Higgs' Boson? - We Have A Discovery

[Budapest]

http://curiosity.discovery.com/topic...mechanics1.htm

Thank you for that, Bryn.

[Budapest]

The question was rather more general than being limited to FETs. It's not difficult to find articles relating to the relationship between quantum mechanics and the early development of the transistor.

Certain types of transistors - mainly those used in integrated circuits - wouldn't work without quantum phenomena. Do you disagree with this?

People like me will also tell you that brains can't work without quantum phenomena. This is so obvious that I probably don't need to state it.

[teamsaint]

I wish I could understand Quantum Physics better.
It seems to me to be the way to understand conciousness , the most fundamental issue of all.................

[Gordon]

Sorry RM I did mean to stay out of this thread because I could see where it might go but Wilde-like I can’t resist temptation. Depends what you mean by Quantum as Prof Jode mighty have said. We have been using the word quantum in more than one context and more than one sense.

OB's response describes the history of where quantum mechanics originated. He didn't mention it, but could have [it's implicit early in that history], the Ultra Violet Catastrophe [a failure to explain Black Body Radiation in the ultra violet] which, at the end of the 19th C was a major block in understanding matter – remember that the electron was not discovered/isolated [In Liverpool] by Chadwick until 1932.

Physics in about 1900 still had a billiard ball model of “particles” - at that time atoms/molecules only – based on Boltzmann, thermodynamics and the Kinetic Theory of Gasses, but “Cathode Rays” were known before 1900 and these turned out to be electrons. This was as adequate then as perhaps Newton was before Einstein, just not accurate when pushed to limits. Electrons in vacuo were known but not in the “solid state” as such but the photo-electric effect – a wave, light, to particle, electron, ie current in a wire, transformation phenomenon was known much earlier [resistance of selenium affected by light] but not understood until Einstein post Planck in 1905. In this sense a “particle” is a name for a defined, self-contained packet or “quantum” [latin: amount] of energy, just that.

Many “particles” exist in the standard theory, all are manifestations of energy and all have “quantum” properties ie their interaction behaviour is limited to specific energy levels. Some are mediators and some are sort of “noble”. An exchange between two energetic systems involves the exchange of energy packets so that the total energy in the system to start is always the same as that at the end [macroscopically that is, Conservation Principle, energy accountancy, this doesn’t work at the Planck length], it’s just differently distributed through the agency of the mediating particles.

As a result of the impasse over the UVC, Max Planck, in a sort of desperation – or was it sheer genius - proposed the bizarre idea that if electrons were forced to only have energy levels that were on a fixed scale rather than continuous, which the old think assumed, the whole Catastrophe could be explained with a high degree of precision. Needless to say some scientists thought this was plain daft - trouble was, daft or not, it worked. Despite this bizarre idea other scientists like Pauli, Heisenberg and Schrodinger [he of the famous cat] not to mention Einstein and importantly Dirac, over the period 1900 to 1925 developed these strange ideas and gave them firm mathematical foundations, even inventing anti-matter in the process and reconciling to some extent the wave and particle views. It’s the most precise theory known to man and much of this is due to Feynman who put the final touches to Quantum Electro-Dynamics [QED] that explains very precisely how the EM force behaves and operates. Subsequently the weak and strong nuclear forces were also explained. Part of Feynman’s success was the method of Quantum Superposition – that an outcome is the sum over all the probabilities of all the possible outcomes. It works.

The Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment explains or demonstrates what quantum superposition is. A cat is in a sealed box, it has a deadly device that will kill it if a certain random event triggers it eg a random radioactive decay of a material inside the box. If we leave the box alone we do not know the fate of the cat, it could be dead or alive. The only way to find out is to open the box and then we will see for sure which state it is in. Now we have collapsed the experiment. Our prediction of the outcome before we open the box is some superposition of the outcomes – simple in this case because there are only two outcomes. So a priori the probabilities of death and life are equal if we believe that the cause of death is random. Quantum Entanglement in this case would imply that another identical box with a cat and a radioactive decay in it some distance away would find a strongly correlated result between the fates of both cats. Such things have been observed with electrons. A transistor circuit is set up in a box so that it switches on if a random event at its input triggers it. If we leave it alone we will not know whether it conducts or not until we look at our ammeter or a light bulb connected to it. When we do look we see the answer for certain. Quantum here implies uncertainty in prediction before the event and certainty after observation. That act of observation collapses the uncertainty – in that sense it is a quantum event. It doesn’t mean that the transistor cannot conduct. This “quantum” and the fact that electron energy levels in the material of transistor are “quantised” aren’t connected. The first quantum is about uncertainty in prediction.

Feynman went on to describe Quantum Computation which was an extension of his sum over all probabilities idea. Given some input state the computer would know all outcomes and their probabilities – a sort of parallel computer - and could predict outcomes but would collapse to a solution only when asked to do so. It would also exploit quantum entanglement. It is claimed that such devices could calculate certain classes of problem very much faster than conventional machines. I look forward to seeing one in PC World next week.

So, Yes, OB's comments are correct in that electrons are "quantum" entities because the energy levels in their interactions with protons when they form atoms are restricted, quantised, not continuously variable. In other words, an electron's behaviour in proximity to protons [whether one at a time or in crystal lattices] depends on its energy. When “stationary”, locked in an atom, it has “quantum” state energy peculiar to that state. [Hydrogen, the simplest eg is very simple] but also has some thermal, kinetic energy because the whole structure is “hot”. Heat the atoms up and the electrons boil off. Whether it is seen as a particle ["billiard ball"] or a wave [both appear to explain some of the behaviour of even a single electron - the double slit] the electron passes through a lattice because the energy states in the lattice and those of the electrons are compatible with conventional current flow, just as in copper wire, when a voltage is applied across the ends of the wire.

What Shockley et al at Bells Labs did in 1948 was make a device in which electrons could be made to behave in a similar fashion to those in a thermionic device [eg a valve] but in the solid state, not free field. All current is is a load of particulate electrons flowing together down a co-operative piece of conducting material eg copper or a series of waves diffracting down that same lattice. An insulating material prevents flow because the constituent atoms collectively do not co-operate with the electrons at all well.

So yes, transistors are “quantum” devices but so is all matter. This thread is about Higgs etc and general quantum mechanics. Heisenberg famously stated that at a certain level of scale one could not be precise about the properties of a piece of matter like an electron [or anything else]. Observation has inherent limits. You either can know with precision where it is but not where it’s going and how fast, or you can know which way and how fast but not where. Where is a wave located? Re-interpret a wave as a probability function. How does a single ball like particle go through two holes at the same time? It may have something to do with an inadequate understanding of time or simultaneity?

At large scales [the size of humans eg] this isn’t a problem because we are not dealing with small distances or scales. For the same reasons an elephant can’t suddenly become a lily BUT THE PROBABILITY IS NOT EXACTLY ZERO, it is just very, very, very, very small! [Douglas Adams got this just right!]. Similarly a transistor is very unlikely to suddenly stop conducting [or more practically stop amplifying your music] out of a fit of quantum pique. But reduce the number of electrons involved by reducing the feature size of the device and you run into statistical issues of not enough to sustain wanted behaviour all the time.

Quantum mechanics at a deep level is dominated by statistics/probabilities and that’s what made Einstein worry. “God does not play dice”. It looks as though he does at the very deepest levels of matter but not the macroscopic.

I’ll get my coat shall I?

[Bryn]

Certain types of transistors - mainly those used in integrated circuits - wouldn't work without quantum phenomena. Do you disagree with this?

Not in the least. My point was that all transistors, not just FETs, work due to properties which are described by quantum mechanics.

