Quantum Physics and The Basement Floor of Science

We Don't Even Know Where the Edges of the Jigsaw Puzzle Are

The world is not as it seems.

The world we see is only a subsection of the electromagnetic waves (EM) emitted from the sun. We call this visible light. We are visual dominant animals and this is mostly how we experience our world.

Our optic systems evolved to optimize our ancestral humans success while they competed for food with all other animals on Earth.

Isn’t it interesting how much humans love eating meat? Meat as we know it is just the ancestors of the animals we once competed against. It’s funny how all meat also has optic systems.

Anyways.

When we elevator down to the atomic level of our world, things become very curious.

Here atoms get heated also by the electromagnetic radiation from the sun. When you apply heat to atoms, they start to jiggle. The study of jiggling atoms is called quantum physics.

From quantum physics you can build out the rest of the world.

As an example I’ll show you how to derive chemistry from quantum physics.

Molecules are two or more atoms that are stuck through attractive forces. When the temperature of these molecules changes they transform from a solid to a liquid to a gas.

An example of a molecule we understand intuitively is water. Our bodies by weight are 60% water. It is a fundamental building block of animals. It’s why we have to drink it daily.

Water is one molecule of oxygen and two molecules of hydrogen. Let’s go over how you transform water using temperature at the atomic level.

When water is cooled below a certain temperature, the three atoms that construct the molecule jiggle more slowly. They move a little but not very much.

Eventually the water molecules start to self arrange into neat, organized stacks. This is because of the unique electrical interactions of water molecules amongst themselves. These neatly stacked molecules form a solid we know as ice.

Now let’s heat the ice.

The atoms start to jiggle faster. As you continue to apply heat, the molecules start to roll all over each other and fall out of their formation. When all the water molecules have fallen out, you get a liquid. This process you know as melting.

This liquid is the same water we drink - which is absorbed in our intestines and builds out that 60% our physical bodies.

Now let’s continue heating the liquid water.

The three atoms making up the water molecule start jiggling so fast they knock into each other at high speeds. After enough heat, the force of their collision overcomes their attractive forces and they can’t stick . Unable to hold on any longer, they careen into the atmosphere as solitary water molecules as a gas. This process is called vaporization.

This process is also known as evaporation when the sun heats bodies of water to pull water molecules into the atmosphere. Eventually the atmosphere returns the molecules as rain. Or at higher elevations it returns as snow. This circulation of water molecules between the earth and atmosphere is called the water cycle.

Humans built steam engines from vaporizing water. These early mechanical engines connected the world through railroads. This chemical process contributed to the industrial revolution.

If you put a dam on a river, the liquid water flowing downhill (due to gravity) turns hydroelectric dam turbines. The kinetic energy of the water is transformed into electricty which is sent through copper wires (good electron conductors) to the electrical socket in your house.

FYI if you keep heating the water vapor 10,000X past its vaporization temperature it eventually becomes the fourth phase of matter called a plasma. At these extremely high temperatures some of the electrons get stripped away from the atoms so the protons and neutrons in the nucleus can interact through their charge at a distance. They essentially exchange information like energy and momentum and this exchange predicts the behavior of plasmas. The sun and other nuclear reactions generate plasmas.

Let’s keep pulling on this thread but increasing the scale beyond chemistry.

All molecules on Earth gradually organized into larger structures. Organic chemistry is the study of the constituent parts of complex organisms.

At the scale of protozoa, bacteria and viruses we call this microbiology.

At the next scale up we are dealing with larger plants and animals. We call this biology.

From what we know about electromagnetism, we can even approximate the nature of the Earth’s core by studying our planet’s electromagnetic field. This is the field that makes a compass functional. This is geology.

The aurora borealis at the Earth’s poles is actually the Earth’s electromagnetic field interacting with solar wind which creates a visible light we can see with our eyes.

And when we pointed our telescopes at the cosmos, we saw that the Sun and planets obey the EXACT SAME fundamental laws. So you can build start to build out the universe as we know it.

By the way, a lot of our technology is building generators or detectors of electromagnetic waves. A telescope is an example of an electromagnetic wave detector. A microwave is an example of an electromagnetic wave generator. X-ray machines both generate an electromagnetic x-ray wave and then detect this same wave on a receiving plate.

The sun is a nuclear fusion reaction between Hydrogen and Helium. Nuclear fusion is what it sounds like - you fuse two molecules that release tremendous amounts of energy.

How do we know that’s what is happening in the Sun? Because we can back calculate it from the electromagnetic radiation and other data we can measure from Earth.

How verifiable is this? Nuclear technology uses similar reactions at the atomic level that fuse or split unstable atoms like plutonium or uranium through heat and pressure.

Dropping nuclear bombs on Japan to end World War II was like running the reaction of the sun in the middle of a city with hundreds of thousands of people.

The jiggling of atoms seems to underpin everything as far as we know. I think it is very curious and profound. All of this. That feeling of awe can be hard to find so savor it when you can.

Why is it like this? I don’t know! The first principle of being a good scientist is get comfortable saying ‘I don’t know!'‘

Atomic theory requires a great a deal of imagination. The famous physicist Richard Feynman who worked on the Manhattan Project said “the irony is you are imaging what is true.”

We do not know how deep these threads go because there is a great deal we don’t know about the world. Atomic understanding is a relatively recent scientific leap.

We don’t know where the edges of this jig saw puzzle are. We don’t even know if there are edges. We could even be digging in the wrong spot.

It is very strange what we are. Complex clumps of solar heated jiggling atoms that construct everything from water to animals to the stars.

You can continue onward to deeper floors - into elementary particles of the universe. An example of these particles you may have heard of would be the Higgs boson. There even seem to be particles that are mathematically required to travel backward in time to make the atomic collisions work. It just gets more and more interesting. Any topic can become interesting when you keep pulling on the thread.