It is 2017 and time is ticking like Formula-1 car. Physics has made a very long, tough, lost journey to its principles and theories on how this universe actually works the smallest of the atoms to the largest of the black holes. From scientific revolutionary Newton to The Person of the 20th Century Albert Einstein who "serves as a symbol of all the scientist such as Fermi, Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman, who built upon his works. At first, you might think that this blog wander away from topic of Quantum Physics, but these are basics, the start of the story.)
So Welcome all the curious, to know how the Universe works, to a world of Quantum Mechanics.
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| Two of the Most Revolutionary Scientist. Newton who told about Gravity and Einstein, Who told how Gravity works. |
The quest of Unification
Newton unified terrestrial with extraterrestrial, which he called Gravity. Maxwell unified Electricity with Magnetism and named Electromagnetism.
Einstein wanted to unify Gravity and Electromagnetism to write Theory of Everything, but he ran out of time.
Albert Einstein spent his last two decades in his modest home in Princeton, New Jersey and in his second-floor study Einstein relentlessly sought a single theory so powerful that would describe all the workings of the universe, even as he neared the end of his life, Einstein kept a notepad close at hand furiously trying to come up with the equations for what would come to be known as the theory of everything, convinced he was on the verge of the most important discovery in the history of science, Einstein ran out of time, his dream unfulfilled.
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| Strings of string theory, we will learn about it later. It is the thing, by which today we thing everything is made. Much, Much smaller than quarks, the thing by which protons are made |
Now, almost a half-century later Einstein's goal of unification combining all the laws of the universe in one all-encompassing theory has become the holy grail of modern physics and we think we may at last achieved Einsteins dream with a new and radical set of ideas called string theory, but if this revolutionary theory is right we are in for quite a shock, because String theory says we may be living in a universe where reality meets science fiction a universe of 11 dimensions with parallel universes right next door. An elegant universe composed entirely of the music of strings but for all its ambition the basic idea of string theory is surprisingly simple it says that everything in the universe from the tiniest particle to the most distant star is made from one kind of ingredient unimaginably small vibrating strands of energy called strings just as the strings of a cello can give rise to a rich variety of musical notes the tiny strings in String Theory vibrate in a multitude of different ways making up all the constituents of nature in other words the universe is like a grand cosmic symphony resonating with all the various notes these tiny vibrating strands of energy can play. String theory is still in its infancy but it's already revealing a radically new picture of the universe one that is both strange and beautiful but what makes us think we can understand all the complexity of the universe let alone reduce it to a single theory of everything.
No matter how hard you try you can't teach physics to a dog their brains just aren't wired to grasp it. But what about us? How do we know that we are wired to comprehend the deepest laws of the universe? Well, Physicists today are confident that we are and we're picking up where Einstein left off, in his quest for unification, Unification would be the formulation of a law that describes perhaps everything in the known universe from one single idea, one master equation, and we think that there might be this master equation because throughout the course of the last 200 years or so our understanding of the universe has given us a variety of explanations that are all pointing towards one spot they seem to all be converging on one nugget of an idea that we're still trying to find. Unification is where is that Unification is what we're trying to accomplish the whole aim of fundamental physics is to see more and more of the world's phenomena in terms of fewer and fewer and simpler and simpler principles.
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| The four Fundamental Forces f the universe. Note that Gravity is way too smaller in strength than Electromagnet. Want Demo? We can levitate objects by using small Magnets against the gravity of Huge Huge Earth ! |
We feel as physicists that if we can explain a wide number phenomena in a very simple manner, that's somehow progress there is almost an emotional aspect to the way in which the great theories in physics so that encompass a wide variety of how many different physical phenomena. So this idea that we should be aiming to unify our understanding is inherent essentially to the whole way in which this kind of science progresses. And long before Einstein, the quest for unification began with the most famous accident in a history of science: As the story goes one day in 1665, a young man was sitting under a tree when all of a sudden he saw an Apple fall from above and with the fall of that Apple, Isaac Newton revolutionized our picture of the universe. In an audacious proposal for his time Newton proclaimed that the force pulling apples to the ground and the force keeping the moon in orbit around the earth were actually one and the same in one fell swoop, Newton unified the heavens and the earth in a single theory he called gravity.
