Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners like you! Ask your questions@danielandjorge.com
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Hey Daniel, We've been answering listener questions for.
Years, right, yeah, more than five five years?
Actually, wow, that's wild. But do you think it's making a difference? Like are we making a dent in humanity's understanding of the universe?
You know, I think every time we answer one person's question, we move all of humanity forward. A tiny little bit forward towards what towards the forefront of human knowledge? And what's there the vast abyss of our confusion.
I was gonna say, I there are treats there, like do you get a lollipop?
No, it's mostly just a bunch of scientists scratching their head eating lollipops. Sometimes that's all you can do.
But can you sense humanity moving forward a little bit? Each time you answer a question?
I guess so. I mean the nature of questions we get has been changing. Sometimes people ask follow up questions to answers to other people's questions.
Wow, so we're moving forward. That's pretty cool. But what happens when we reach the edge of your understanding and humanity's understanding?
Then we declare success and I.
Retire as a physicist or as a podcast?
Yes? And yes, but.
Wait, if we reach that point, don't we need more physicists.
If we reach that point, then everybody's a physicist.
And then everyone gets to lollipop and the podcast.
Hi.
I'm Horeham, a cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a physicist and a professor at U C. Irvine, and I'm a full time questions answerer.
Oh I thought you were a full time question asker. Isn't that what physicists do? Do you feel like you get paid to answer questions or to ask questions about the universe? Which one pays more?
I feel like that's just two sides of the same coin. But when I'm at work, I'm asking questions, and then as soon as I get home, I'm answering them who emptied the dishwasher? Who's turn is it to take out the dog? I feel like I'm the answer repositor of the.
Family interesting and the dog walker. Apparently, whether there's a quote in the one of the PhD movies where someone says, in academia, you're either known as the person who came up with the question or the person who answered the question. Everyone in between gets sort of forgotten about.
Like all those bricks don't matter. Is just the person who puts the cap on the pyramid?
Yeah, the person who designs the pyramid and the person who puts the last down gets all the fame.
Yeah, that might be true, but there's a lot of things we learn along the way.
I guess you can still have fun doing the questions, trying to answer the questions, and that's kind of what science is all about, right, trying and failing.
Yeah, and it's also fundamentally exploring. You don't always know where your research is going to end up. Might start out asking one question and answering somebody else's question or a completely different question. That's some of the joy of it, the surprise.
Right right, Like what's going to be inside this lollipop? Who knows? He could be a scorpion, he could be chewing gum. Let's find out.
Let's give it to the dog and they'll find out.
What if it has chocolate inside?
Oh no, mmm, oh no, I hope it's a chicken flavored lollipop.
But anyways, welcome for our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we ask all sorts of questions about the nature of the universe, how it works in the tiniest level, how it comes together to make our incredible reality, and how it exists on the grandest scale, expanding and accelerating and zooming photons all through the universe. And we do our best to try to answer some of the questions that we have and that you have about how it all works.
That's right, because it is a giant universe full of mystery and unanswered questions, and so in this podcast we try to think about those questions, figure out where they came from, what those questions are, and sometimes how to avoid them if we don't know the answer avoid them.
No, we embrace the questions we don't know the answer to.
Actually, and you avoid questions sometimes like if you don't know the answer, you pulled this kind of like politician thing where you very cleverly circumvent the question.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Some there you can go if you're doing it right now.
But my daughter has been helping us a little bit with our new TikTok account where I walk around campus at UCI and ask people questions, and she's been commenting that the answer of the question is almost always, well, we don't know.
Unfortunately, that is the answer still for a lot of physics, but also maybe kind of the fortunate thing. I guess if you're a physicist because it means a job security.
Yeah, or if you're an aspiring physicist. There's still so much left to figure out about the universe and not just tiny loose ends about how to do eleven dimensional integrals over quantum brains, but really basic stuff about how the universe works. So we encourage you all out there to think about the universe, to try to understand it. And when those ideas don't quite come together, when it doesn't weave itself together into a whole concept in your mind, reach out to us. Ask us questions. We will answer, we will help you understand. Write to us two questions at Danielandhorge dot com.
Maybe what you need to do on TikTok is do what of those dances that they do on TikTok And then maybe that will distract people from the fact that you don't know the answer.
It'll show them that I don't know the dance either. I guess we'll be testing the theory that any publicity is good publicity.
There you go, or that maybe there's an intricate dance of the universe in terms of math and physics and the particles that make up reality.
I'm going to do two moves at the same time to show you how an electron can be in superposition of two quantum states.
That's right, and how does that run? Where it looks like you're floating on the air work. That's what I want to know.
That's not physics, that's dance engineering.
All right. But questions is sort of the name of the game here. We talk about questions, and sometimes we answer questions from listeners.
