Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You_ A Guide to the Universe - Marcus Chown [6]
But atoms do exist. We and the world around us are proof enough of that. Far from expiring in a hundred-millionth of a second, atoms have survived intact since the earliest times of the Universe almost 14 billion years ago. Some crucial ingredient must be missing from Rutherford’s picture of the atom. That ingredient is a revolutionary new kind of physics—quantum theory.
1 Some of these ideas were covered in my earlier book, The Magic Furnace (Vintage, London, 2000). Apologies to those who have read it. In my defense, it is necessary to know some basic things about the atom in order to appreciate the chapters that follow on quantum theory, which is essentially a theory of the atomic world.
2 Of course, there is no way a needle can actually feel a surface like a human finger can. However, if the needle is charged with electricity and placed extremely close to a conducting surface, a minuscule but measurable electric current leaps the gap between the tip of the needle and the surface. It is known as a “tunnelling current”, and it has a crucial property that can be exploited: the size of the current is extraordinarily sensitive to the width of the gap. If the needle is moved even a shade closer to the surface, the current grows very rapidly; if it is pulled away a fraction, the current plummets. The size of the tunnelling current therefore reveals the distance between the needle tip and the surface. It gives the needle an artificial sense of touch.
3 Eventually, physicists would discover that the nucleus contains two particles: positively charged protons and uncharged, or neutral, neutrons. The number of protons in a nucleus is always exactly balanced by an equal number of electrons in orbit about it. The difference between atoms is in the number of protons in their nuclei (and consequently the number of electrons in orbit). For instance, hydrogen has one proton in its nucleus and uranium a whopping 92.
4 See Chapter 4, “Uncertainty and the Limits of Knowledge.”
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WHY GOD PLAYS DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE
HOW WE DISCOVERED THAT THINGS IN THE WORLD OF ATOMS HAPPEN FOR NO REASON AT ALL
A philosopher once said, “It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.” Well, they don’t!
Richard Feynman
It’s 2025 and high on a desolate mountain top a giant 100-metre telescope tracks around the night sky. It locks onto a proto-galaxy at the edge of the observable Universe and feeble light, which has been travelling through space since long before Earth was born, is concentrated by the telescope mirror onto ultrasensitive electronic detectors. Inside the telescope dome, seated at a control panel not unlike the console of the starship Enterprise, the astronomers watch a fuzzy image of the galaxy swim into view on a computer monitor. Someone turns up a loudspeaker and a deafening crackle fills the control room. It sounds like machine gun fire; it sounds like rain drumming on a tin roof. In fact, it is the sound of tiny particles of light raining down on the telescope’s detectors from the very depths of space.
To these astronomers, who spend their careers straining to see the weakest sources of light in the Universe, it is a self-evident fact that light is a stream of tiny bulletlike particles—photons. Not long ago, however, the scientific community had to be dragged kicking and screaming to an acceptance of this idea. In fact, it’s fair to say that the discovery that light comes in discrete chunks, or quanta, was the single most shocking discovery in the history of science. It swept away the comfort blanket of pre-20th-century science and exposed physicists to the harsh reality of an Alice in Wonderland universe where things happen because they happen, with utter disregard for the civilised laws of cause and effect.
The first person to realise that light was made of