[Budapest]

At large scales [the size of humans eg] this isn’t a problem because we are not dealing with small distances or scales. For the same reasons an elephant can’t suddenly become a lily BUT THE PROBABILITY IS NOT EXACTLY ZERO, it is just very, very, very, very small! [Douglas Adams got this just right!]. Similarly a transistor is very unlikely to suddenly stop conducting [or more practically stop amplifying your music] out of a fit of quantum pique. But reduce the number of electrons involved by reducing the feature size of the device and you run into statistical issues of not enough to sustain wanted behaviour all the time.

Quantum mechanics at a deep level is dominated by statistics/probabilities and that’s what made Einstein worry. “God does not play dice”. It looks as though he does at the very deepest levels of matter but not the macroscopic.

I’ll get my coat shall I?

Gordon, don't put your coat on and leave just yet.

Douglas Adams came up with many pertinent jokes about physics in his Hitchhikers serious (which was always one of the most entertaining things about it for me).

Do you have any views about how the brain works? The usual stuff, 1s and 0s, binary computation, is obviously complete rollocks. I always use the example of a fly. A fly has, in relative terms, an incredibly simple brain (some people wouldn’t even call it a brain). Flies drive us mad, yet just look at their aerial acrobatics. All that darting around takes an incredible amount of computation, computation that even our most powerful computers couldn’t hope to match.

The only way a fly can do this is via multiple states/quantum superposition.

Next time you swat a fly think about that.

[MrGongGong]

e).

Do you have any views about how the brain works? .

Nothing like a simple question for a Friday evening then ?

[Lateralthinking1]

You can only try to comprehend the brain by using parts of the brain. Those parts are what enable us to have a concept of a physical body, a concept of a brain inside it, a language that can be applied to describe those concepts and an elaborate language, known as science, to describe the functioning of those concepts. This is not to criticise such interpretation.

But however much we perceive the brain as being real, able to be seen if removed from the body, and similarly able to be scrutinised and comprehended, the concept is internal. It has simply been extended to a perception that it is partially external. That perception is as much a construct of the brain as is the concept of a brain. In some ways, the perceived externalising of the brain brings it closer to us conceptually. In other ways, it makes it more distant being something of a wild goose chase.

It is my belief that everything we see as physical and external is concept. In that way all of living is no different from the concept of the brain itself. It comes as no surprise to me at all that quantum physics and related science have developed at the same time as the science focussed on the working of the brain, nor that each becomes more elaborate in attempting to describe phenomena that are still beyond comprehension. They are, in coming from the same concept, precisely one and the same.

In time we will have a neat set of answers to each. All the numbers will add up. All the connections will be made. It will lead to satisfaction. But then it will be realised that while the puzzles will have been solved, questions will still remain in essence wholly unanswered. That is because they will have been built on the notion of a separation of the internal and external when the real puzzle is not how such things function in interaction but why they should be perceived as not existing at the same source.

nb There is your answer as to how something can be something else or in one place and another. The more you delve into perceived external positioning and seek to nail it down, the more it will tell you that your conundrum is in the wrong place.

[Gordon]

Nothing like a simple question for a Friday evening then ?

Cambridge Nat Phil tripos question:

"Estimate the accelerations undergone by a fly alighting on a ceiling." Hmm. Or should I say Hummmm...

I agree, the aerobatics are deeply learned not computed, ie there are embedded algorithms that the fly doesn't have to "think" about like human knee jerk or blinking. We can go downstairs rapidly without thinking too much can't we? If we do try and think we fall down those stairs.

Flies are very efficient then and honed over billions of years perhaps by natural selection. It has to also have feedback from the wings etc as a servo mechanism too in order for the algorithm to work - deal with the vagaries of air density, wind etc. Analogue computer? I dread to think about the fate of those poor flies who crashed repeatedly 'cos they didn't get it! Perhaps they saw sense, gave up dumped the wings and became wood lice. That's intelligence.