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| Famous Picture featuring Newton under an Apple tree. Imagine that day Newton busy with his other works! I think you won't be reading this article. Thanks Newton to come there on that day! |
The unification of the celestial with the terrestrial that the same laws that govern the planets in their motions govern the tides and the falling of fruit here on earth.
It was the fantastic unification of our picture of nature. Gravity was the first force to be understood scientifically, though three more would eventually follow and although Newton discovered his law of gravity more than three hundred years ago, his equations describing this forest make such accurate predictions that we still make use of them today. In fact, scientists needed nothing more than Newton's equations to plop the course of a rocket that landed men on the moon.
How Einstein proved Newton wrong ?(somewhat wrong)
While his laws described the strength of gravity with great accuracy, Yet there was a problem, Newton was harboring an embarrassing secret he had no idea how gravity actually works. For nearly 250 years, scientists were content to look the other way when confronted with this mystery. But in the early 1900's an unknown clerk, working in the Swiss Patent Office would change all that. While reviewing patent applications, Albert Einstein was also pondering the behavior of light. And little did Einstein know that his musings on light would lead him to solve Newton's mystery of what gravity is. At the age of 26, Einstein made a startling discovery that the velocity of light is a kind of cosmic speed limit, a speed that nothing in the universe can exceed but no sooner had the young Einstein published this idea, then he found himself squaring off with the father of gravity.
(see this video at 3:45)
The trouble was the idea that nothing can go faster than the speed of light flew in the face of Newton's picture of gravity. To understand this conflict, we have to run a few experiments and to begin with let's create a cosmic catastrophe. Imagine that all of a sudden and without any warning, the Sun vaporises and completely disappears. Now let's replay that catastrophe and see what effect it would have on the planets according to Newton. Newton's theory predicts that with the destruction of the Sun, the planets would immediately fly out of their orbits, careening off into space. In other words, Newton thought that gravity was a force that acts instantaneously across any distance, and so we would immediately feel the effect of the sun's destruction but Einstein saw a big problem with Newton's theory, a problem that arose from his work with light. Einstein knew that light doesn't travel instantaneously, in fact, it takes eight minutes for the sun's rays to travel the 93 million miles to the earth. And since he had shown that nothing, not even gravity can travel faster than light. How could the earth be released from orbit before the darkness resulting from the son's disappearance reached our eyes? To the young upstart from the Swiss Patent Office, anything out running light was impossible and that meant that 250-year-old Newtonian picture of gravity was wrong. If Newton is wrong then why do the planets stay there? Because remember the triumph of Newton's equations come from the quest to understand the planets and the stars. In particular, the problem of why do the planets have the orbits that they don't? And with Newton's equations, you can calculate the way that the planets will move; Einstein's got to resolve this dilemma. In his late 20s, Einstein had to come up with a new picture of the universe in which gravity does not exceed the cosmic speed limit still working his day job in the Patent Office Einstein embarked on a solitary quest to solve this mystery. After nearly 10 years of racking his brain, he found the answer in a new kind of unification. Einstein came to think of the three dimensions of space, and the single dimension of time, as bound together in a single fabric of space-time. It was his hope, that by understanding the geometry of this four-dimensional fabric of space-time, that he could simply talk about things moving along surfaces in this space-time fabric. Like the surface of a trampoline this unified fabric is warped and stretched by heavy objects like planets and stars and it's this warping or curving of space-time that creates what we feel as gravity. A planet like the earth is kept in orbit not because the Sun reaches out and instantaneously grabs hold of it as Newton's theory but simply because it follows curves in the spatial fabric caused by the sun's presence, so with this new understanding of gravity let's rerun the cosmic catastrophe let's see what happens now if the Sun disappears. The gravitational disturbance that results will form a wave that travels across the spatial fabric in much the same way that a pebble dropped into a pond makes ripples that travel across the surface of the water so we wouldn't feel a change in our orbit around the Sun until this wave reached the earth. What's more, Einstein calculated that these ripples of gravity travel at exactly the speed of light and so with this new approach Einstein resolve the conflict with Newton over how fast gravity travels and more than that Einstein gave the world a new picture for what the force of gravity actually is. Its warps and curves in the fabric of space and time Einstein called this new picture of gravity, General relativity
(see the same video at 7:20)
...and within a few short years, Albert Einstein became a household name. Einstein was like a rock star in his day, he was one of the most widely known and recognisable figures alive. He and perhaps Charlie Chaplin were the reigning kings of the popular media. People followed his works, and they were anticipating because of this wonderful thing he had done with general relativity. This recasting the laws of gravity out of his head, there was the thought he could do it again and people want to be in on that. Despite all that he had achieved, Einstein wasn't satisfied.
