Several ancient cultures dispute for the fact of having invented the number zero, a necessary tool for mathematics to work. The thing went well until some disciples of Pythagoras, who as a geometer was a fanatic of the whole numbers, discovered the existence of irrational numbers, with an infinite number of decimals, something very crazy for the time; people died due to it. Later, Newton managed to lift an image of a mechanical universe that remained standing until Einstein began to shake it. The not so modern quantum mechanics now comes to dynamite the idea of emptiness, of zero, of nothing, by the hands of researchers like David Tong, as shown in this short video:
David Bohm would surely have loved it. The truth is that Einstein’s relativity explains only the sensitive universe and has little or nothing to do with reality which our limited senses cannot perceive, that of which we are all made; The fluctuating subatomic universe, saturated, filled with electromagnetic, gravitational, quantum fields, each composed of particles that follow rules different from those of classical physics … that is why quantum mechanics was invented. It’s nothing unusual, it happened with the zero, Newton had to invent the calculus …
Heisenberg demonstrated conclusively the validity of quantum mechanics with its famous uncertainty principle: in the macroscopic world, there is nothing that prevents knowing the position and momentum (which is a value to the direction and velocity) of a ball in movement for instance; in the microscopic world of the Plank scale, this is not as such; When the position is calculated with a very low degree of indetermination, that is to say, the more accurate is the position’s measurement, the particle’s momentum value becomes highly imprecise and vice versa:
Professor Walter Lewin explains it masterfully in this video, where he first exposes how unfortunate is the image we all have of the atom with its electrons orbiting around the nucleus in a solar system way, and in the end demonstrates with an experiment the mathematical predictions of Heisenberg. The video is long but worth it, in any case, it’s a fact that the behavior of electrons within any chip is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics; which means, that it works, although no one knows very well why.
Like all previous researchers, the present ones are also having problems to prove their theories by means of experiments, but they are on it, apparently they have already found the way to avoid the annoying principle of Heisenberg, without violating it. One of the fattest problems is that normal binary processors go wrong when they have to work with astronomical numbers; hence they are willing to build quantum processors. Andrew Pontzen explains it briefly:
However, it is possible that the biggest problem is that there are too many theories derived from quantum mechanics, many of which are incompatible with each other, so some think that perhaps a simpler way of explaining observations might be found. Terry Rudolph says that we may have to forget the anthropocentric vision that our primate senses have created from reality, in order to really understand it; and to illustrate it, he shows how something like this happened to the astronomers before Galileo, who were forced to design a complex system of geometrical juggling, pretty nice-looking actually, so that the measurements might fit the observations and the prescriptions of religion, which required the earth to be in the center of the solar system … and of the whole universe in fact:
Before Galileo After Galileo
Andrew Pontzen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFxPMMkhHuA&t=2s
David Tong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg&t=2323s
Walter Lewin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeK0DV329mU
Terry Rudolph https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKGZDhQoR9E#t=3770.221
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