From a clockwork universe to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics

Before the turn of the 20th century, most people (physicists included) thought the universe ran like a clockwork machine. If you could measure the properties of the universe accurately enough, you could predict how it was to behave in the future. It was, in other words, "deterministic". Much of this was down to the ideas of Newton.

Newtonian mechanics

It's probably fair to say that no single individual has had a greater influence on the scientific view of the world than Sir Isaac Newton. He was a genius (a god in the physics world!), but like all genii he lived in his particular era of history. In 1543, a century before Newton's birth, Nicolaus Copernicus launched a scientific revolution by rejecting the prevailing Earth-centred view of the Universe in favour of a heliocentric view in which the Earth moved round the Sun. Galileo was summoned to appear before the Inquisition in 1633 charged with heresy for supporting Copernicus' ideas. As a result Galileo was "shown the instruments of torture".

Newton's great achievement was to provide a synthesis of scientific knowledge to explain why the planets went round the sun (among other things). He discovered a convincing quantitative framework that seemed to underlie everything else – he proposed his law of gravity. By combining this law with his general laws of motion, Newton was able to demonstrate mathematically that a single planet would move around the Sun in an elliptical orbit. For the first time, scientists felt they understood the fundamentals, and it seemed that future advances would merely fill in the details of Newton's grand vision.

An orrery – a mechanical clockwork model of the motions of the planets in the solar system

Newton's discoveries became the basis for much more study, and the upshot of this was a mechanical world-view that regarded the Universe as something that unfolded like clockwork – predictable and mechanistic. People thought that once this mechanism had been set in motion, its future development was, in principle, entirely predictable. Hence the Universe was thought to be "deterministic", and physicists felt very safe with this idea.

This mechanistic view still prevailed two centuries later (up to the end of the 19th century) as scientists continued to stand on Newton's large shoulders and think they just had to "fill in the details". For example, a stormy sea may look random and unpredictable, but this is just a consequence of its complexity and the huge number of water molecules involved. In the mechanistic view, if you had a big enough computer and accurate knowledge of the starting conditions, such a system would be entirely predictable.

Cracks in the clockwork

However, some cracks in Newtons clockwork mechanism were starting to appear. In the late 19th century, a number of discoveries happened that just couldn't be explained by the old model – including the discovery of the photoelectric effect by Heinrich Hertz (1887) and of the electron by J. J. Thomson (1897) and the fact that electric charge occurs in indivisible units called quanta (Millikan, 1909).

Along came Einstein in the early 20th century. He put forward new theories of gravity and energy (he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of Hertz's photoelectric effect). In 1913, Nils Bohr explained the discrete spectral emission lines of the hydrogen atom, again by using the idea of quantization and what later came to be known as "photons" (1926). The "quantum revolution" had begun!

Over the last 75 years or so, quantum mechanics has brought a profound change in human thinking, particularly around the notion of "indeterminism".

The quantum revolution

Quantum physics is concerned primarily with things at the microscopic scale such as atoms and molecules, and how they move and interact. In the quantum world we find a very serious kind of unpredictability that cannot be blamed on our ignorance of the details or our lack of computation clout. Instead it turns out to be a fundamental feature of nature. In the realm of atoms, all we can do is calculate probabilities for different outcomes – and we can never, even in principle, do any better.

A 3D quantum view of an atom formed of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, surrounded by electrons. Electrons aren't really in orbits, but more in fuzzy "probability zones" that look like shells and lobes.

One example is the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus. Unstable nuclei (e.g. uranium-238) will "spontaneously" decay into a more stable form by emitting a particle. Quantum mechanics allows us to predict with high accuracy the time after which half of a collection of unstable nuclei will have decayed (the half-life), but not when one particular nucleus will have decayed.

Strange behaviour

The problem is things at the quantum level just don't behave like things on a macroscopic level. One of the inherent differences is that single particles (like an electron) sometimes behave as if they're solid "particles" and sometimes behave as if they are waves. This paradoxical behaviour has been known since Thomas Young's double-slit experiment way back in 1805. The fact is they're both, and neither. The concept of a solid particle (like a snooker ball) is inadequate, and the idea of a wave (like a water wave) is also inadequate. What we call particles (like an electron) are really more like packets of wave-like energy and they just appear to behave differently in different circumstances.