He immediately set-asides on an even grander goal, the unification of his new picture of gravity with the only other force known at the time, electromagnetism.
Now electromagnetism is a force that had itself been unified only a few decades earlier. In the mid-1800s, electricity and magnetism were sparking scientists interest. These two forces seem to share a curious relationship, that inventors like Samuel Morse we're taking advantage of, in newfangled devices such as the Telegraph. An electrical pulse sent through a telegraph wire to a magnet thousands of miles away, produce the familiar dots and dashes of Morse code, that allowed messages to be transmitted across the continent in a fraction of a second. Although the telegraph was a sensation, the fundamental science driving it remained something of a mystery. But to a Scottish scientist, named James Clark Maxwell the relationship between electricity and magnetism was so obvious in nature that it demanded unification. If you've ever been on top of a mountain during a thunderstorm, you'll get the idea of how electricity and magnetism are closely related. When a stream of electrically charged particles flows like in a bolt of lightning, it creates a magnetic field and you can see evidence of this on a compass. Obsessed with this relationship, the Scott was determined to explain the connection between electricity and magnetism in the language of mathematics. Casting the new light on the subject, Maxwell devised a set of four elegant mathematical equations that unified electricity and magnetism in a single force called electromagnetism…….(Don't worry if you do not understand them, you will understand them later in schools, here are those just to introduce.)
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| Image Courtesy : Wikipedia. These are the 4 simple equations to describe everything related to Electromagnetism. One day Quantum Physics will do the same, have the Master Equation(s) |
………….. and like Isaac Newton before him, Maxwell's unification took science a step closer to cracking the code of the universe. That was really the remarkable thing that these different phenomena were really connected in this way, and it's another example of diverse phenomena coming from a single underlying building block or single underlying principle. Imagine that everything that you can think of, it has to do with electricity and magnetism can all be written for very simple equations. Isn't that incredible? isn't that amazing? I call that elegant. Einstein thought that this was one of the triumphant moments of all of the physics and admired Maxwell hugely for what he had done. About 50 years after Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism, Einstein was confident that if he could unify his new theory of gravity with Maxwell's electromagnetism he'd be able to formulate a master equation that could describe everything, the entire universe. Einstein clearly believes that the universe has an overall grand and beautiful pattern to the way that it works. I so the trance the question why was he looking for the unification I think the answer is simply that Einstein is one of those physicists who really wants to know the mind of God, which means the entire picture. Today, this is the goal of string theory, to unify our understanding of everything, from the birth of the universe to the majestic swirl of galaxies in just one set of principles, one master equation. Newton had unified the heavens and the earth in the theory of gravity. Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism. Einstein reasoned all that remained to build a theory of everything, a single theory that could encompass all the laws of the universe, was to merge his new picture of gravity with electromagnetism.
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| Two of the four Fundamental Forces. Notice Electromagnetism is illustrated larger than Gravity. Want Demo? We can levitate objects by using small Magnets against the gravity of Huge Huge Earth ! |
He certainly had motivation probably one of them might have been aesthetics or this quest to simplify. Another one might have been just the physical fact that it seems like the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light. So they both go at the same speed then maybe that's an indication of some underlying symmetry. But as Einstein began trying to unite gravity and electromagnetism, he would find the difference in strength between these two forces would outweigh their similarities.
We will see those in part 2 of the blog.
Thank you for reading..
If you want a thorough physics book, Get one of these-
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| Read this book, Sure to love it! Get on Amazon. Click on the above link to check it out. |
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| One more, highly simplified version of Quantum Physics. Click on the above link to check it out. |
There is a remarkable book that succeeds in having only one point at which people will be misled. It’s not long. It has lots of pictures. But don’t make the mistake of thiking that it is not a serious work. It really has everything in it that you need to get started. It will often help (probably to show how brilliant the writer is) and start getting confused.
Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate
you reorient yourself if you read something less carefully written
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