Probabilities of the Quantum World

Many years ago someone introduced me to this masterpiece while I was at IIT-B. At that time I just filed it away. A book was a book was a book. There were far more important things to do. Like whatever. I don’t even remember now what was so important all those years ago!

Then some years ago, 2003 to be precise, I was “tracked” onto the Spiritual world. I participated in this breathing-meditation program offered by the Art of Living Foundation, and, truth be told, I totally phoo-phaa’d the idea of me participating in this program! Come on, a left brained, IIT trained PhD Chemical Engineer and breathing-meditation! Bah!

And then it happened. I reluctantly participated in the program and Hello…!! There was a totally unknown dimension to me. It was here all the time. My mind was just too noisy to recognize this dimension. Hello, hello helllooo!!

And so it started. A new Journey. A new set of tracks. Spirituality. From the old tracks of Science onto the new tracks of Spirituality. Soon I noticed that these two set of tracks were actually parallel. There were little to no junction points and so, the Maverick that I am, I made by own set of two tracks. One wheel now rests on the Science track while the other rests on the Spirituality track. Life at this intersection has been totally FUN! Several Aho moments. Several moments where faith has been shaken and stirred; Faith in both; Faith in Science was shaken and faith in Spirituality was stirred too.

While on these new set of tracks, I read Daniel Danin’s masterpiece: Probabilities of the Quantum World. It is a book that walks the reader gently though the pages of History. The development and back-stories of how the magical world of Quantum Physics came about. The Spiritual insights are there too for the taking.

Since this book from MIR Publishers, Moscow is long out of print, I thought I would summarize the gems from this book for the world to read. And also, I would throw in my own insights and commentary, which you can totally ignore! To make it easier, I will mark my commentary / insights [like so]. The rest of this post will be almost verbatim transcription of parts of Daniel Danin’s masterpiece. Of course, only the parts that resonated with me are included! Nothing I can do about that.

This is the story of the Quest for Reality! The ultimate Physics. It needs to be told. Again. And yet Again. The Serendipity of it all. Educated Guesses all around. And, yet, each one, precisely Correct!

“I’d rather be Lucky than Good”

Here goes…

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Press enter or click to view image in full size

There is an old safe rule for story-tellers — start a good story from the beginning. In telling a story like that of the Quantum revolution in human understanding of the structure of Nature, there are several problems!

The first problem lies in the attitude and extent of understanding of the recorder. The story teller ceases to be a neutral recorder of events; he turns into the author of a documentary. Is that not a contradiction in terms, ‘author of a documentary’?

The other problem is, which beginning? The story has many beginnings and any one of them could serve. Then again, the solution may be to start from the end? The end must surely be unique as the mountain summit conquered by climbers. But another good side to our story is that it has no end, and will never have one:

The outstanding ideas in science are immortal and they do not harden into a perfect mold but continue to grow in the field allocated to them by nature.

In August of 1960, five university scientists met in Berkeley, California. It was our story that brought them together. To be more exact, it was their concern that the story had not yet been written, and (to be even more specific) the scientists were concerned about the safety of its documentary evidence and determined to preserve the testimony of its participants for suture generations.

It should not be thought that the people who met in Berkeley were retired veterans, jealously concerned about their own posthumous fame. Not at all! They were a small group of active physicist-historian-philosophers who has scientists thought of themselves as grateful heirs of the quantum revolution. Gratitude — that is the key. The words of John Wheeler, the prominent theorist sum up the common opinion [of the Berkeley group]:

“Without parallel in the last three hundred years”

The preparations were soon spurred on by a sad event: on January 5th 1961 the creator of wave mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger, died in Vienna at the age of 73. “The bell has been tolling”, said Wheeler who headed the archive committee, “time is short”. His meaning was clear. Everyone remembered the recent losses: Enrico Fermi in 1954, Albert Einstein in 1955, John von Neumann in 1957, Wolfgang Pauli in 1958, Abram Ioffe in 1960… And not another prominent scientist of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period had departed leaving unopened a whole chapter in the history of the quantum conceptions.

… To be Continued

[I had all the good intentions & plans for completing my faithful documentation of this masterpiece of a story of the Quantum Revolution. But… there is always a “but”. Someone once told me that the best joke to tell the Universe is to tell it your plans! There is a Universal Plan. And it will happen. Just not right away.]

[Some critical full-time-job related issue has come up and the documentary has to be put on a brief hold. One week tops… (can you hear the Universe laughing??). Meanwhile, I leave you with the below freshly minted masterpiece from my dear friend Srinivas Vedula. Vedula’s creation fits snugly with what you will see in the To be Continued section. The Universe sent this to me via our Facebook interaction! Enjoy…]

[Oh ya… for the Medium uninitiated, please leave a couple of “claps” below if you like this and would be interested in the subsequent part(s). Thanks.]

Our Quantum Life by Srini Vedula

There once was a young lady named Bright
Who traveled faster than the speed of light

She reached the bar at quarter-past-nine
To meet her beau Albert Einstein
“My watch said it was fourteen-past-nine
Even though yours says it is quarter-past-nine
I looked it up when I heard the bell chime,
But I understand that you’re still on time,
My Dear, I will let you into a secret of mine
God is real and Relativity divine.”

She then went to Baghdad in Iraq
To see her dear friend Paul Dirac
Who said, “if you were a small particle
I could take you on my little bicycle
But since you are a dainty wave
I will drive you to my special cave”
When he took her to his homemade digs,
She was pleased to meet Mr. Peter Higgs
Who concurred, “if you want to find God,
Make sure you research the smallest pod”

Shen then searched for a man so uncertain
She looked for him all day in Brisbane
In the shower, under the bed and behind the curtain
But when she finally saw Herr Heisenberg
She wasn’t sure it was in Pittsburgh or Luxembourg

Tired and broken, she kept through the wringer
Until she met a man named Erwin Schrodinger
A man so much in love with his cat
That he kept it forever locked in a box
Nary a mat, a bat, a rat or a tit-for-tat
Would convince him ever to open its locks

When her travels took her to Cambridge
Where thoughts and reality did a physicist bridge
She met this brilliant man named Hawking
His discoveries were oh-so shocking
He said “Light can reach almost any goal,
but it better beware when it reaches a black hole,
it might finagle its arrogant way in
but through time infinity, it just stays in”

And finally she met a man with a stubble
Who most of us know as Edwin Hubble
“No light, no touch, no sound nor a clang”
“Trust me, you should,” he said, “life started with a Big Bang!!”