We're taught at school that an atom is composed of a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus (similar in structure to the solar system). This model was introduced by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in 1913. It's a helpful way of thinking of things, but not entirely correct. The electrons are not balls whizzing around in an orbit. All we can say is that there's a certain region within which we're most likely to find the electron wave-packet when we look.

in 1927, Werner Heisenberg discovered what he called the "uncertainty principle". It says that one can never know at the same time the precise location and velocity of a "particle". The better you know one, the less certain you can be about the other. It's a consequence of their very nature.

Uncertainty

After hundreds of years of thinking of the Universe mechanistically, this old mindset has filtered down into society as a whole. We all, to some degree, view the world as acting like clockwork. If I do this, that happens; cause produces effect – it's safe, secure, predictable and dependable.

But reality isn't like that. Uncertainty and probability are built in.

Uncertainty, fuzziness, indeterminacy are wonderful things! In his essay on the "Seven Radical Principles of Wise Decision Making", Martin Boronson comments that it's because we deeply despise uncertainty that we value decisiveness so much. However it's in holding that uncertainty that and being ok with it that creativity can happen. "New ideas only emerge if we can sustain the tension and anxiety [of the uncertainty] and wait."

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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We're all made from stardust

We're all made from the same 96 elements (like carbon, nitrogen, etc). Actually humans are only made up of about 11 of those 96, but they're the same 11 as are found throughout the Universe. It's all the same stuff!

Have you ever thought about where all these elements come from? Maybe not! The answer is they all come from space, either being formed right back at the very beginning of the Universe or in stars that have born and died through the aeons. Quite literally we're all made from stardust.

I feel some astronomy coming on...

The entire Universe is one

To all intents and purposes, the theory and our latest observations agree that the beginning of the Universe started with a Big Bang. At the point of the big bang, everything was compressed into a single point of infinite density and infinite heat (which is really just energy). Everything in the entire Universe was once compressed together into a single point. Isn't that amazing – science shows we are all one.

As you might imagine, the explosion that followed was immense. The physics implies that the Universe underwent an incredible period of what's known as "inflation", where it increased in size by an enormous amount in a very very short time.

As the Universe then continued to expand and cool after this rapid inflation, the pure energy began to condense out into subatomic particles. In 1905, Einstein published his theory of special relativity, stating that energy is equivalent to mass (multiplied by the speed of light). Energy is equivalent to mass – it's another incredible concept! Essentially, mass (basically all "things") is just condensed, solidified energy. It blows my mind every time I think of it!

The Big Bang element factory

So as the Universe was cooling from it's infinitely high temperature, pure energy started solidifying into particles – first into things like quarks and other exotically named particles, then into more common or garden protons and neutrons, etc. At these high temperatures, a series of reactions started to convert single protons into atoms of hydrogen (two protons together) and helium (four protons and some neutrons), and a small fraction of lithium and beryllium. At the end of this cooling off period, the Universe contained about 75% hydrogen and about 24.99% helium.

So we've now got 4 of our elements (albeit not much of the other two). The big bang couldn't produce any elements heavier than beryllium due to a bottleneck in the reaction (as it happens, the absence of a stable nucleus with 8 or 5 nucleons).

The stellar element factory

Now we need to fast-forward about 200 million years to when the first stars formed. (This is a mere blink of the eye for the Universe, bearing in mind it is currently 13.5 billion years old.) So these large clouds of hydrogen and helium were floating around, getting bigger because gravity was pulling in more material, and gently cooling. Eventually, one clump somewhere deep inside one of these clouds got big enough to start collapsing in on itself. One of the things about gravitational collapse is that it really starts to heat things up. Right in the middle it got hot enough to start a totally new type of reaction – that of compressing 4 hydrogen atoms together to form helium. Stellar nuclear fusion was born and indeed the first star was born.

Stars can be thought of as giant furnaces that convert lighter elements to heavier elements and in the process release energy that radiates out (some of which we see). The reaction bottleneck that the plain Universe got stuck on was overcome in this fusion reaction.

