Feynman and what comes next...

As you may be aware of, I am a Feynman aficionado:

1. My scientific motto is a (not so famous) quote of Feynman: "All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper - that's all!"
2. My Twitter visual profile is dedicated to him.
3. I love viewing videos of his lectures or his interviews.
4. I regularly go across his written works.
5. I've spotted errata in his Physics Lectures, volume III (Quantum mechanics), most of them typo, but some substantial errors.

Curiously, I discovered him relatively late. When I followed quantum mechanics courses at university (somewhere between 1985 and 1989), my courses didn't refer to his lectures. I consider that as a missing. It was only after I took time to dig deeper into the quantum foundations (after 1996) that I came across his works. Reading his works was so enlightening for my comprehension of the fundamental laws of nature, that there are pieces that I could read tens of times and each time I would learn new things. Or better said: approach known things from a new point of view.

Feynman is deservedly one of the most quoted people (at the Selected Pages section of Wikiquote, he figures along with people like Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius, Einstein, Jesus or Shakespeare...). His words are inspiring and often explain physical truths in plain language, comprehensible to the layman. As for all quotes, there is a caveat: they must not be seen as an absolute truth. Or as Feynman stated it himself: Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.

Very early I was skeptic about one of Feynman's most famous quotes: nobody understands quantum mechanics. This is often requoted in a more or less transformed way (for example Dawkins' version: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"). Does this quote have a general and definitive value of truth? Or was it just that Feynman didn't know of anyone who could explain quantum mechanics in an understandable common sense way?

Chapter 1 of Feynman's quantum lectures gives some insight in the reasons of his belief that nobody understands quantum mechanics: "We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics." He goes on to describe the double-slit experiment (with electrons), showing that it is impossible to think of waves alone or of bullets alone (such explanations have been taken over by popular media like that given by "Granddaddy of all Quantum Weirdness"). And Feynman concludes with "No one has found any machinery behind the law. No one can explain any more than we have just explained. No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation." These are terrible sentences when repeated to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of physics students since 1965. They mark a halt for any further investigation of the subject.

Fortunately, there are inventive unconventional physicists. There were already deeper theoretical representations given by physicists like De Broglie or David Bohm, showing how a particle may be directed by a guiding wave and thus yield all the experimental results of the double slit experiment, but this had never been put to proof during their lifetime with an experimental model.

Today, I think I can safely say that the quote "nobody understands quantum mechanics" is experimentally outdated. Couder and Fort, two French physicists, experimented with bouncing droplets on a liquid subtract and discovered that they exhibited quantum behaviour, without looking for any quantum analogy:

• droplet travelling in its wave,
• diffraction and interference patterns of travelling droplets similar to photon and electron diffraction patterns,
• attraction and repulsion of droplets embedded in their waves,
• symmetric and anti-symmetric orbital motion of droplets.

Visuals presented by Couder are breathtaking. Even if you don't understand french, I highly recommend watching bouncing droplets orbiting around each other (for example at 25:35 of his 2006 presentation).

An upcoming paper of Couder's group in Physical Review Letters even suggests a quantum tunneling analogy with ordinary droplets: "Unpredictable tunneling of a classical wave-particle association", by A. Eddi, E. Fort, F. Moisy, and Y. Couder.

So today, Feynman's defeatist words about nobody understanding quantum mechanics are outdated. Please, experimental physicists, go ahead, be inventive and focus on experiments where ordinary macroscopic individual particles simulate quantum behaviour, polarization, bosonic and fermionic behaviour, inward bound forces, entanglement, quantum erasure, coupling of ordinary particles to their pilot-wave fields (gravitation, electromagnetism). Because all these quantum phenomena may be rationally understood with the help of experimental models. It's just a matter of inventivity. And we "will find someday that, after all, it isn't as horrible as it looks." ~ Feynman's Epilogue to his Lectures on Physics.

First video sequence of Common Sense Quantum Physics

Today I published my first video sequence presenting Quantum Physics intuitively. I hope to have another six or seven sequences mixing theoretical and experimental analogies.



Here is the videoscript:

Hello, I'm Arjen, the Common Sense Quantum Physicist. My goal is to bring Quantum Mechanics nearer to intuition. As an introduction, we'll look at a characteristic property of light : the polarization. Light may be polarized in some cases, that means that it can take a characteristic orientation.

For example, the sunlight reflected from this surface is polarized in such a way that it is filtered by these sunglasses if I wear them horizontally on my nose. If I turn my head, I am dazzled by the reflected light.

So, how could we explain this ?

Firstly, we need to know that a polaroid film is deposited on these sunglasses. A polaroid film is in fact a bunch of molecules that are arranged parallelly on the glass of the spectacles.

Secondly, we take advantage of a scientific representation of light. Light is composed of tiny particles, that we call photons. In quantum physics, a photon is represented by a little spinning arrow. One way to understand light is then to visualize it as a flux of little spinning arrows guided by a wave. When an arrow bounces from a reflecting surface, it affects its spinning direction. Before the reflection, the arrow is spinning in a random direction. The reflecting surface then rearranges that in a definite spinning direction and the polaroid film filters the photons depending on their spinning direction.

Let us simulate this polaroid filtering with ordinary objects.

Firstly, we have this safety barrier representing the polaroid film on the sunglasses.

Secondly, we have this rotating rod that represents the spinning arrow. If the rod is spinning perpendicularly to the rails of this barrier, it will nearly never pass the grid... If the rod is spinning parallelly to the grid, the probability is much higher. If it is spinning in any other direction, it is just a matter of probability.

