Weird Science

[thelerner]

This is an interesting article on cutting edge physics that defy sense and science -

6 Scientific Discoveries That Laugh in the Face of Physics - http://www.cracked.com/article_19668_6-scientific-discoveries-that-laugh-in-face-physics_p2.html

 

Here's an excerpt of #5: 

 

"..Over the course of a day spent observing some unstable uranium, scientists in Texas noticed something strange. Uranium is unstable and decays over time in a process called radioactive decay. And when they left it alone, unwatched in the petri dish, the uranium did as it was told. But whenever they tried to watch it, the uranium just sat there not really doing anything, like a pot of water mocking an old spinster from a burning stovetop.

 

The second day came and the same thing happened; the uranium that should have been breaking apart like a sandcastle getting pounded by the waves of each passing second just sat there mocking them. The lab reported their findings to other labs, presumably after putting each other through rigorous psychiatric testing. And somehow, against all reason and logic, it turned out the initial experiment wasn't just everything in Texas being crazy like usual. Everyone else saw the same thing. Certain particles will never decay if you're observing them, which means that you can essentially stop time by paying attention to certain particles.

 

The paradox defies the law of entropy, as well as common sense, logic and we're pretty sure the Harry Potter universe. This is the equivalent of taking photos of your child so much that she doesn't age, or staring at last night's turkey dinner so that it won't go bad.

 

We know that certain unstable elements decay. We have evidence of it everywhere in nature. But put them under a microscope and they seize up like a dog who refuses to do the trick you taught him when the neighbor's watching. Except radioactive isotopes aren't supposed to be able to notice stuff like the giant eyeball staring at them behind that plate glass window.

 

So in case you ever feel like we've got the universe figured out, keep in mind that in certain conditions, the universe appears to be actively keeping secrets from us."

 

 

The other sections are just as interesting. 

[joeblast]

defies the law of entropy, eh *burnshands*

 

I'd say one asserting that might just have an incomplete definition of what's included in those laws of entropy

[thelerner]

If entropy is being disrupted by rude stares then we should take notice.

 

I'm usually suspicious of 'quantum' explanations, especially when people try applying quantum phenomena happening at or near sub atomic levels to every day life.  But depending on how accurate this is, and I can't vouch for it; if observation is keeping uranium from decay that's pretty interesting, some mechanism is keeping uranium fresh or sorta stopping time around it. 

 

I regard Masaru Emoto's work on messages in water crystals as new age fluff.  I'm pretty sure his theories such as writing  positive words on a rice canister keeping it fresher then a control has been debunked.  Yet this article is saying a scientist's gaze is holding back a natural process of decay.  And that its replicated in other labs. 

 

If so, maybe we should take a closer at the nature of such decay and observation and see what other tricks this phenomena might apply to. 

[Brian]

Not only a poor understanding of entropy but also expecting "particles" to behave like billiard balls.

[Marblehead]

If we hold no expectations we will never be disappointed.

[Brian]

The more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know...

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics

[Andrei]

And moreover "observing" a particle does not mean "staring" at it. You can stare as long as you want at uranium and still you will be dead by the radiation it is emitting, and by the way that radiation is the matter that is decaying. But "observing" and "measuring" in technical language involves some sensors which contains some electro-mechanical systems that indicate some numbers from some energy exchange between uranium particles and other materials. The principle of uncertainty in quantum mechanics is about that, not that if you stare at uranium it stops decaying, it is just about you can't measure its quantum states. It's a totally different thing but depending how you word it it can be interpreted in so many ways.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

Edited October 24, 2016 by Andrei

[Marblehead]

I'm glad I never got much interested in quantum stuff.  I would have pulled out all my hair by now.

[Brian]

I'm glad I never got much interested in quantum stuff. I would have pulled out all my hair by now.

I'd encourage you to try wrapping your head around Newton first.

[thelerner]

Course the original article was a writers (a sharp one) take on physics question.  Keep in mind they are writing for entertainment and zeno quantum paradox is a really cool name, legitimate and pretty strange.

 

On the other hand, here is physic scientist rebuttal to the whole article: Defending Science Against Cracked.com - http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/01/30/defending-physics-against-crac/

 

Rebuttal to what I posted-

2.) The Particle That Knows We’re Watching.

Radioactive decay, the process that allows an unstable atomic nucleus to transmute into a different element, is one of the slowest physical processes known to man. Often taking billions of years, radioactivity is built on a foundation of quantum mechanics, where a metastable nucleus must quantum mechanically tunnel into a less energetic, more stable state.

Image credit: retrieved from Aggeli K at BrightHub.com.

