Happy Birthday: Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zurich, graduating in 1900. He acquired Swiss citizenship a year later, which he kept for the rest of his life, and afterwards secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1914, he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917; he also became a German citizen again. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, he decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research, later carried out as the Manhattan Project.

In 1905, sometimes described as his annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers. In them, he outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity, and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation. A paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. It introduced the cosmological constant and is further regarded as the first step in the field of modern theoretical cosmology. In 1917, Einstein wrote a paper which introduced the concepts of spontaneous emission and stimulated emission, the latter of which is the core mechanism behind the laser and maser, and which contained a trove of information that would be beneficial to developments in physics later on, such as quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics.

In the middle part of his career, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation, in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons. With physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, he laid the groundwork for Bose–Einstein statistics. For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that ultimately proved unsuccessful. First, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that "God does not play dice". Second, he attempted to devise a unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism. As a result, he became increasingly isolated from mainstream modern physics. Many things are named after him, including the element Einsteinium. In 1999, he was named Time's Person of the Century.

Just Finished Reading: Atom by Piers Bizony (FP: 2007) [194pp] 

The transition between the 19th and 20th centuries was an odd time in many ways. One of the strangest, and in hindsight one of the most amusing, was in the realm of Physics. As the 19th century ended students who expressed an interest in physics as a career were told that they were wasting their time and that most everything that could be discovered already had been at that anyone left in the profession would spend their, presumably bored, time finishing off a few left-over details. One of those ‘details’ was the structure of atoms. 

No one really knew very much about atomic structure in the Edwardian period. The prevailing ‘theory’ was that atoms (along with their electrons – then of disputed existence) existed in a kind of ‘cake-mix’ blob with the electrons playing the part of chocolate chips. As investigation progressed (using incredibly primitive and home-made equipment) it quickly became apparent that things were far more complex and that a ‘solar system’ model with electrons ‘orbiting’ the nucleus of the atom was a better representation of reality. But that idea created problems of its own. Such a model might work for Hydrogen but more complex atoms had multiple electrons in various ‘orbits’. How did the system maintain itself for more than a vanishingly short period without collapse? How did chemical reactions happen? The more they investigated the more complex and the more frankly bizarre it all became. We were moving into the age of Quantum Mechanics (QM). 

Anyone with even the barest ‘knowledge’ of QM will know how strange it is. In fact, the word ‘strange’ just doesn’t cover it. QM is honestly CRAZY. Albert Einstein himself – who was, to be honest, at least partially responsible for creating the field – never accepted the theory and spent a good deal of his life in opposition to it. Yet, time and time again, QM has been shown in theory, in experiments and in practice as being fundamentally correct – there's just a few little things presently unexplained that need to be cleared up...    

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this, maybe a quick refresher read and nothing more. Pleasantly it was rather more than that. This was FUN. Not only did the author have a very readable style he also managed to explain some very complex ideas that only once or twice pushed up against my ability to wrap my head around them – and for a book on QM that’s quite something! Another thing I really liked about this was the focus on the scientists doing the work and their portrayal as human beings – odd though many of them were. This grounded the experience at a human level. Looking at the beginnings of the ideas surrounding the atom, moving on to the race to create the atom bomb, debates on how stars burn for so long, the creation of heavy atoms in supernova, the Big Bang and much besides this was a great way into the worlds of the vanishing small and the cosmically BIG. If you’ve ever wondered what the fuss was all about but either didn’t know where to start or were afraid that reading up on the subject would fry your brain, this is the book for you. With barely an equation to be seen and very good explanations of the issues raised and their resolutions this will give you a good basic grounding on the subject and might even get you interested in reading further. Definitely recommended. 

Just Finished Reading: The Consolations of Physics – Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy by Tim Radford (FP: 2018) [178pp] 

It's difficult not to view the Universe we’re born into with a feeling of awe. Indeed, it's difficult to learn about the Universe without becoming over-awed and maybe a little overwhelmed. Both staggeringly old and STAGGERINGLY huge, it’s easy to think that we’ll never understand it, but the amazing thing is that we ARE beginning to do just that. 

We’ve been looking at the heavens for longer than human history and, no doubt, wondering about the lights in the night sky and what they are. It took a LONG time to finally figure things out (or start the process!) but we’re getting there. With telescopes, probes and a bit of mathematical wizardry we can understand the movement of planets, the birth (and death) of stars and even the birth (and death?) of the Universe itself. But we’re not there yet – not by a long way. Our knowledge of the Universe is still partial and there is much we still don’t understand – or even know we don’t know. There’s even the real possibility that much that we think we know might be flat wrong. We do indeed live in exciting times. 

