Top 12 things to know about physics

So, lay people are naturally curious about the world, and Quantum Mechanics is one of the most interesting aspects of physics to dig into! There are counterintuitive relevations to be had, philosophical points to ponder, and in the end - though you will not have all the answers - you will be sure that the true nature of reality is very different from its surface appearance!

But if you really want to understand QM, not fully, but well enough to understand the current state of understanding - not just to get some entertainment value out of it - you should know a lot about physics. I can't teach all that stuff here.

What I will do is give a few short sentences on each topic. I'll probably edit in some references.

Top 12 things to know about physics:

1. Classical mechanics

In classical (Newtonian) mechanics, there are particles (which can be points or be extended). Each has a position and velocity. There are equations that describe how these things change as a function of time, based on force laws such as Newton's famous law of gravitation.

Key concepts: Vector, position, velocity, acceleration, mass, force, momentum, angular momentum, potential energy, kinetic energy, conservation laws, force laws

2. The harmonic oscillator

A spring-mass system is a paradigmic example of a harmonic oscillator. The restoring force increases linearly with the distance from the equilibrium point, which leads to a sinusoidal motion if it's left to oscillate freely. This oscillation is more than a little similar to that in the next subject, waves. If there is damping friction, the oscillation decays exponentially, which can be represented mathematically as a complex (real + imaginary part) frequency.

Key concepts: Linear, nonlinear, frequency, amplitude, sinusiodal, complex exponential

3. Classical waves

Sound, water waves, electromagnetic waves - these are all disturbances of some kind of field, that propagate at a specific speed. A field is a function of position, such as air pressure, that can vary with time. Disturbances propagate locally - the neighboring regions are affected first.

Key concepts: Field, amplitude, phase, frequency, wavelength, local, Doppler effect, superposition, interference

4. Special relativity

You know all that stuff you just learned about classical mechanics? Ahem ... it's all wrong! Well, not all of it, but things are a bit different.

The speed of light is found to be the same relative to any observer, when measured by observers moving at different speeds. How can that be? Well, there's time dilation ... and length contraction ... that work together to produce that result. The speed of light is a cosmic speed limit. One important consequence is that if events are simultaneous as measured by observers moving at one velocity, they will not be if measured by observers at some other velocity.

Key concepts: E = m c^2, time dilation, length contraction, light cones, relative simultaneity, spacelike seperation, Lorentz invariance

5. Electromagnetism

Electromagnetic forces hold atoms together, and electromagnetic waves have many important applications. There are positive and negative charges. Like charges repel; opposite charges attract. The force decreases as the inverse square of the distance. Magnetism is a consequence of relativity.

Key concepts: Charge, electron, proton, electric field, magnetic field, EM wave

6. General relativity

OK! So, you finally have some grasp of special relativity. You've understood the 'twin paradox', the 'barn paradox', and how it is that observers moving relative to each other each think that the other guy's clock is slower.

But wait ... there's more! Space and time are flexible. Gravity is a bending of spacetime caused by mass. In extreme cases, you might not be able to think of a flat spacetime that is bent out of shape - you might have to build it by gluing pieces together. If mass is concentrated enough, it could collapse to a black hole, from which even light can't escape - you can think of future time as pointing radially towards the center of it.

Closed timelike curves are solutions to the equations of GR in which the future loops around to become the past within those places - time travel? It has problems. There is no known way to make them, anyway.

Key concepts: Gravitational redshift, black hole, event horizon, gravitational wave, closed timelike curve, general coordinate invariance, wormhole

7. Cosmology

The universe as a whole is expanding. Looking back towards the past, it was smaller and denser, apparently having originated in a state of very high density and temperature and much smaller size - the Big Bang. According to general relativity, it would have been a state of infinite density. Looking to the future, the universe will get larger and colder; long after the last star has evaporated, it appears that it will just keep expanding. If there's a cosmological constant, it will keep growing exponentially.

Key concepts: Hubble constant, Big Bang, singularity, redshift, cosmological constant

8. Entropy and Statistical Mechanics

Disorder (entropy) tends to increase on a microscopic level. As a result, to get anything accomplished, we need a continuous flow of more-ordered stuff going in, and we dump the less-order stuff going out. For example, sunlight in (high energy per photon (particle of light), an orderly concentration) and thermal radiation out (distributing the same energy over many more, less energetic photons, which is more random since there are more ways to do it).

Statistical mechanics allows us to consider the mechanics of large numbers of particles using probability distributions rather than trying to follow each particle individually. It explains the above tendency, obtaining irreversible average behavior from time-symmetric basic equations of motion.

The thermodynamic 'arrow of time' implies that the conditions near the beginning of the universe were much lower in entropy than a typical possible microstate, which is why the entropy has a lot of room to grow.

Key concepts: Entropy, arrow of time, configuration space, probability, large number of particles

9. Quantum mechanics

That's right; before delving into interpretation of QM, it helps to know a bit of QM first.

Experiments have shown that everything has wave-like characteristics. Particles such as electrons (and in principle anything made of them, such as people) can exhibit wave-like interference effects. Waves, such as electromagnetic waves, can appear to act as though made up of individual particles (photons in the EM case).

QM explains why matter doesn't collapse: Electrons are attracted to the protons in an atom's nucleus, but if they are confined to a small place such as the nucleus, they would have a short wavelength. They would need high energy for that, and if they had it, they would zoom out. In practice there is a balance between the electron wave resisting being squeezed to a small size, versus it being attracted to the nucleus. Also, electron waves can't occupy the same state as each other, so atoms with more electrons end up with shells of electrons further out, even though they have more protons pulling the electrons tight.