I don't think our computing machines that work on binary arithmetic are how our brains do "calculations". They may be Turing machines but that device is very abstract. It needs a physical structure to host it. The elements of the brain are not transistors with only one pair of states. Neither is it a serial von Neumann calculator. There is a hint of parallel processing if not quantum computing and also a hint of architecture with co-processors to deal with, say, sight and hearing and locomotion. What is intuition? Learned from experience and so embedded algorithm like the fly?

Anyway, it's Saturday morning!

[Pegleg]

I don't think our computing machines that work on binary arithmetic are how our brains do "calculations". They may be Turing machines but that device is very abstract. It needs a physical structure to host it. The elements of the brain are not transistors with only one pair of states. Neither is it a serial von Neumann calculator. There is a hint of parallel processing if not quantum computing and also a hint of architecture with co-processors to deal with, say, sight and hearing and locomotion. What is intuition? Learned from experience and so embedded algorithm like the fly?
Anyway, it's Saturday morning!

My brain may be an advanced computational device, but it's doesn't mean I can get my head round quantum physics.

[teamsaint]

My brain may be an advanced computational device, but it's doesn't mean I can get my head round quantum physics.

I have a small pile of advanced computational devices in a corner our study which no longer compute in an advanced or any other way. They are all under 3 years old.

[Frances_iom]

I have a small pile of advanced computational devices in a corner our study which no longer compute in an advanced or any other way. They are all under 3 years old.

you really shouldn't let your grandchildren watch so much TV.

[teamsaint]

you really shouldn't let your grandchildren watch so much TV.

I don't (have them)and I wouldn't(let them). !
If I had my time again I wouldn't have a telly in the house when bringing up kids.
But I would spend the cash on a brilliant stereo so they could REALLY learn what is important !

[Quarky]

My brain may be an advanced computational device, but it's doesn't mean I can get my head round quantum physics.

I know the feeling!

[Gordon]

My brain may be an advanced computational device, but it's doesn't mean I can get my head round quantum physics.

It doesn't mean you can't either.

If the basic structure of a brain is similar to Einstein's the potential is there. Savants appear from time to time that have marvellous specific gifts which illustrates the scope of that potential but often it exposes a trade off. Normality could be a broad band ability across a range of fields of human existence with no one specific outstanding skill or ability that skews everything. Is this physical/physiological/genetic or is it something else? Ghosts in machines? If anyone mentions souls after this I'm off!!! My brain hurts enough already!

It seems to be about self organisation and the ability to programme itself to solve a wide range of "problems" some of which it is systematically exceptionally good at and others not. Accidental damage has shown that brains have considerable abilities to adapt. Expertise in any field means a long exposure to the associated problems and a lot of preparation and thinking about it and discussing it with others of a similar experience. Progress by means of trial and error.

What makes one person obsessional about a particular problem and others not. What is an aptitude?

I have tried to read Roger Penrose' book Shadows of the Mind [OUP 1994, Vintage paperback 2005] and have great difficulty with the language and concepts but there do appear to be some very interesting ideas in there that are worth persevering with. Be warned though it's tough going, first to get where he is coming from before being able to grasp where he goes. He has a great deal to say about quantum effects and quantum computing in this context. Reading it certainly changed my original idea of what quantum computing was/is/may be. That wiki article skims the surface by comparison.

Quote from page 394 [of 457] "Someday it may perhaps become possible actually to build a quantum computer [his italics], but at the moment these theoretical constructs [he has just described some eg quantum cryptography] are very far from practical realisation, and it is hard to predict when - or even whether - they might eventually be physically constructed [he gives a reference to Obermeyer, Nat Rev 1988]."

It seems Penrose wasn't rushing off to PC World either. If QC happened I think we'd hear about it in a flurry of glory that will make the Higgs business seem like a tea party. Then again, if it did, the military and NSA complex [or the Chinese equivalent?] would keep it very quiet!!