We absolutely do. Any question that comes into our inbox, we will answer it. And some of those questions we feature here on the podcast because we think lots of people want to know the answer, or I just think could be a great opportunity for Jorge to make fun of physicists.
Yeah, I got to earn my keep here. Yeah, do they. On the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions number forty seven. We're getting close to fifty, but both in Questions episodes and in Age Daniel.
You know, I'm forty eight, but once I passed forty five, I just decided to round it up to fifty. And then my wife recently turned forty five, and I said to her, welcome to the rounded up to fifty club, and she was not very happy with that invitation.
She's like, nope, I'd like to use more numbers of precision please exactly.
She asked me, if when I get to fifty one if I was going to round it up tow one hundred. There you go, and I said, bring it on.
Maybe you'll gain the wisdom by then of never commenting on your wife's age.
See, there are always things to learn.
Yeah, there, It is a mysterious universe full of answers to be had. But yeah, we like to answer listener questions here on the podcast, and so today we have three pretty intense questions. I feel like they're intense, not just in the sense of how complicated the concepts are, but also intense in the sense that it's all about sort of atoms, right and things at the smallest of levels.
Yeah. Absolutely, these folks are really digging in the details of how the universe works and trying to make it click together in their minds.
I love it, and so let's jump right in. The first question comes from knowl from Perth, Australia.
Hi Daniel and Juahai. This is not from Perth, Western Australia. My question is how many atoms does it tyke before you can measure its gravity? Thank you and Cape the excellent content coming.
All right, awesome question here, pretty intense. It has something to do with both the smallest things in the universe and also maybe one of the most significant forces in the universe.
Yeah, it's a great question because it really leans in the direction of understanding gravity for little particles, which is so important. It's one of the biggest open questions in the universe is how does gravity work for quantum particles? Can we unify all the forces into a theory of quantum graph And one of the reasons that it's difficult is that it's even hard to see gravity happening on particles because gravity is so weak, it's so much weaker than all the other forces, and particles have tiny, tiny masses, so it's almost impossible to see the gravitation effects of little particles.
Well, I guess it's not hard to see it. Like if you hold up a rock, right, you know it's made out of particles, and you like, go the rock, the rock will fall down to the ground, so you can see gravity acting on all the particles of that rock.
Yeah.
Absolutely, the whole universe is made out of particles, and we see gravity happening. But all those objects we see gravity happening for these are classical objects where all the quantum effects have averaged out right, the rock can be described using purely classical physics e ficals MA, even you don't even need relativity, and so we can describe gravity there. I think Noa's question is like how small an object can you see gravity happening on? How many atoms do you have to put together before you can measure the gravity of an object? What's the tiniest thing.
I see you're talking about, like how to measure the gravity, or like how much gravity is being exerted on a small clump of particles or atoms? Right, Because like you can take a small clup of atoms and you let it go, and it is going to fall to the floor, isn't it. You're going to see it.
A small clump of atoms, if you let them go, will feel gravity. We think they'll also feel a bunch of other stuff. If there's any electromagnetic forces that are residual, it'll feel that. That's why, for example, you can use a magnet to overcome the gravity of the Earth, or static electricity can hold something to your head defying gravity. Gravity is so weak that any other force, if it's an all in play, is going to overwhelm it. So that's why you mostly see gravity happening on really really big stuff where there's a lot of it, the Earth and the Moon, for.
Example, or a rock, yeah, or a lollipop.
Or your dog. But dogs and lollipops are lots and lots of particles, right, You're not seeing gravity happen on individual particles there.
But I guess I'm thinking of like a gas. If you fill up a room, or even the gas in our atmosphere, you can see the effects of gravity on each one of those air particles, right, Like the air is dens is near the surface than it is up in the sky. Mm hm.
And if you want to think about like where have we seen gravity in action, then thinking about the atmosphere is a great way to do that because the reason we have an atmosphere is because of gravity. Like the Moon has no atmosphere, has an exosphere, but it has no atmosphere because it doesn't have enough gravity to hold gas to it. If you turned off the Earth's gravity, we would lose all of our particles of atmosphere when we're actually already losing particles of atmosphere all the time. They boil off the top of the atmosphere if they have enough velocity, and that's something we've studied in great detail. We know that like lighter atoms like helium hygen boil off at faster rates and heavier atoms don't. We can calculate the escape velocity for a particle to leave the Earth's atmosphere. We do all these calculations and we can even check them against things we've observed. So that's an example of gravity acting on particles in a way that we can calculate and that we can observe.
Right, So you can see the macro effects. But I think maybe what you're talking about is like if we want to measure the gravity on an atom, for example, you might be able to see an atom and keep track of it, but you can't maybe ascribe all of its emotion or what it does to gravity, Like it might be affected by other forces which are stronger than gravity, which might confuse your measurement of its gravity.