So this experiment learns us two important things about the behaviour of the particles composing light.

Firstly, a photon is represented by a rotating arrow. The photon is a prototype of all quantum particles, in fact it is the simplest of all quantum particles. While in ordinary classical mechanics, particles are represented by points or spherical objects, like bullets or tennis balls, in Quantum Mechanics, the objects are represented by rotating arrows or rods or baseball bats, scientists say vectors. This constitutes the core of Quantum Mechanics. A very famous physicist, Richard Feynman, once presented Quantum Mechanics as the science of drawing arrows. You'll find that in this very clear presentation of Quantum ElectroDynamics : " All we do is draw arrows, that's all ".

The second important thing that we learn through this experiment is that quantum measurements are a matter of probability. The quantum rules do not give certainty about the result of an experiment. Quantum Mechanics only give odds about measurements under given conditions.

So remember these two important facts when dealing with light...

[1] photons are best represented by little arrows and

[2] measurement on these arrows is a matter of probability.

Next time, we'll look at how we may characterize the physics of quantum particles.

SPQR - Simplify Physics's Quantum Rules

In my introduction post, I qualified quantum physics as being nearer to intuition than classical physics. As this is not a widespread opinion, this needs some explanation. Understand me well, I don't say that quantum physics is better understood than classical physics. I merely infer that, because quantum physics deals with elementary particles, its principles should be easier to grasp than the classical principles. But as our reasoning has been formatted since our first physics classes into a classical mould, we are not trained to analyse the ordinary world quantum-mechanically.

The framework of classical physics did not emerge easily during the course of history. It took many efforts from men like Newton (represented by Gotlib in the image), Lagrange or Hamilton to formulate classical principles. Newton had the exceptional capacity to put the classical laws into a few comprehensive sentences. Let us remind his three laws:

1. Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
2. The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.
3. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

As far as I know, an analogous clear and simple formulation of quantum physics does not exist. There are some tries of physicists like Feynman that are on the good path, see for example his 3 general principles concerning probability amplitudes (in chapter 3 of his Quantum Lectures on Physics) or his explanation of path integrals with rotating arrows (in QED). But we have not yet succeeded to express the quantum laws in an ordinary way like Newton expressed the classical laws. We are very much in need of Simplifying Physics's Quantum Rules, in order to make it more accessible to populusque. Why not take our inspiration from Newton? Let me have a try. Newton considered translational motion. Quantum evolution is about the phase change of arrows, i.e. self-rotational (spinning) motion of arrows. So we could put it in this way:

1. Every arrow-like body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform spinning motion, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
2. The change of spinning motion is proportional to the perturbative force impressed.
3. The mutual actions of two spinning arrow-like bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

That's nearly all about the fundamental laws of quantum physics. The first two laws may be formulated as evolution laws with a constant angular velocity and a position dependent force potential. The complex factor i merely expresses that the orientation of the vector difference between two subsequent orientations of the spinning vector AB is perpendicular to AB. The main difference between quantum and classical mechanics appears then to be that QM addresses spinning (absolute) motion while CM addresses translational (relative) motion.

If quantum physics is introduced in such a way to beginners, I guess they would gain faster insight into quantum behaviour without being hindered by classical reasoning.

More about it at the related wikiversity project.

Why 'Common Sense' Quantum Physics?

Quantum Physics is generally presented as a weird, non intuitive field of Physics. The domain of application is however that of the simplest systems: discrete particles evolving in a carefully controlled environment. Such systems therefore obey the most fundamental laws of physics. And who says "fundamental" says: simple, intuitive, common sense, natural... My conviction is that quantum laws are the simplest way to express how nature behaves. Or said otherwise: quantum physics is intuitive, with respect to classical physics that is artificially constructed. In order to see this, we must however approach Quantum Physics in a perspective that remains unexplored. Rather than to try to link it to classical and relativistic physics, we ought to take a more direct way.

I love the way Feynman presents Quantum Physics. In his renowned public lecture QED: The Stange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), he says: You will have to brace yourselves for this - not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper - that’s all! That's the essence of Quantum Physics: arrows. Mathematicians call arrows vectors, and there are very advanced, abstract ways to describe operations on such objects. But the mathematical artillery must not hide the fact that physically, we are handling with very simple objects: objects that are alike arrows, or rods, or needles, or ballpens, or baseball bats.

A child knows intuitively how such objects behave. Tintin's cartoon "Ottocar's scepter" shows a comic situation, in which the clue consists in correctly inferring how such an object could pass through a grid. In order to make sense of Quantum Physics, we'll have to brace ourselves for this: all we do is draw little arrows. So how could arrows help us to grasp the essence of Quantum Physics? The first thing is maybe to re-read Feynman's QED, or just visioning its 4 QED public lectures: http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8. Than just think about it.

There is not simpler a particle than a photon (apart maybe of a neutrino which is experimentally equivalent to a photon with zero frequency):

• it has no inertia, its departing velocity with respect to the emitter is always the same (provided it does not find obstacles on its way),
• it has a very simple polarization, when correctly oriented, it passes through a wire grid,
• when constrained between two limits, its frequency may take only discrete values,
• many photons with the same polarization may be beamed together,
• in the quantum ocean of other quantum particles (essentially other photons or neutrinos), one photon creates and interacts with (we say interfers with) the wave it generates in that ocean (physicists speak of a field).

Such a particle may be represented by a rotating arrow whose rotational plane has a constant orientation between two obstacles.

This common sense way of interpreting Quantum Mechanics is explored at Wikiversity/Making_Sense_of_Quantum_Mechanics.