Stars spend the majority of their life converting hydrogen into helium because it's extremely efficient, and there's so much hydrogen (even in a star like our own Sun) that this reaction can continue for billions of years. There are two main fusion reactions that are important inside of stars. For stars of small-medium size with (comparatively) low core temperatures, a reaction known as the p-p chain dominates. For medium-big starts with much higher core temperatures, a process known as the CNO cycle (standing for carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) dominates.

Both the p-p chain and the CNO cycle have the same effect though. Four protons are combined to form a helium atom, liberating energy (and a few other bits). The difference is that the CNO cycle requires the presence of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen to act as catalysts, thus producing energy more efficiently than in the p-p chain.

So where does this carbon, nitrogen and oxygen come from if all stars do is convert hydrogen into helium? Some of it is produced very near the end of a small-medium size star's life. The majority, however, is formed in a supernova.

The supernova element factory

A nova is a burst or explosion in a star. Some stars undergo regular nova outbursts. A supernova, as you might imagine, is a much bigger version of a nova, and it tends to be catastrophic. There are two main types of supernovae. The first happens when there are two stars in orbit around one another, and the more massive star is sucking material from the smaller one. At some point so much material accumulates on the bigger star that it can't cope with the pressure (literally) and it implodes. The second type concerns very massive single stars (typically bigger than around 8 times the mass of our Sun). These massive stars consume their hydrogen fuel fast. At the end of their lives, as the fuel runs out, the outward force holding the star up fades and again the star implodes. A supernova happens when the imploding material rebounds to produce one of the Universe's most energetic explosions.

Binary star where one star is sucking material from the other

It's in this second type of (so-called "core collapse") supernova that many of the heavier elements we know and love are formed. In fact all the elements from carbon up to and including iron are produced in supernovae through various processes. For example, large amounts of radioactive (and therefore unstable) nickel can be produced, which would quickly decay into stable iron.

The periodic table indicating the main origin of elements found on Earth (source).

For the elements heavier than iron another process is needed, and this is called r-process neutron capture (r for rapid). This can only work in the super-high density and high temperature conditions of a supernova. Lighter elements rapidly accumulate neutrons to create particular very heavy isotopes, which then decay to the first stable isotope. All the "heavy" elements from iron up to about plutonium are made this way.

The remnant of a core-collapse supernova explosion

When the supernova explodes, it blasts all this enriched material out into its environment. It stirs up the gas and mixes everything together. This is another reason why supernovae are so important – they get the newly enriched material back out into space.

Generations of stars forming and exploding

So let's say you have a big gas cloud that initially forms a few million stars. After some time a few of the big ones will go supernova. Leave it another few million years and some of that expelled gas will come together again and form a new generation of stars enriched by the previous generation of supernovae. After a few times through the cycle you collect up enough material to start forming rocky planets – and eventually (maybe) life.

Our Sun is thought to be a 3rd-generation star and has been shining for about 5 billion years.

Look around you right now. Everything you see is made of material that was forged in the furnace of past stars and supernovae. And who's to say that all this stuff may be swept up in some future event and incorporated in a new star and planet system...

As the Buddha said, all things are subject to change, even if it takes millions of years.

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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How I understand ki energy from outside myself

In my last article I was looking at my understanding of the phenomenon of energy (in the eastern chi/ki sense) and how I've come to see it as an (ex)scientist. I described my experiences of feeling waves or rushes, sometimes jolts, of pleasurable sensations travelling through my body during certain yoga or meditation practices, and concluded that these body-felt sensations are what I feel when the electromagnetic field in my body generated by the movement of electric current within my nerves and other cells comes into coherence. The reason why we don't all feel these is due to blockages and restrictions that have built up in our bodies over time (tight muscles, imbalances, etc), and a general lack of sensitivity.

I've been told for many years by various yoga and meditation teachers that it's not only possible to feel this ki energy moving within us, but it’s also possible to feel and even receive ki energy from sources outside yourself. As I said in the previous article, both in traditional Chinese medicine and modern physics, everything can be seen as a form of energy – but things being energy, and being able to receive that energy are two different things. So does this make sense?