Yeah, I think there's a few things going on here. Is what you just said that it's hard to get rid of everything else, so we can focus just on the gravity. Though people have done that, and we can talk about experiments where people look at the gravitational effects on just pure neutrons which have no electric charge. But the real issue is that all of this is probing still the gravity of the Earth, not the gravity of that particle or that neutron. Right, we're pulling on that object using the Earth's gravity. We're not like seeing two neutrons attract each other gravitationally.
Oh I see. Now you're talking about measuring the gravity between two small the objects like atoms. But was that Nole's question?
Well, Nole says how many atoms does it take before you can measure its gravity? And so on one hand you can say, well, the Earth is acting with gravity on that object, and so by Newton's laws, therefore the object is also acting on the Earth. There's a symmetry there. But actually seeing the gravitational effect of a tiny little clump of stuff, not the effect on it, but the effect of it, I think would be really fascinating.
Oh, I see. You think that the Nole's question is like, what's the smallest the bit of stuff that we can measure how much it attracts other things?
Yes, exactly, because you have a neutron or a helium atom in the atmosphere is being pulled on by the Earth, we already know the Earth has gravity, No big deal. How many atoms do you have to clump together before you can feel something having its own gravity pulling on other stuff?
All right? Because I think what he's maybe trying to get at is that it's really hard to do it with one atom, and so maybe even possible. But maybe he's thinking, what if I take two atoms or three atoms or four atoms? Can I measure the gravity of a small clump of atoms and then just divided by the number of atoms, would that let me measure the gravity of one atom?
Yeah?
Exactly? And I think his question is how small can that go? Technologically, like, in principle, any tiny amount of matter has gravity to it, but in practice it's very difficult to measure this gravity. And so how many atoms do you have to put together before we can register the effects of gravity, before we can actually see the needle go above zero?
And I guess maybe this is more of a technical question, like more of an engineering question, right, like what's the best instrument that we've made to measure gravity? Or maybe he's talking about a theoretical limit.
The theoretical limit is one, right, two atoms near each other. In theory, they have gravity, and we don't know what the quantum mechanical description of their gravity is. But if we assume they act classically, though of course they don't, then we know how to calculate their gravity and how they've been space and all sorts of stuff treat them like tiny planets. We know how to do that theoretically, and we think theoretically that there is gravity. There really just a practical question of measuring it. It's essentially impossible to measure the gravity of an individual atom because it's so tiny and gravity is so weak. So I think Noel's question is an engineering one, which is like, how good have we gotten it measuring the gravity of tiny bits of stuff?
Well, let's start maybe with something large and then try to go down in size. Okay, so what have we start with a bowling ball? Can we measure the gravity inherent in a bowling ball? Have we done this important measurement in the history of science?
Well, I know, bowling ball's weigh about what ten to fifteen pounds?
How do you know?
They have numbers on the sides they tell you how they are.
What if you but not if they drill the holes in them then it changes.
Oh no, my gosh, they're totally inaccurate.
And now we're getting to a theoretical limit here.
But that's about six or eight kilos. And that's the kind of thing that we can measure. It's gravity absolutely.
How would you measure that.
We have these torsion experiments where essentially you put like two bowling balls and the ends of a long rod and then you suspend it from a wire so it's balanced really really well, and a tiny push sideways and the bowling ball will make it spin. Then you bring other bowling balls in near it, like next to this torsion pendulum, and you see if it spins a little bit. It spins a little bit. That tells you there's a tiny little force there between the bowling balls. So this is like the Cavendish experiments. It's the most precise way we know to measure the gravitational constant without knowing, for example, already the mass of the Earth.
Okay, so if you do this for a couple of bowling balls, then you can measure its gravity. You can see like the force and one bowling ball exerts on the other bowling ball through gravity, and you're pretty sure, it's not like you know, the electromagnetic attraction or vendor wible forces between the two bowling ball exactly.
And this is really just pure experimental science like this keeping it stable, making sure you're not getting shaken by trucks rolling down the highway or affected biostatic electricity, or even by like the force of light on these bowling balls. Remember, photons have momentum, So you have to do this experiment like in the dark. And so yeah, it's a real experimental accomplishment to make this work.
Also, you have to make sure your bowling lane is like oiled evenly.
Right, that's bowling engineering. That's out of my field of expertise. Yeah, I don't know.
Sorry, Yeah, that's not a physics experiment. So we can measure the gravity of a bowling ball, We have done it, you're saying, and like, how well do we know this, like down to what precision? Like are we barely getting it or are we pretty comfortable we know the gravity of a bowling ball.
We're pretty comfortable. Then we can measure the gravity of six kilo objects and do it pretty precisely. These are still the same kind of experiments we use to measure big g although we have a whole podcast episode about how we measure the gravity constant, and these days we can measure it using really really tiny twists of that torsion pendulum. You do it by putting a mirror on the wire and then you shine a laser on the mirror, so that even if the wire turns the tiniest little bit, you can see the laser spot move. It's really clever.
