Whenever justification is desired for supposed mystical or paranormal phenomena, the phrase “quantum physics” is trotted out; from the cult-hit “What the bleep do we know?” to rationalization of “The Law of Attraction” in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret all the way to the Noetic science in Dan Brown's The Lost symbol. The vast majority of practicing professional physicists reject the possibility that quantum physics can play an observable role in our daily lives because bizarre quantum effects are simply beyond the scale of human activity.
The time scale of Human experience is set by the time between heartbeats, about one second; the energy scale is given by the fraction of a Calorie we typically burn in each of those seconds. Phenomena that exhibit the peculiar effects of quantum physics – where particles act like waves and Schroedinger’s cat can be both dead and alive at the same time – occur at the time and energy scales of individual atoms and their components; a scale dictated by a number called Planck’s constant.
Human beings typically burn about 1/20 of a calorie each waking second, setting the scale of human experience around 1/20 Calorie-seconds. Planck’s constant, on the other hand, is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the human scale. It is, roughly, 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000016 Calorie-seconds or, in scientific notation, 1.6E-37 Cal sec – a wicked tiny number no matter how it’s spelled. We just can’t reasonably expect to observe quantum physics phenomena with our naked eyes.
Except, maybe …
A couple of weeks ago, results emerged from an experiment at the University of California, Santa Barbara performed at extremely low temperatures (a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero,
-459 degrees Fahrenheit) described as the first observation of macroscopic, visible-to-the-naked-eye quantum phenomena.
In the experiment, a resonator sort of like a tuning fork, tiny by human scale but huge by the Planck-constant scale, which demonstrates blatantly quantum physics phenomena: rather than having its oscillations gradually and continuously increase in pitch as the temperature rises, the pitch increases in discrete steps, which is to say, it is “quantized.”
The common sense argument that quantum phenomena is out of the purview of human experience is not challenged by the new experiment, but it at least provides some feint experimental footing for mystics who attribute paranormal phenomena effects to quantum mechanics.
Comments