Let's consider the chairs we're sitting on right now (assuming you are sitting on one!). The chair is made of solid matter (wood, metal, etc), which, as Einstein showed us, is just a form of energy (remember E=mc^2). Can I feel that energy? Sure I can – just by the mere fact that I'm still sitting on the chair and haven't passed straight through it means that my body is experiencing the physical energetic forces that make the chair solid. But does the fact my chair is really just energy mean there can be an exchange of that energy with me, or that I can feel that energy at a distance?

Well, I don’t have an answer about chairs yet, but as I've been tuning in to these shimmering, pulsing sensations in my body, my teachers have been encouraging me to see whether I can feel ki energy from other things – particularly organic things like people and plants, but also places.

And as crazy as it sounds, I can actually feel something! Trees have been a big source of these sensations.

London Plane tree

At first I would be in the park here in London and I'd try feeling a tree... Being acutely aware of how weird I might appear(!), I would would try approaching a tree surreptitiously when no one was looking and lightly touch the bark. Sure enough, whooff, waves of tingling, pulsing sensations would often (not always) ripple through my body. Some trees do it more than others (generally big old ones are best!). Now, when I really tune in, I can feel these familiar tingling sensations when I just come near a tree, or even stand under its branches – just being in its presence. I can't feel it every time, just when I'm trying to tune in, and I'm feeling particularly open. It happened pretty powerfully a week or two ago when I was standing between four very fine beech trees, and for the first time the other day with just a house plant!

Taoist masters throughout the centuries have observed that trees are tremendously powerful plants. Taoist master Mantak Chia explains how, in the Taoist view, trees are seen to be constantly in meditation and are natural processors of ki energy. The best trees for healing, they say, are big trees, especially pines and those growing near running water. But again, all this is ideas and beliefs. How do you explain it?

It turns out that, like animals, plants too have electrically charged cells (so-called cell action potentials) and use them to rapidly send signals through the plant. This came as a surprise to me. So plants generate their own electromagnetic field as well… (Apparently by attaching electrodes to the leaf and root they be made to sing.) When you think about it, we all know that plants depend on light, which is just electromagnetic energy, for their nourishment. We learn that at school. They photosynthesise the carbon monoxide in the air together with water that they draw up from the earth and the energy from sunlight into sugars and proteins – and oxygen which they expel.

So sensing the bioelectromagnetic field (or ki energy) of a plant doesn’t sound so weird, even when it’s at a distance. And the fact that plants can excite a response in your own bioelectromagnetic field also doesn’t sound so strange. I think of it like a form of induction, like how your electric toothbrush charges or how an induction hob works. Changes in the field of one object influences the field of the other.

My teachers also say that one can feel and receive ki energy from the Earth. In fact one of the first times I felt these strong energy pulses I've mentioned was when doing what my yoga teacher Jonathan Monks calls the root meditation. As he describes it, this is about opening your root (the energetic centre in your pelvic floor) so that you can connect with and receive the energy of the Earth. The sensation was clear enough, but energy in the Earth...?

It's known that the Earth's magnetic field is generated by electric currents moving through the highly conductive layer of molten iron alloys in the planet’s outer core. The currents are formed as the molten iron moves around due to convection. But how this relates to potential ki energy at the surface of our planet is much harder to understand. Some people talk about ley lines being paths of energy in the ground, some people about feng shui and the harmonisation of ki in the wind, water, stars, and earth.

Personally I haven’t found a way of understanding Earth energy yet. I feel it in my root (pelvic floor), in the soles of my feet on the ground, and in my hands when they’re on the ground, but that’s all I can say.

As always, your comments are very welcome - here on the blog, on FB or by e-mail. More on this in the weeks to come...!

I got an article in Nature!

I was asked some time ago to write a News & Views article for Nature on a recently accepted Nature paper titled "Suppression of star formation in the galaxy NGC 253 by a starburst-driven molecular wind" by Bolatto et al. This was very exciting since it's pretty much any scientists dream to publish in Nature! Ok it's not a full article, but still, it's Nature! ...and it's pretty much the last thing I'll do for astronomy.

