The Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s was in large part due to new theories and discoveries, which indicated that the general view of the universe – the more or less Aristotelian, teleological view – was no longer viable. This revolution eventually resulted in a substantially different view on the sort of universe we inhabit. New discoveries in recent years, involving Bell’s theorem, quantum theory, and the outcome of carefully designed and replicated experiments, strongly suggest that the general view of the universe we have had since the Copernican revolution is no longer viable. The main goals of this paper are (i) to present Bell’s theorem and the results of these recent experiments in a way accessible to a non-technical audience, and (ii) to explore the question of whether these new discoveries place us in a similar situation to that of our predecessors in the early years of the 1600s, or roughly, whether we are in the beginning stages of a modern Copernican revolution.
The Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s was in large part due to new theories and discoveries, which indicated that the general view of the universe – the more or less Aristotelian, teleological view – was no longer viable. This revolution eventually resulted in a substantially different view on the sort of universe we inhabit. New discoveries in recent years, involving Bell’s theorem, quantum theory, and the outcome of carefully designed and replicated experiments, strongly suggest that the general view of the universe we have had since the Copernican revolution is no longer viable. The main goals of this paper are (i) to present Bell’s theorem and the results of these recent experiments in a way accessible to a non-technical audience, and (ii) to explore the question of whether these new discoveries place us in a similar situation to that of our predecessors in the early years of the 1600s, or roughly, whether we are in the beginning stages of a modern Copernican revolution.
The turn of the XXth century witnessed a revolution in physics comparable to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the universal laws of mechanics and of gravitation three centuries earlier. The world required to be described in novel terms, as the immutable, deterministic view of our familiar universe had given way to a new world picture, one which featured chance, flux, and an incessant upsurge of waves of matter. Such a worldview was so radically new and counterintuitive that it gave rise to strong debates, to the effect that Albert Einstein himself tried to oppose it on the grounds that “God does not play dice”. In spite of the intense debates that accompanied its emergence, quantum mechanics quickly proved an incredibly efficacious new tool to understand and to predict a wide array of new phenomena. It was so successful that in no time it broke free from the environment of research labs to become part of daily life, making it possible, for example, to understand why some materials were conductors, while others were insulators. Along with it, came, too, the discovery of transistors, on which much of modern electronics rests. It also led to understand how novel materials known as superconductors allow the transport of electricity with no loss, thus paving the way for new developments in the fields of medical imagery or energy distribution. Other aspects of the quantum theory led to the development of atomic clocks of astounding accuracy, which would be wrong by no more than fifteen seconds, had they been set at the beginning of the universe. A hundred years later, at the turn of the XXIst century, Quantum mechanics has lost none of its astounding power. Contemporary research has undertaken the task of exploring its less immediately perceptible aspects. Groundbreaking developments have ensued, such as the teleportation of grains of light or the possibility, once predicted by the great physicist Richard Feynman, to build, one day, novel computers which, unlike the ones we are familiar with today, will be able to process innumerable numbers of operations in parallel. The Wright Colloquium will be for us the occasion to explore, in the company of five internationallyknown specialists in the field, some of the fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. We will appraise how efficiently quantum physics can describe our world, and confront its limitation when it is faced with the infinitely small (in relation to recent experiments carried out at the CERN) as with the incommensurably large scale of sidereal spaces. We will appreciate the extent to which quantum physics already has impacted our everyday lives, and evoke the way in which novel fields such as quantum computers and quantum information will entail profound changes in the future. The quantum adventure has only just begun! Monday 15 November 2010 - 18h30 Jochen Mannhart Center for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism, University of Augsburg, Germany Quantum Physics on the Scale of Daily Life Tuesday 16 November 2010 - 18h30 Wolfgang Ketterle Nobel Laureate 2001 (Physics), Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A. When freezing cold is not cold enough New forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature Wednesday 17 November 2010 - 18h30 David Gross Nobel Laureate 2004 (Physics), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa-Barbara, U.S.A. Quantum Mechanics of the Very, Very Small and the Very, Very Large Thursday 18 November 2010 - 18h30 Alain Aspect CNRS senior scientist and Professor Institut d'Optique and Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France. From Einstein’s intuition to quantum bits: a new quantum age? Vendredi 19 novembre 2010 - 18h30 Rainer Blatt Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Austria The Quantum Way of Doing Computations
The last century has been a period of extreme interest for scientific research, marked by the overcoming of the classical frontiers of scientific knowledge.Research oriented towards the infinitely small and infinitely big, in both cases beyondthe borders of the visible. Quantum physics has led to a new Copernican revolution,opening the way to new questions that have led to a new view of reality. At the sametime, new theories have developed, involving every field of science, philosophy and art, rediscovering the link between unity and totality and the importance of humanpotential. In a transdisciplinary approach we consider quantum field theory, new ideason the concepts of vacuum and entanglement, metaphysical aspects of quantum revolution and the introduction of different interpretative approaches on the “Whole”.