Okay, So we've tried to with bowling balls, and you're saying we've gone smaller like billiard balls, down to maybe even smaller objects. What's the smallest object we've done.
The smallest experiment I could find used three quarters of a kilogram lead weights, so basically billiard balls.
Billiard balls, So that's not that small. I mean, that's only like a tenth of a bowling balls. It's a billiard ball. That's the smallest we've done an experiment on where.
The objects are symmetric. We have the same mass, and that seems pretty small. But remember that's still a lot of atoms.
That's what I was going to say. It seems like it's huge. I thought maybe we had measure things smaller.
Well, it's a pretty huge number of atoms. You know, if you use Avagadu's constant, it's like still two times ten to the twenty four atoms. It's a lot of atoms. There was an other experiment where the sizes weren't symmetric. You had like one bigger and one smaller, and that one the smaller mass is down to fifty nine milligrams, So that's a whole lot smaller, but it's still a pretty big number of atoms.
Well, and in this case, you're measuring the gravity of the fifty nine milligram mass, or you're measuring the gravity on the fifty nine milligram mass.
So here the small mass is the one on the torsion pendulum, so it's the one being.
Moved, so you're not measuring really it's gravity. You're measuring the effect of gravity on it.
Yeah, so that's a good point. And so the smallest experiment where the things really are the same size, where they're having the gravitational effect on each other, is three quarters of a kilogram or.
A billiard ball, which, as you said, it's like ten to the twenty four atoms.
Yeah, I don't even know what the prefix is for that number. It's a really really big number.
A bazillion, a gajillion a ton exactly.
So engineers have a lot of work to do to get us down to measure the gravity of one atom.
Well, to tell me what happens if you try to go smaller, like what if you put marbles there? What do you get? You just get pure noise or you know, it starts to go wonky? What happens if you go smaller?
So the limitations here really are experimental. It's sort of like ligo. You're trying to measure a really small effect and there are other effects that are trying to drown it out. So it's like trying to listen to something really really quiet. You need a super quiet room. And so in this case, just the shaking of the building, like the seismic noise of the earth, will shake your apparatus in a way that's more dramatic than the gravity of two marbles or the gravity of two tiny pebbles, for example. So you need to isolate your room, you need to remove from all other effects.
Well, maybe the problem is they keep doing these experiments in like a bowling.
Alley next to a freeway.
Yeah, I think that's the problem a pool hole. So you're saying, like, if you try to measure anything smaller, it just we don't have the instruments needed to get past just the general noise of the universe to try to measure something that weak.
Exactly. They keep inventing new instruments to suppress the noise, to be insensitive to the noise. There's been like a whole thirty or forty year system of these experiments, each one more precise and more accurate than the last, because they figured out some clever way to prevent a source of noise from infecting their experiment, which gives them new sensitivity. And so they keep working on it, and they're going to keep pushing it down, and I can see them making progress steadily, but they're nowhere close to measuring it for like.
One atom right right right now, we're like ten to the twenty four orders of magnitude away from order being able to measure that.
Yeah, well that's twenty four orders of magnitude. Ten to the twenty four orders of magnitude would be ten with ten to the twenty four zero.
Oh sorry, yeah, you know what I mean. But I think we bansered Nole's question which is that he has. How many atoms does it take to before you can measure it to gravity? And it seems like the right now the best state of the art is is ten to the twenty four items.
Yeah, though in theory the answer is one, and maybe one day we'll get there.
Oh I see theoretically, yes, all right, well, let's get to these other questions about the nature of matter and reality and quantum mechanics. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions here today. We just answer one about bowling, right, and gravity.
Yeah, pebbles and lasers and pool balls and bowling.
Yeah, and I think we struck out or got to go to a ball. I I don't know sports enough to know what the right analogy here is. Maybe we've got to split on it.
I think in bowling they call that a touchdown.
Yeah, there you go. All right, Well, let's get to our next question, and this one comes from AIG who has a question about the energy levels of an electron.
Hi, my name is Sonic Eshner, and I have a question about time and energy levels for an electron. Does it take time or is it instantaneous when an electron jumps between energy levels? Thank you, bye bye?
All right, interesting question. First of all, I guess maybe we should talk about the energy levels of an electron, Like what is that? What is this question he's asking in the first place.
Yes, so an electron flying around the universe can have any energy. But if you put an electron in a box or like trap it around a proton in a hydrogen atom, then there's only a few solutions to the quantum mechanical equations we call those different energy levels. The electron can't just have like any arbitrary energy as it's hanging around the proton. There's like a ladder of energy levels it can exist on.
Right.