 

It isn’t easy, as you can imagine, because there’s no good way to get up-and-over the proverbial hill; it isn’t like those protons and neutrons just spontaneously align into that less energetic configuration! What you need to remember is that each of these particles that make up the nucleus are quantum mechanical in nature: they’re not just particles, but they’re waves, too. And waves spread out over time, where they can attempt to tunnel into that more stable (post-decay) state. Every once in a while, after enough time has passed, a nucleus will find its way into that state, and when that happens, you get a decay!

Image credit: Chi LF collaboration, from John von Neumann Institute

 

But it takes time to get there. If you’re too impatient, and you can’t wait, you might be tempted to look right away. Only, you know what happens in quantum mechanics when you make an observation: you collapse the wavefunction into one particular state! So if you can’t help yourself from making observations, what you’re basically doing is resetting the clock every time you look!

Image credit: Peter Byrne / Scientific American.

 

If you’re cracked, you’ll lament that this is like the watched teapot that never boils. While if you’re a physicist, you know the teapot boils, but the nucleus won’t decay unless you stop continually collapsing its wavefunction!"

 

 

me> that last sentence seems to back up the weirdness of the phenomena.   "but the nucleus won't decay unless you stop continually collapsing its wavefront!" .. It'll take me a while to try to grok that.  This sentence is as crazy strange as the phenomena they're defending against, ie "Only, you know what happens in quantum mechanics when you make an observation: you collapse the wavefunction into one particular state! So if you can’t help yourself from making observations, what you’re basically doing is resetting the clock every time you look!"

 

He's basically saying we collapse wavefunction by looking at them.?  Is this an accepted interplay between human observation (consciousness) and the quantum world?  I seem to remember Schroeders cat was originally created to make fun of this kind of paradox.  (Also I recall the Big Bang was named ironically by someone who didn't believe in it, to make fun)

 

addon>

Course going to wikipedia on Observer effect- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_%28physics%29#Quantum_mechanics to hunt down wavefunction, what is it?  We find: "..But the wave function ψ is not a physical object like, for example, an atom, which has an observable mass, charge and spin, as well as internal degrees of freedom. Instead, ψ is an abstract mathematical function that contains all the statistical information that an observer can obtain from measurements of a given system. In this case, there is no real mystery that mathematical form of the wave function ψ must change abruptly after a measurement has been performed."

 

So the wave function is an abstract mathematical function that contains information..?

[dawei]

What am I missing.... isn't this just the "observer effect" ?

 

How Does Observing Particles Influence Their Behavior?

[TheWhiteRabbit]

What about the Halo effect?

[blue eyed snake]

well...I think to say that something is either a particle or a wave...doesn't sound right.

It's two theoretical models to describe what we ( seem) to perceive happening.

So my tentative conclusion is that whatever we perceive, it's neither particle nor wave....

 

here is Schrodinger's cat for dummy's   I need to look at it at least twice to more or less get it, but maybe I'm just dumb in that department

 

 

 

 

further I'll leave this topic to our brainy Brian

[Marblehead]

I'd encourage you to try wrapping your head around Newton first.

 

The simple observing of nature seems to be serving me quite well, but thanks for the suggestion.

[Brian]

well...I think to say that something is either a particle or a wave...doesn't sound right.

It's two theoretical models to describe what we ( seem) to perceive happening.

So my tentative conclusion is that whatever we perceive, it's neither particle nor wave....

 

here is Schrodinger's cat for dummy's   I need to look at it at least twice to more or less get it, but maybe I'm just dumb in that department

 

 

 

 

further I'll leave this topic to our brainy Brian

Not sure anything more need be said...

[joeblast]

lots of interesting things regarding probability and what happens when what can be known about a given event or set of events changes

[Andrei]

I am not a physicist but I had some quantum physics courses in university and I remember some stuff.

It is all about interpretation and this is how I understood this.

 

The uranium decay is like this:

So Uranium basically loses alpha and beta particles and becomes something else, the number represents how many protons and neutrons they have.

 

Like for example Uranium 238 loses 2 protons and 2 neutrons which is a nucleus of He and becomes Thorium 234

But by losing 2 protons U 92 becomes Th 90 (which indicates the number of protons it has.)

But if you lost 2 protons you have 2 electrons which are excited, they have energy stored which is no more balanced by the proton, so

Everytime you loose or gain an electron actually you loose or gain an excited electron, which means that electron has some energy, which is a photon or more. A photon is the smallest quantity of energy you can have hence the name quanta, and is represented by Plank constant in equations.

http://www.atnf.csiro.au/outreach/education/senior/cosmicengine/sun_nuclear.html

 

 

Now what is this energy you loose or gain, is basically a photon. Anything in the Universe exchange energy through photons.