At the other end of the scale, we have the infinitely small – the once indivisible atom, now known to be made up of progressively smaller and smaller parts. The Quantum realm is bizarre on steroids but works despite Einstein never fully accepting its implications. Not only are things stranger than we know, but they might also very well be stranger than we can know. Few scientists can wrap their heads around the mathematics required to understand (or at least appreciate or approach understanding) of the strangeness of Quantum Mechanics whilst the rest of us normal folk can only look on with wide-eyed wonder and laugh at the absurdity. I do find it FUN though – knowing that the foundations of everything are just so WEIRD. It warms my heart. 

Looking both out into the Universe and into the heart of atomic structure, the author shows how the endeavour to understand EVERYTHING is an amazing gift and one that can inspire much previously held to be the domain of Religion. The Cosmos can leave us feeling a sense of awe, a knowledge of how small we are, and inspire us to want to know the origins and mechanics of existence itself. Breakthroughs in the study of sub-atomic particles can should us just how amazing things really are and how everything, from the exploding hearts of stars to the DNA in every one of every living creature's cells are ultimately connected. We are indeed star stuff. But I think the most awe-inspiring thing we’ve learnt from all our endeavours so far is the sure and certain knowledge of how little we actually know. There is still SO much to learn, So much the discover and SO many misunderstandings to correct. We are living in an era of great scientific breakthroughs. I for one love finding out new stuff and even more finding out we were wrong about the old stuff. Can Physics make you happy? It works for me... [lol] A recommended, if somewhat short, read for anyone unsure what all the fuss is about with Cosmologists and the Quantum world. More to come. 

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Just Finished Reading: A Universe from Nothing – Why is there Something rather than Nothing by Lawrence M Krauss (FP: 2012)

I have always believed that the Universe is a natural phenomenon which came into existence, through completely natural processes, some 13.7 billion years ago. Over the years I have, occasionally, dabbled in the science of such things to flesh out my belief with some facts. This book was another part of the effort to get my head around the whole thing. Whilst not completely effective – much more my fault than the authors – I am now a little closer to my goal of appreciating the science behind the existence of the Universe if not exactly fully understanding it. I am the first to admit that I am not a scientist. My formal education over the years has, by and large, been in the Humanities and that’s where I feel most at home. However I have developed, mostly through reading and some excellent TV documentaries a deepening interest in biological Evolution, Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics. This book brought together two of those subjects – Cosmology & QM.

Most of us have by now heard of Dark Matter. It is an idea conceived to explain why the Universe is behaving in the way it does. Essentially, according to present theories, there isn’t enough visible matter in the Universe to explain why it’s continuing to expand after the Big Bang and looks like it’ll expand forever so not Big Crunch when it all comes back. But weirdly (and to be honest most of the ideas discussed in this book can easily be labelled ‘weird’) not only is the Universe continuing to expand but the expansion is actually accelerating. Yes, that’s right. Accelerating. Pretty soon – in cosmic terms – we’ll no longer to be able to see the furthest galaxies and stars because they’ll be accelerating away from our area of space faster than the speed of light. Told you it was weird… The cause, the driving force of this expansion? More weirdness – Dark Energy. All space – even the empty space between stars and between galaxies is literally frothing with energy at a quantum level. Not only that, at intervals too small to measure, things like electrons spontaneously pop into existence and just as quickly pop out again and this is happening all the time. Going a little deeper down the rabbit hole it’s not only matter that seemingly spontaneously generates itself – its space too in the form of a rapid expansion. Mostly this occurs in vanishing small timeframes followed by an equally rapid deflation. But sometimes the expansion goes on into measurable time periods – like 13.7 billion years. Yes, just like our Universe and, it seems, like others too. Weird enough yet? Because there’s just one more thing – not only do the observations of our Universe say that spontaneous generation of entire Universes could happen or even do happen but, as far as the observations seem to be indicating and backed up by very sophisticated and verified mathematics, that this sort of thing *has* to happen and is happening right now. Because of the nature of QM exhibited in Dark Energy entire Universes are coming into existence in other parts of our Universe, in effect ‘budding off’ multiple Universes that, given the right physical constraints may well be very similar to this one. OK, that’s weird enough I think.