They usually do this visually by kind of going back to the old model of the atom, where which had electrons kind of going around the nucleus of an atom in an orbit like a circular or do they have to do that? They don't, But I think that maybe helps people understand it. Like maybe if the atom worked the way people thought it did, which was just like a kind of like a planet going around the Sun, If the electron was going around the nucleus of an atom, then an energy level was kind of like the size of that orbit kind of right, because maybe a bigger orbit has more energy to it.
It's definitely true that bigger orbits have more energy, and like planets going around the Sun, have to move faster to have a larger radius. The difference is that orbits can have any radius. There's literally an infinite number any velocity you pick for your planet, there's a radius where it can sit happily. For electrons, that's not true. There's only a few energy levels where all the mathematics works out right.
They're discrete or quantized, which is kind of where the idea of a quantum mechanics comes from, or at least the night.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And something I think is really cool that not enough people appreciate is that the quantized energy levels comes from put the electron in confinement. An electron out there in free space can have any energy. It's putting it in a box, like trapping it around the proton, or sticking it in a square well or something that generates the quantized solutions to the Shirtinger equation.
Right. It's maybe kind of analogous to like a guitar string, right when you start to get into quantum wave functions, like when you can strain a string from two ends of a guitar. Then there are sort of like main ways that it can vibrate, right.
M hm, Yeah, that's exactly right. A string on its own can vibrate in any way, but once you put it in your guitar it has a fixed length. You can posed boundary conditions, like it can't vibrate at the points where it's tied down, and that limits the solutions to the wave equation, and quantum particles are governed by a different wave equation, the Schrodinger equation that tells us where its quantum wave function can exist and what solutions are allowed. And because you've put it essentially in a box, you've created boundary conditions. Those limit the energy levels that it can be at.
Right, Like an electron trapped kind of orbiting around a proton like in the hydrogen atom, can only do it in certain ways or configurations, and each one of those has a different energy level.
Yeah, exactly. And something that's fascinating is that you just can't exist between those energy levels. Like if the Earth wanted to move into Mars' orbit, it could, you'd have to put a rocket on it and speed it up and do all sorts of stuff, and along the way it would be sort of halfway between Earth's orbit and Mars's orbit. But electrons can't do that. They can't be in between, and yet they can be in one energy level at one moment and be in another energy level later on.
Well, I think that's what ANX question is asking. Is like you're saying, like, an electron can only fit around a nucleus or a proton in certain modes or configurations, but surely there might be some sort of transcision period before it clicks into one of these, Like if I just throw an electron at a proton, you know, you're telling me there are some configurations, but as I throw it, doesn't it sort of exist in between these configurations?
I think, ooh, that adds some complications. I think the simpler way to think about it is taken auto with an electron. A photon comes in with extra energy, the electron absorbs that photon, and now it's in a higher energy level. Does it take time to go from the lower energy level to the higher energy level?
That's the question, and it has, right, Yeah, that's the question, and it has exactly. But it's sort of the same question as what I'm asking, which is, like, you know, if I throw in an electron out of proton, or it switches levels, doesn't it technically might take some time to go between the configurations.
So the electron doesn't have to go from one configuration to another. Because remember, an electron doesn't have like a location at every moment the way the Earth does. The Earth is a classical object, so it has a path, right, it has a location at every moment, and we think that that path is smooth, it's continuous, there's no instantaneous jumps in it. But electrons are not like that. They don't have a defined lower lotion at every moment. They don't have to go from one place to another to be at one place and later be at another place. You don't have to be able to track its location at every intermediate spot for it to be somewhere and later be somewhere else.
Right, because it's quantum mechanical, right.
It's fuzzy, Yeah, exactly.
Just because it's fuzzy doesn't mean it can't like be a weirdly shaped fuzzy in between the ones that click around the proton, can it?
It can't be really shaped fuzzy. Those solutions do not satisfy the mathematics right, so they just cannot be in between.
They don't satisfy the mathematics for them to be stable orbits. But can it exist in an unstable orbit or a configuration for a moment?
No, you really just can't do that as long as it stays bound, right, as long as it's still within the atom, it's moving from one energy level the atom to another, then there's no intermediate solutions. The way to think about it is not that the electron is in this state and then the electron is in that state. What happens is that the electron has a probability to be in the first state, call it one hundred percent, and no probability to be in the higher state, so zero percent, And then that probability can change. That probably changes smoothly, so that like at some moment, the electron has a fifty percent chance of being in the lower state and a fifty percent chance of being in the higher state, and then later on it'll have one hundred percent chance of being in the higher state and a zero percent chance of being in the lower state. So it's probability changes, and that actually changes smoothly. But which state is actually in you can only ever measure it in one state or another.
Right, because those are the stable solutions. But maybe, I guess, maybe I wonder if what Onik is asking is, you know, as does probabilities transition? Can those take time? Maybe?
Yeah? So the probability transition does take time, absolutely, though you can only ever measure it in one state or another.