News & Views articles are written for a non-specialist audience, describing a full science paper in that same journal edition - what the authors did, the scientific context, the paper's shortcomings and strengths, implications and future directions, etc.

So here it is for posterity. "How to catch a galactic wind" by Mark Westmoquette.

The nice thing is they also featured it on their front cover!

The Yoga of Time Travel

This week I wanted to review a book I've just finished reading called "The Yoga of Time Travel" by Fred Alan Wolf PhD.

I was lent this book by someone at our Zen group. It piqued my interest as it's on that physics-spiritualism border. In true Amazon style, I'd give it 4 stars (out of 5): It's well written, has some fascinating concepts in there that were certainly new to me, he does a great job of explaining special and general relativity with regards to weird space-time effects and time dilation, and he attempts to connect all this to a number of interesting spiritual aspects. I'm not giving it 5 stars because it's obvious he hasn't gone very deep into the spiritual side of things (his understanding is noticeably superficial), and the connections he tries to make between the hard physics of time travel (what's allowed by quantum physics and relativity) and the spiritual experiences he discusses are not so easy to follow. Plus, he totally confused me in his discussion of transportable wormholes where two people remain holding hands but get separated by space and time!

According to his website and wikipedia, Fred Wolf got his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. His field of research was high atmospheric particle behavior following a nuclear explosion. As time went by he got interested in the relationship between human consciousness, psychology, physiology, the mystical, and the spiritual. Now he's nicknamed "Dr. Quantum"(!) and writes books on the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness.

One of the things in the book I found the most interesting relates to our perception of time. We all have those periods where it feels like time is going at a snails pace (e.g. waiting for somebody) or when time absolutely flies (e.g. when we're enjoying ourselves). As modern humans we have come to measure time using a clock - in the old days using the back-and-forth swing of a pendulum as the yard-stick (as it were), or nowadays the vibrations of an electrified quartz crystal (e.g in your watch) or the resonant transitions of electrons in an atom (in an atomic clock). But who's to say which is the truer measure of time? We have come to think our perception of time passing is distorted when what we feel is different to what the clock says.

And that brings me onto another of the things he discusses. What really is time? One of the first physical measurements that set the "direction of time's arrow" came at the beginning of the industrial revolution. It was found that hot things cool down and in doing so heat up cooler things; you cannot heat up a cold object without doing work (the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).

"Put the thermodynamic arrow of time together with the energy required for manual labor and you come up with the time-clock punch - the means to measure the working person's wage. Linear time became the ultimate frame upon which Western culture determines its technological progress, its labor laws, and its riches, or lack thereof."

Later in the book he suggests that our internal concept of time arises through sequential focussing and de-focussing on particular points in space-time (a thought, action, moment of reality). "Our conscious experience consists of a sequence of these focal points, sites of more specific focus separated by sites of unfocussed possibilities." … "Focal points are places in space-time where objective awareness occurs and the more blurred sites are places where objective awareness diminishes but subjective awareness persists. [Converting] a possibility into a probability corresponds to the process that produces a focussed point or "sudden awareness", while a blurred site [represents] "unawareness" or unconsciousness."

In meditation, we encourage the de-focussing or blurring aspect, "letting go of fixed ideas I have about myself and others". Moving from a more blurred to less blurred state would represent moving forward in time, whereas increasing de-focus would conversely imply moving backward in time. Letting go implies increasing the uncertainty of an event in space-time, and, essentially, travelling backwards in time. "When we let go of old habits, we also move backwards in time... our subjective time-sense [runs] counter to objective time." - These connections between blurring and time travel are what I find less easy to understand.

Interestingly he says that travel backwards in time is not at all forbidden in quantum mechanics - and may actually be necessary for certain physical phenomena. He says that this naturally leads on to the concept of parallel universes (which he discusses quite a lot), and this is how we can solve the apparent paradoxes that arise through time travel.

After all this I'm definitely interested to read more from him, like his latest book "Time Loops And Space Twists" or "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" by Henry Stapp.