I cannot see you if you don't give me a photon, but every time you give me a photon, your electrons state change from a higher state to a lower state, because the electrons give up the photons. Every time you give me an electron is because that electron was excited with a photon coming somewhere else from the Universe, from the Sun or from some other star, and once excited raises to a higher energy level which is unstable and leaves the proton that binds him and goes out into Universe.

 

These states are the wave functions, they are vibrations of spherical shapes. The electrons stay around a proton in a shape of a sphere and if they receive a photon they start vibrating on that sphere.

 

This is a linear wave, but in a plane a wave function looks like that, depending on the energy state:

 

 

 

Imagine a drop falling on a surface of water, while you consider each drop the smallest quantity of energy you can have:

 

This is a lower energy excitation 

 

And this is a higher energy excitation:

 

And this is how the wave function looks in a sphere:

 

The higher the number of waves the higher the energy it contains

 

This is how the wave functions look like in Hydrogen but in Uranium is much more complicated, and they represent stable states, which means they can be like that forever if they are not excited by other photons:

 

The unstable states means they have to change to fit into stable waves shapes.

 

So in a nutshell, to see or observe or measure something you have to give or take at least one photon which means the wave state has to change from a level of energy to another level of energy, which means whatever you measured it is not anymore like it was, it changed, it transformed.

 

If you wait for a natural process, like waiting Uranium decay by itself it takes a long time, but if you want to do it faster you have to excite it and by doing this you change the time scale, what they say you reset the clock, because you add photons to the system and the system is in a different state than it would be in a natural environment. 

[Andrei]

The excitation happens like this:

 

Edited October 25, 2016 by Andrei

[Brian]

lots of interesting things regarding probability and what happens when what can be known about a given event or set of events changes

Yeah, most people have only the vaguest notion of fundamental probabilistic principles but we tend to think we grasp them on an intuitive basis. I have to confess to having made some money from college students in bars in years past with the Monty Hall paradox.

[joeblast]

hehehe....ok, so the way I understand this is that we're seeing a weak force manifestation here, that is what is responsible for the particle decay.

 

what actually happens, when you start looking at the quantum chromodynamics of this, is that a weak force emission pretty much involves one of the quarks inside of a proton or neutron to spontaneously flip its charge, with the new qqq triplet having lost roughly the massenergy of the lepton emission.

 

its almost like the act of observing prevents the waveform from collapsing inside the diameter of the weak force interaction

[Brian]

Yeah, most people have only the vaguest notion of fundamental probabilistic principles but we tend to think we grasp them on an intuitive basis. I have to confess to having made some money from college students in bars in years past with the Monty Hall paradox.

Just for accuracy, I should have said "three-card problem" instead of "Monty Hall paradox" -- the former is really easy to do at a bar while the latter is harder to coordinate with drunks.

 

A fair warning, though -- be prepared for someone to get pissed off...

 

EDIT: There are plenty of other counter-intuitive realities to give people headaches, of course -- "a son born on Tuesday" as an example. The point being that we don't need to delve into the realm of eigenstates to demonstrate that reality often ain't what you think it is...

Edited October 25, 2016 by Brian

[Nungali]

I'm glad I never got much interested in quantum stuff.  I would have pulled out all my hair by now.

 

if you were interested in radioactive stuff  ..... it would have fallen out by now .

[Stosh]

Would I be correct to presume, that after observing the electron, and allowing it to pass through the slit, that at some farther distance , one would again see an interference pattern, from a second slit pair ? OR is the collapsed wave function similar to polarizing a photon? where the photon would proceed perpetually as a defined -collapsed wave function , until being absorbed by something....( if that happens)

Edited October 25, 2016 by Stosh

[Marblehead]

if you were interested in radioactive stuff  ..... it would have fallen out by now .

 

Actually, I was around that stuff when in the Army.  I was often tasked with the responsibilities of CBR (chemical, radiological, biological) NCO (Boss Man) in most of the units I was assigned to.  A few of the units has samples so that I could check the calibration of the detectors.

 

It didn't do anything to my hair but it made me sterile.

[joeblast]

Would I be correct to presume, that after observing the electron, and allowing it to pass through the slit, that at some farther distance , one would again see an interference pattern, from a second slit pair ? OR is the collapsed wave function similar to polarizing a photon? where the photon would proceed perpetually as a defined -collapsed wave function , until being absorbed by something....( if that happens)

observation after the slit is collapsing the wave function there - no interference pattern