So it does maybe take time for an electron to switch energy levels.
Yes, absolutely, it takes time for that quantum state to transition. Nothing happens instantaneously in a relative world, but you'll never see the electron in between. Right, what's happening is that probability to be in the lower state or the higher state. Those things are changing. It's sort of like if you have a coin. At coin you can flip it and get heads or tails. And what if I have like a little dial that changes the probability of heads or tails. So I start out with only going to flip heads, and then I can turn that knob so now it's fifty to fifty, and then later on it'll only retails when you flip it. You'll always get heads or tails. Just the probability of heads or tails will change over time.
But I guess maybe it depends on what you call an energy an electron being in a certain energy state, right, Like what you call it in an energy state is the probability of it being in an energy state. And you're saying that the transition between probabilities is smooth and takes time, then it does sort of typically take time for an electron to switch between energy states.
Yes, absolutely, there's like a moment when you can describe it as fifty percent in the lower state and fifty percent in the higher state. That doesn't mean that it's like physical location is in between the two, or that you could ever measure it and any intermediate state, right, but there is a moment when it has a probability of being in the lower state or the higher state.
Well, at the particle quantum level, my understanding is that things aren't really there anyways. There's just the probability of things to be there.
Yeah, exactly.
So the changing of its fuzziness from one shape to the other you're saying does take time.
Yeah, exactly, And so if you're thinking about in that quantum mechanical way, it all makes sense. I wonder about Onyx's question because I wonder if oniic is wondering if the electron like teleports from one place to another instantaneously, And so I just want to make sure that Onik and averybody listening understands that the electron doesn't have like an existing location has an energy level which is a probability distribution, and that transitions to a new probability distribution. It's not like the electron is here and then it reappears instantaneously in another orbit.
Right.
Well, I think maybe the way that most physicists like to draw these orbits is clouds, right, like probability clouds. And you're saying, like a cloud can't just con from one shape to another cloud. There has to be this transition period where it's like maybe a little bit of both, in which case the blob looks a different shape.
Yeah, exactly, one blob is decreasing while another blob is increasing. There's no intermediate blob, right.
Well, if you add up the two, doesn't that happen?
Yeah exactly. The intermediate blob is just different mixtures of.
The two, right, which would have its own shape.
Yeah, which has its own shape?
Okay, So yeah, so maybe like don't think of it as the electron jumping from one orbit to another thing of it, just as like one electron changing from being a blobby shape that looks like this to a different blobby shape in the quantum world that looks like that, and that does take time. You're saying, like how much time it.
Depends on the energy. And it's actually a fascinating a little wrinkle in quantum mechanics because the Schrodinger equation is not relativistic. It doesn't like respect special relativity and have the speed of light built into it. You have to add that in when you get to like relativistic quantum mechanics or quantum field theory. But there are still some guardrails there that prevent things from happening instantaneously. Like it's a way function and waves evolve smoothly with time, and because it's a wave, it's wave nature is what generates the Heisenberg uncertainty relationships. So in this case, for example, there's a relationship between energy and time. If you want something to happen really really fast, like almost instantaneously, then the energy of that process is very uncertain. If you want something to be really specific about energy, then the time is uncertain. Essentially, it can take a very long time, So you can have something that happened really fast, but then you can't be certain about the energy of it. Or you can have something happen with a really specific energy, but then you can't really be sure it's going to be fast, So you can't have something happen really fast and to a very specific energy at the same time.
Yeah, it seems like it's maybe one of those things we talked about in a previous podcast about what the uncertainty and quantum mechanics actually means. Mm hmm, yeah, okay, so then what's the answer. How fast is it changing or can it change? You're saying it can change instantaneously if you put infinite amount of energy into it.
If you have an infinite uncertainty in your energy, then yes, you're going to approach an instantaneous transition. But then you have no idea what transition you're going to. You're going from energy level one two, energy level unknown.
Well, maybe give us a second, since you're a particle physicists. When you smash these particles together and they're interacting at the quantum level, like how fast are these reactions happening or these transformations or these you know, breaking up of particles. It's like nanoseconds, right or less.
Oh yeah, much faster than that. Yeah, we're talking about events that like ten to the minus twenty three seconds, so super short periods of time.
Hmmm. And in this case you can measure those things or is it kind of theoretical like can you see can you measure can you clock something happening that fast? Or you just think it's happening that fast.
We can make those measurements, but it's sort of indirect. Like the time that a particle survives depends on its energy and its mass and the uncertainty in its mass. So by measuring like uncertainty in the mass of a bunch of particles, we can measure how long effectively those particles are living. So, for example, we measure the top quark mass really really precisely, and we know the variation from top quark to top quark, and that tells us how long the top quarks live. But it's one or two steps indirect from like actually looking at a clock and seeing it tick by.