Quantum mechanics is one of the great success stories of modern physics, making sense of the very small just as Einstein's theory of relativity made sense of the very large. But, for most students, the ideas that make quantum mechanics powerful can be confusing and counterintuitive. This volume in the Greenwood Guides to Great Ideas in Science series provides a history of quantum mechanics from the early breakthroughs of Planck and Einstein, at the beginning of the 20th century, to the present frontiers of quantum computing and quantum gravity. The approach is entirely non-technical, and is aimed at the general reader who may not have much mathematical background but who has a strong curiosity about some of the most important developments in modern science. Quantum Mechanics: A Historical Perspectivetraces the history of this powerful theory, including: ; The early discoveries by Max Planck and Albert Einstein regarding the quantization of radiation ; The early quantum theory, including Neils Bohr's theory of the atom ; The birth of modern quantum mechanics through the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Dirac and others ; Applications of quantum mechanics in chemistry, nuclear physics, electronics, and many other areas ; Recent work in quantum computation and quantum information theory The book emphasizes the fact that despite the great success of quantum mechanics, many exciting intellectual frontiers remain open for further researchers to explore. It includes a glossary, a timeline, and a bibliography of accessible resources for further research.
Abstract This chapter introduces the book by emphasizing how our perception of the universe is quite different from the actual laws that govern this universe. An attempt to understand the laws that govern our universe goes back to antiquity. The modern scientific revolution took place in the seventeenth century. All the phenomena that we observe in nature seem to follow the laws that were discovered by Newton, Maxwell, and others. Our intuition is based on these laws. The most remarkable developments that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century included Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. These laws, which are presented in this book, are highly counterintuitive and mysterious.
In 1935, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper introduced a new kind of two-particles quantum state, which was named 'entangled' by Schrödinger.Showing that measurements on both particles were strongly correlated even if the particles were widely separated, Einstein argued that the formalism did not describe all the elements of the physical reality, and he concluded that Quantum Mechanics was not complete.Bohr immediately opposed this reasoning, claiming that Quantum Mechanics was consistent as it was, and that it did not need to be completed, and even that it should not be completed.The discussion between Einstein and Bohr lasted until the death of the two giants, leaving the question unsettled.It was considered by most of the physicists only as an epistemological debate, holding on questions of interpretation, but without any practical consequence on how to use Quantum Mechanics.The situation changed in 1964, when Bell discovered that taking Einstein's point of view led to consequences in contradiction with the predictions of Quantum Mechanics in some (rare) situations.The debate was then displaced from the realm of epistemology to the one of physics, since it could be settled by experiments.After a series of experiments closer and closer to the ideal Gedankenexperiment, more and more physicists realized that entanglement was definitely weirder than any previous concept, and that it might be used for new ways of processing and transmitting information.This prompted the development of a new field, quantum information, which brings us into a new quantum age, and may change our society as dramatically as the first quantum revolution, which gave us integrated circuits and lasers, responsible for the development of the information and communication society.
Classical physics Quantum theory was produced roughly between 1900 and 1925; it changed our view of the Universe in a revolutionary way. Such is the central preoccupation of this book. Relativity was another revolutionary theory produced between 1905 and 1916; it is less central here. The clear implication of these statements is that, prior to 1900, there was an established body of theory that was widely successful and was thought to provide final answers to fundamental physical questions. This body of theory is known as classical physics . The above is a simplified account of the development of physics over the last few hundred years. There is a good deal of truth in it. By 1900, Newton's Laws of mechanics had been established for over 200 years; they had been overwhelmingly successful in describing a huge range of phenomena, both terrestrial and in the solar system. They were held to be among the greatest human achievements, indeed the very greatest strictly scientific achievement, and practically a direct revelation of divine intent, and by 1900 it seemed unthinkable that they could be challenged. The same could not quite be said of electromagnetism, an area of physics that encompasses electricity, magnetism and, as will be seen later in this chapter, optics. By 1900, what we now take to be the complete and final theory of classical electromagnetism , that of James Clerk Maxwell, was over 30 years old, and the discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz which was acknowledged to confirm the theory, more than ten years old.