like ripples from a rock dropped in a pond).

Where things start blowing your mind is that this happens even if you shine only one packet of light at a time: that one packet goes through both slits and interferes with itself! 

However, if you try to be clever and add a detector, to find out which slit the light goes through before it goes through the slits, this stops happening and you get the two lines of light that you would have expected originally. 

The upshot is this: until you observe the packet of energy, it is in all places at once (with varying probabilities).  Then it interacts with something else, and of all the possibilities one ends up being the case.  This is the case for everything, not just packets of light!  Remember high-school chemistry, where the electrons orbit the nucleus at certain levels?  In some sense, each electron is in all places in that orbit at once (remember the “electron cloud”?).

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This forms the basis of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment: a cat is in a closed box with an apparatus that might kill it (with 50% probability).  In some sense, until you open the box to check what happened, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.

One of the questions we were to answer:

"[W]hy does the image [of Schrodinger’s cat] still seem as packed with creative force as ever?"

Monday, 7/2 - NYI Begins Again

Today was the first day of the New York Institute program. This was the main program I attended last year, which consists of four seminars, and many lectures, discussions, and film series (this program is in English). This year we are only attending one seminar; I am taking a seminar with John Bailyn on puzzles in Russian syntax. The opening party was in the evening, and I saw many familiar faces, including Blake, a roommate from last year who's been here since February, Katya, the Stony Brook/NYI study-abroad guide, Nina Kazanina, who taught a seminar I took last year, Konstantine Klioutchkine, who taught another seminar last year, and much of the staff as well as a few familiar students, including one we had dubbed "Debra Messing" last year. They said there wasn't enough champagne for everyone but that turned out to be quite far from the truth...