But you do seem to have some numbers for it. So in the case of the electron, what kind of number would you put on it? Like in our everyday lie is you know a ray of light hits my skin, how long are the my electrons and my skin changing energy states?
So the energy levels of the hygien atom I happen to know because my son is doing chemistry are like thirteen point six ev. So call it like ten electron volts. And the uncertain relationship is dominated by Plank's constant, which is like ten to the minus fifteen ev seconds. And so put that together and it tells you that we're talking about transitions of the order of like ten to the minus fifteen seconds.
Whoa which seems slower than the ones when you smash.
Particles, Yeah, but still pretty fast.
All right, well, I think that answer is annext question. It does take some time for the electronic to jump between energy levels, maybe to the order of ten to the minus fifteen seconds. All right, let's get to our last question, but first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions, and our last question here today has to do with polarization, not of our country, but of light exactly.
Hi, Daniel and George, I'm with from Brisbane. If you would answer my question on polarization at quantum level, that would be really good. You have a great podcast. What the polarition is at photon level? Does a photon vibrate in all planes and polarization allows only in a specify plane? Or photon vibratets only in one plane and polarization allows photons which align with that polarization plane.
Thank you, all right. I think Vivec's question in general is basically like, what is polarization? What's going on at the photon level? What does it mean for a photon or a LightWave to have polarization? Because polarization is sort of all around us, right as sunglasses are polarized some of them, definitely, the screen on your phones are polarized, and so it's something that actually affects us every day.
Yeah, And polarization is really fascinating and tricky think about. And I find a lot of listeners are confused on some basic concept of the mental picture they have of what a photon looks like is usually wrong. So I thought it'd be fun to talk first about what is polarization for classical electrodynamics, and then we can talk about what it looks like for a photon.
Okay, now this is a property that light has, right, Like light can be polarized.
Yeah, exactly, light can be polarized.
So what is it?
So if you think of light as just like a wiggle in the electromagnetic field, and let's just ignore quantum effects for now. Let's pretend that we're maxwell and we're just thinking about light is like oscillations and electric and magnetic fields, right.
Meaning like basically all around us is an electromagnetic field. Like we're all surrounded by this field exactly, and the light ray is just kind of like a wiggle in that field that zooms across the room exactly.
And there's an electric field and there's a magnetic field, and they're sort of on top of each other. A field is something that exists in all of space, right, And so there's an electric field and there's magnetic fields all through space, and a light wave.
They're different.
They are different, two components of something larger we call the electromagnetic field, but they're different, like the way two sides of a coin are different but connected. And a light wave is an oscillation in these two fields that are linked. This is like Maxwell's greatest insight to show that electric fields and magnetic fields are really tightly coupled. One can generate the other.
So like a light ray is a wiggle in one of these fields. But it's actually the two fields you're saying are sort of like connected to each other. So you can't just have a wiggle in one field. It has to come with a wiggle in the other.
Field exactly because changing electric fields will give you magnetic fields, and changing magnetic fields will give electric fields. So it's a coupled oscillation. It's like sloshing back and forth between them.
Okay, so we're surrounded by fields. A light ray is a wiggle in that field, So what's its polarization?
So the crucial thing to understand is that these fields are not just numbers. They're a vector, which means that at every point in space, these fields don't just have a value, they have a direction, like a tiny little arrow. That's what's really interesting the electromagnetic field. It's not just like a number through space.
It's a little arrow, meaning it's not just like an intensity at any given point or like a brightness to it. It's also like a it has a directional component to it.
Exactly, it has a directional component.
To it, like you can have a wiggle that's pointing up or a wiggle that's pointing down or to the sides.
And light is an oscillation of those little arrows. And people often think that, oh, a light wave is like literally moving side to side as it moves through the universe, it's wiggling sideways, but it's not. A light wave is moving along a straight line. What's wiggling sideways is the vector of the electric field and the vector of the magnetic field. So along a straight line, you have like an arrow that's growing and shrinking and growing and shrinking, pointing what direction those arrows are pointed perpendicular to the motion of this wave, because light is a transverse wave mm.
So you're saying a photon is like you can imagine it like a little bead going along a string from here to Like if I shoot a laser, I don ts it's like a little bead that's going on a string from me to you. But as it's going down the string, it has kind of like arrows shooting out of it exactly to the sides and up and down.
But it never moves sideways, right, It's always along that bead. But moving sideways is the strength of these little arrows, the electric field and the magnetic field, and polarization is telling you where those fields are pointing. So the electric field is pointing perpendicular to the motion of the photon. But there's still lots of ways that it could point. Right, there's a whole circle of directions it could point. Polarization is telling you which direction is the electric field pointing as the photon moves along that line.
So as it moves it maybe maybe you can have an electric field that's pointing up and it wiggles by shrinking and growing in the updirection.
