Kvantfysik, och bland annat kaos

Jag ska förstå före jul… Professor Jim Al-Khalili i videon har pluggat kvantfysik ett helt liv… Inom 100 år lär vi nog säga att det var kvantfysik – lagen om orsak och verkan – som styrde år 2020, och inget annat och ingen annan.

Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?

In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

It’s a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.

And the best thing is that one doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.

Jim Al-Khalili shows how chaos theory can answer a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_yOueFMe7c

As humans, we’re always trying to know more about how our world works, so we make models, models that allow us to reasonably predict what might happen if any of the established variables in a situation were to change. This is a deterministic system, meaning the behavior of certain variables is determined by their known characteristics. But what happens when the situation is a whole lot messier, with many, many variables and moving parts to keep track of? Take the weather for example, to make a perfect weather prediction we would have to have highly accurate measurements of every contributing variable over every single square inch of atmosphere we are looking at.

So you can imagine, any tiny change of the input could mean a huge variation in the output, and while the system is still deterministic in that the variables do behave the way we expect them to, it is still very unpredictable and subject to variation making it chaos…but with rules, a.k.a. deterministic chaos. Deterministic chaos—you may have also heard of it as chaos theory or the butterfly effect. And, of course, weather is actually how chaos theory was first discovered by Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, and his team in the 1960s.

 

 

Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the story of arguably the most important, accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever: quantum physics.

The story of quantum physics starts at the beginning of the 20th century with scientists trying to better understand how light bulbs work. This simple question soon led scientists deep into the hidden workings of matter, into the sub-atomic building blocks of the world around us. Here they discovered phenomena unlike any encountered before – a realm where things can be in many places at once, where chance and probability call the shots and where reality appears to only truly exist when we observe it.

Albert Einstein hated the idea that nature, at its most fundamental level, is governed by chance. Jim reveals how in the 1930’s, Einstein thought he’d found a fatal flaw in quantum physics. This was not taken seriously until it was tested in the 1960s. Professor Al-Khalili repeats this critical experiment, posing the question does reality really exist, or do we conjure it into existence by the act of observation?

Elsewhere, we explore how the most famous law of quantum physics – The Uncertainty Principle – is obeyed by plants and trees as they capture sunlight during the vital process of photosynthesis. Could quantum mechanics explain the greatest mystery in biology – evolution?

Om Lena Holfve 18098 artiklar
Under 80-talet var Lena Holfve en uppmärksammad författare men slutade som yrkesförfattare år 1992, och startade upp IT-tjänster. Lena räknas som en av de absolut första pionjärerna på Internet i Sverige med start 1990-91. Då var det i princip bara Lenas domäner och Systembolagets prislista ute. Nu är Lena pionjär igen med ett slutet och privat sällskap i domänen lenaholfve.se och vars syfte är att studera vad som händer i världen, men i en privat sfär. Sedan år 2017 har det startats upp en liten bokproduktion, igen.

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