As I explained in my previous post, in QM, it is not correct to say that each particle is a wave in space. Instead, there is a joint wavefunction, which lives on configuration space. I will have more to say about it in other posts.

When a measurement is made, the outcome appears to be random, with the probabilities given by the Born Rule - proportional to the square of the wavefunction. Many observables have a discrete (quantized) set of possible outcomes.

Key concepts: Matter waves, spin, quantized outcomes, wavefunction, Pauli exclusion principle, eigenstates, eigenvalues, Hamiltonian, observable, Shrodinger Picture, Heisenberg Picture, Born Rule, measurement problem, Shrodinger's Cat, entanglement, decoherence, Bell's theorem

10. Quantum field theory (QFT)

QFT is the relativistic version of quantum mechanics. Instead of particles, there are fields. There's a small set of fields for every kind of particle - electrons, photons, etc. The wavefunctional lives on the space of configurations of these fields. QFT allows the creation or destruction of 'particles' because really there are no particles - quantized excitations of the fields play the role of particles.

There are problems with QFT. It is necessary to 'renormalize' the fields because interactions can produce infinite divergences, which must be subtracted out. This can sometimes be done by assuming a minimum length scale, then taking the limit as the scale goes to zero. Even so, some problems remain but can usually be ignored by using approximations.

Key concepts: wavefunctional, field configuration, spin, boson, fermion, antiparticle, locality, renormalization

11. Quantum gravity (QG)

Nobody has yet suceeded in bringing it all together, and until they do, we won't really know what's going on. But even so, there are many important tidbits to know regarding gravity and QM.

There is a minimum length scale in quantum gravity: Make a small enough black hole, and the wavelength becomes the same size as the event horizon. Add more mass, the event horizon gets bigger; less mass, and the wavelength does. Squeeze a wave that small, and you've added the mass (E = m c^2). This scale is called the Planck length. We don't know what's going on below that scale.

Many people think that the Planck scale explains the use of renormalization in QFT. Infinite renormalization doesn't make much sense, but with a finite minimum scale, there would be just a finite scale factor. Of course, no one knows how the details would work.

It is generally thought that a fixed volume of space has a finite number of degrees of freedom in QG due to the minimum length. This affects some interpretations of QM.

Another important thing to know about is Hawking radiation. As Hawking discovered, an event horizon produces radiation. This makes black holes evaporate - on the quantum level, this is important because it means that some form of the usual information-preserving quantum mechanics might apply after all; details of what went in are encoded in the radiation.

Also, the radiation has a thermal spectrum, allowing a temperature and an entropy to be assigned to black holes. The stability of these objects is re-explained in terms of them having a huge entropy. This implies that there is some new variable that can be distributed in many ways, such as different excitations of string modes at the center (see below) or something varying near the event horizon.

QG might also forbid other weird features of GR, such as closed timelike curves.

On the cosmological level, if there is a cosmological constant, there will be Hawking radiation. In the past there appears to have been a similar large effect (inflation) but it was not a constant. In the deep future, the Hawking radiation might produce Boltzmann brains - randomly assembled brains. It's not something that would happen often but infinity is a long time and an exponentially growing universe is a big place. If over infinite time these greatly outnumber normal observers, as they would, the theory is inconsistent with our observations.

Also, if QM is applied to the equations of general relativity for a closed universe, the apparent result is that the wavefunction can not change as a function of time (total energy = zero, which leads to a static state in QM). This Wheeler-DeWitt equation is a rather controversial result.

It is not clear what the ontology of QG would be. Perhaps the wavefunctional lives on the space of possible geometries and field configurations on those.

QG is not renormalizable. String theory uses extended fundamental objects to avoid the infinities, but current work assumes a fixed background geometry, which is considered an approximation that is hard to get away from.

String theory allows many 'vaccum' solutions; our universe might decay from the current one to an uninhabitable one, perhaps helping explain the lack of Boltzmann brains over the history of the universe. Other ways out of it are for baby universes to continually form (perhaps in black holes), or for there to be no cosmological constant.

Loop quantum gravity is another approach, that avoids a fixed background, but is less developed. Other approaches include the holographic universe, in which the boundary determines everything.

Key concepts: string theory, loop quantum gravity, Plank scale, Hawking radiation, Wheeler-DeWitt equation, problem of time, baby universes, Boltzmann brains, cosmological constant, decay of the vacuum

12. The anthropic principle

Our universe seems fine-tuned for life. If parameters such as the strength of the electrical force compared to the nuclear forces were just a little different, complex chemistry would not be possible. If there were no neutrinos, supernovas could not eject the complex elements out into space. If the number of space dimensions were different, planetary systems could not form. If photons did not exist, energy could not flow from stars to plants.

There is only one reasonable explanation for this fine-tuning: there must be many universes, most of which are unsuitable for life, but some of which are. In that way, a simple overall theory can explain a complex particular universe. The anthropic principle states that the only part of reality that we find ourselves in must be such that we can exist.

The multiple universes might be the many solutions to string theory, or could maybe even be all possible mathematical stuctures - the Everything Hypothesis. (A post on it will come.)

The objection might be raised: Could not an intelligent creator explain the fine-tuning? But while a creation scenario can not be disproven, it can NOT be a fundamental explanation for the origin of life, because it merely pushes back the question, to where the intelligence of the creator would have come from. For an intelligent creator to exist, unless by a wholly unbelievable coincidence, in a simple overall theory, we must conclude that he must be a product of Darwinian evolution in his own fine tuned universe. The resulting model is much more complicated than the simple multiverse scenaio, violating Occam's Razor (the principle, used in science, that simpler explanations are more likely). This is explained in detail in Richard Dawkins' excellent book "The God Delusion".

Key concepts: Fine tuning, multiple universes, anthropic principle, God Delusion