Yeah, exactly, or sideways.
Now does a photon have to have a direction? Can you have a photon that's like what what does it mean to have a photon that's not polarized?
So an individual photon has to have a direction. You can have a beam of light that's unpolarized. That means that it's a big mixture of photons of lots of different polarizations.
So you can't have an unpolarized photon. Each photon by definition is polarized exactly.
And now we're mixing sort of the classical and the quantum version. The classical version is that these are just waves in the field. There are no photons. Brighter light means just like bigger wiggles in the field. This quantum version says no, no, no, it comes in discrete packets. Each one is its own photon. Brighter light is more photons. And so in the quantum version this still happens, but now you have quantum spin instead of like the direction of the electric field. But still you can't have an individual photon that's unpolarized. Every photon has a direction either to its quantum spin or to its classical electric field, and the polarization tells you what direction that's in.
Right, Like each photon you're kind of saying, has it like an kind of like an up and down and then left and right, and so its polarization is kind of like, uh, in what direction is its up and down?
Pointing yeah, exactly. Like firefighters sliding down a pole, right, they can slide down in lots of different angles. They're moving down the pole always, but they can slide down facing left or facing right, or facing any angles. It's like the polarization of the firefighter. So the same way, photons moving in the same direction can have a different polarization and still be moving in the same direction.
So then that's basically what polarization is. It's like the direction in which it's electric field is pointing it as it wiggles, exactly.
For classical electro dynamics, it's the direction of the electric field. For quantum photon, it's the direction of its quantum spin.
Interesting, now, when it comes to sort of like our everyday experience, you're saying that polarized light is one in which all the photons are basically pointing in the same direction, and unpolarized light is where all the photons are like pot they're all pointing in random directions.
Exactly. It's not really unpolarized. It's a sum of different polarizations. It's like you have a bunch of people with different political opinions. It's not like you have no politics, you just have lots of different politics.
It's like multi polarized unpolarizes. You're really saying multipolarize exactly.
And you can have polarization filters, for example, that only allow a certain polarization through where you can only allows light through that's like going up and down, or only allows light through that's going side to side with this polarization.
Now, the light from my cell phone, like the screen, I know that light is like coming from the screen is polarized. Now is that polarized because there's a filter in the glass of my cell phone or because the you know, whatever diodes or something that's generating the light somehow only produce a certain kind of photon.
Yeah, I have no idea.
You're not even going to try to circumvent the question. Let's see, let's see your crafted work. If I asked you why my cell phone has polarized light, Daniel, what would you say and you can't cut this out later?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the answers. I don't know.
Meane, you wikipedia this sleep.
It's possible that your phone screen filters it out, or it's well that's generated in such a way to only be polarized. I think they do that because it's easier to look at, but I'm not sure.
Interesting, all right, Well, maybe we'll leave this as homework for listeners to try to look it up. All right, But the answer the basic question, that's kind of what polarization is. You're saying, it's a direction of the wiggles of a photon in the electric field and magnetic field.
Yeah, exactly. And remember that the photon itself is not wiggling in space, never deviates from the line of its motion. What's wiggling there are the electric and magnetic fields for the classical picture and the quantum picture. The photon is still moving just along that line, and now the polarization is describing the direction of its quantum spin.
Right, although it's sort of like these are quantum objects, right, So you can't really say that it's stay in the middle. You're just mathematically that's where you assume that it's staying on You.
Exactly, have no path and no definitive location. But if you're solving the equation for where it's likely to be, then that's along a line.
Right, So it is sort of maybe wiggling natuality. You just mathematically it doesn't deviate on average.
Yeah, there's definitely a fuzziness to a photon's location, but not in an oscillatory way. Yeah.
All right, Well those have been three awesome questions. Do you think everyone deserves a lollipop. I feel like I deserve one.
Yeah, I think a bowling ball flavored lollipop would have really finish this off. Oh my gosh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you have to be careful though. You have to make sure it is a lollipop. You don't want to be licking any random bowling balls. You don't know where those have been, or a billion balls a billion bars would be even worse.
Just don't lick stuff. That's the health advice from your physics.
Podcast unless you're absolutely sure. Yeah, I guess you could test it on your dog maybe, or on a physicist.
And if you do lick stuff, don't sue us over it, please.
Yeah, unless you liked it.
That's a whole different kind of podcast.
Or here well as usual. Another reminder that we can still ask a lot of questions about the universe. There's still a lot of mysteries to think about, to explore, and sometimes you can even stump physicists to the point where they say, I don't know, we say that all the time. How often do you say it, Daniel, I don't know. There you go, there you go, that's what that's the exact answer. I was looking for.
And if there's things that make you go I don't know, then write to me and I'll talk to you about it. I'll tell you everything I do and don't know about the subject. The email addressay is Questions at Danielandjorge dot com and we love to hear from you.
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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