Although some of this book clearly flew over my head – I did struggle at times to work my way through the logic of it all – I did ‘get’ enough of it to appreciate how far our understanding of Universe creation has come since the idea of the Big Bang first made scientific headlines. Clearly I need to keep reading about both QM and Cosmology to get my head around the difficult stuff so there will be more in both areas (and, naturally, in Evolution too) to come. I seriously doubt that I’ll ever understand the maths behind any of this and I’ll probably never understand the intricacies of QM (I mean, who does?) but I do hope that I’ll be able to deepen (and widen?) my appreciation of both subjects so I at least get the gist of what they’re talking about. Recommended if you fancy something weird, cool and reasonably difficult to get you head around.

Just Finished Reading: Life on the Edge – The Coming Age of Quantum Biology by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden (FP: 2014)

Of course this book had ‘hard to ignore’ written all over it as it amalgamates two of my favourite science subjects – Evolutionary Biology and Quantum Mechanics. I mean, what’s not to like? Plus the fact that I’ve seen the BBC series based on the book so I already had a pretty good idea that it would push my buttons. I was not disappointed.

The authors started off with a deceptively easy question (well, kind of easy!). How do birds, and specifically the European Robin, navigate across large distances with such incredible accuracy? The best theory seems to be that they use some kind of compass in conjunction with the Earth’s magnetic field but no one really knew exactly how and the theory had lots of holes in it. Some birds seemed to have ferrous metal elements in their beaks (but not all) and seemed to be adversely affected by nearby magnetic fields (but not all). It was all very confusing until they started asking the right type of question: Exactly what type of compass are we talking about here? The one everyone is familiar with from Boy Scouts or the more subtle Inclination compass that can’t tell direction so neatly but can tell you if you are approaching or moving away from the Pole. It turned out to be the Inclination type housed (rather oddly) in a pigment in the eye. Birds apparently ‘see’ magnetic fields…. Maybe. As researchers spread their net they found it in chickens too (who don’t migrate), and butterflies, and fish and… well, you get the picture. Once they knew what to look for they found it just about everywhere doing similar jobs in a whole host of creatures. But the really weird thing was how it actually worked. You see the Earth’s magnetic field was long considered to be far too weak to affect biological systems. But not, it would seem, at the sub-atomic (AKA Quantum) level. Here we seemed to have evidence of warm, wet, messy biology apparently operating with the direct assistance of the Quantum world.

Of course once this sort of crazy idea was out in the open others (after the usual initial scepticism) tried to find other examples of Quantum Biology and it wasn’t long before they found it and began to lay the foundations of a whole new branch of science – and incidentally apparently answering (or at the very least offering up answers to) some biological problems that had to date eluded most biologists in the field: Migration, Photosynthesis, Smell, Respiration, How Gene’s work and why Mutations happen, Where Consciousness comes from, How life first emerged from lifelessness and much else besides. Once it was accepted and then shown that Quantum processes could actually take place at biological temperatures and do real-world work with real-world effects the evidence began piling up that the whole gamut of Quantum weirdness – spooky action at a distance, tunnelling, superposition – the kind of things that sends sensible people mad (and often reduces me to giggles) is happening right now in the cells of plants, flies, mice and you. The implications of this is profound, from the production of better drugs, to life extension, biological Quantum computers, artificial life creation and things we haven’t even thought of yet.

As the authors repeatedly point out this is a very young field of science which is producing ground breaking results almost on a weekly basis. Their enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and I think I finally really understand the famous double-slit experiment in all its wonderful strangeness thanks to a chapter that kept me reading well past my bedtime on a school night. If you have any interest in either Evolution or Quantum Mechanics or just want to know how the world really works then you just have to read this book. It does help if you have some knowledge and understanding of the basics but the explanations of exactly what’s going on here are extremely good. I thought I had a handle on things beforehand. I definitely have a much better grip now. Fascinating and mind bending. Highly recommended.

Just Finished Reading: The Fly in the Cathedral – How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom by Brian Cathcart

The history of 20^th Century science – particularly that of physics – has long fascinated me. At the end of the previous century it was considered that just about everything about the physical universe was understood. Only a few niggling problems remained to be solved. One of these problems concerned the nature of light whilst another sought to understand the structure of the atom. As scientists throughout the world delved into these areas instead of answering questions they generated more and worse still produced mysteries that seemed to be beyond anyone’s understanding.

In Cambridge the great New Zealand eccentric Lord Rutherford determined that the only way any of this would be understood is by experiment after experiment until something shook free. But first his team needed to build sophisticated enough apparatus to produce the effects that generated enough results for the theoreticians to work with and that apparatus was at the very edge of existing technology. They were stuck in the classic chicken and egg scenario. But slowly throughout the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s they managed to push forward the underlying technology they needed to run experiments at high enough voltages to produce the effects they needed. On lab desks throughout Europe and the US scientists, technicians and engineers built the very first particle accelerators – atom smashers – that first chipped away at the atomic structure and later smashed it completely.

All of this, painfully pieced together over decades by some of the greatest minds that ever lived, is one of the greatest stories ever told and one that is in the headlines again today as we edge closer to understanding where mass comes from with on-going search for the Higgs Boson. Needless to say the understanding of particle physics is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, everything that exists within it and probably why it exists in the first place. There is much within this field that I do not understand and probably never will. Yet I find the subject endlessly fascinating so keep trying to at least form an appreciation of what’s going on in the field and gain at least a partial understanding of how it all works. This book helped by filling in some of the historical background and a little of the actual science too. Being aimed at the lay reader it only assumes an interest in the subject and a very basic knowledge of atoms. Don’t be put off by the subject matter. The story of the very first atom smashers is a very human tale of men (and some women) that needed to know how everything fitted together. From there early discoveries to the present day we are finally approaching that very point – or at least so it seems. Maybe there is something just around the corner that will blow everything we think we know clean out of the water. That’s the real excitement of science. 

Just Finished Reading: Particle Physics – A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close

This book is part of my continuing plan to use the excellent VSI series to expand my knowledge base into new areas and deepen my knowledge in others. I have read several books in the area of Quantum Mechanics and Sub-atomic physics over the years and, though I don’t fully understand everything I read, find myself fascinated by this bizarre aspect of our reality.

Starting from seemingly very simple questions regarding matter and existence – so much so that for the first few pages I thought that the author had pitched the contents too low even for an introduction - this small volume quickly ramped up the pace forcing me, at times, to struggle to keep up. Fortunately for my Humanities trained brain, the author peppered this book with very few mathematical equations and charts but with enough detailed diagrams for me to grasp the meanings behind his explanations. I’m still convinced that I missed quite a bit but felt confident enough to imagine various ‘flavours’ of Quarks forming the sub-atomic particles we know and love. I’d heard about many of them before but was introduced to a few that were new to me including the Bottom Quark – yes, you read that right! Funnily these guys seem to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Apparently bottom quarks are more massive than their anti-matter alternative so, not long after the Big Bang and the resultant matter/anti-matter annihilation there was still enough matter left over to make everything you see around you. At least that’s what I took away from the explanation offered. So next time a theist asks that particularly annoying question you can confidently reply: Bottom Quarks!

Anyway, the author covers theories of matter, how we actually learn about it, the different types of accelerators and colliders and how the particles are actually detected. Further discussion is on ‘exotic’ matter, anti-matter and the curious question of where matter comes from. Questions raised at the end of the book cover ideas on Dark matter (and Dark energy) as well as the hopes for the, then under construction, Large Hadron Collider.

All in all this was an interesting if, at times, difficult read. It certainly hasn’t put me off reading more on this fascinating subject and I’m hopeful that one day I’ll be able to wrap my head around some of the more general ideas in this field. I’ll never understand the maths but at least I can stand back and appreciate the wonderful strangeness of it all. Recommended for anyone who fancies a bit of mind stretching.

Just Finished Reading: Quantum Theory – A Very Short Introduction by John Polkinghome

As part of my ongoing project to both widen and deepen my knowledge base I’ve been buying a selection of the ever growing list of VSI books. This is my first of the new batch – basically anything beyond the VSI philosophy books I’ve been working my way through until now.

I’ve had more than a passing interest in the very weird world of the Quantum for some time but haven’t managed to finish more than a few books on the subject. As I don’t really have that much of a background in the sciences it can be a little difficult getting into subjects like this – especially when even a half page of mathematical equations reduces my brain to mush. Thankfully there were only a few pages of professor Polkinghome’s book that required any math at all. Those I must admit I did pretty much skim over. The rest was math free and readable enough to keep me plugging away at the strangeness to begin to see some sort of comprehension dawning. I’ve still got a long way to go to get a real handle on this stuff but I think this book helped me to take a few baby steps in the right direction. Quantum physics, I think, holds the potential answers to some of the very big questions I see asked on the Web. I think it might answer how the Universe began. It might even say something about the origin of life and might explain some aspects of consciousness. But as this book quite clearly spelled out, we have a long way to go before we truly understand Quantum reality. Hopefully I’ll come across a simple book explaining the results when we finally do understand it! More VSI to come and more quantum mind stretching….