Quantum Cats, Accidentally Ending The World and Radio Telescopes
What I've been writing and reading this week
What Are The Odds We Destroy The World?
At first the terrifying prospect seemed plausible. Detonate an atom bomb in water, scientists had already realised, and you can trigger an even bigger explosion — a technique that would later become the hydrogen bomb. But why, Edward Teller wondered, would water be needed? What would happen if you used air instead?
The concept was simple. When an atom bomb explodes in a tank of purified heavy water, the result is an explosive chain reaction. The energy of the bomb forces hydrogen atoms in the water to collide, and every time that happens a powerful pulse of energy is released. Each pulse adds a bit more energy to the explosion, until a nuclear inferno erupts.
That was fine, the scientists thought, and perfectly controllable, as long as your aim was to blow up a city. But Teller took things a step further. If heavy water could detonate a hydrogen bomb, then why not sea water? The sea is full of hydrogen too, and thus susceptible to the same chain reaction. Unlike the hydrogen bomb, however, the sea is vast in size, and the potential chain reaction uncontrollable.
Hunting the Quantum Cat
The situation, Schrödinger complained, is getting ridiculous. Why, one could dream up quite absurd scenarios! Put a cat in a box, for instance, and sometime later it may turn up both dead and alive, trapped in a curious position between life and death. That, Schrödinger felt, was too much. Physics had gone wrong.
Einstein agreed. The idea of the cat, somehow alive and dead at once, was absurd. But so were all the alternatives. Quantum physics by nature seemed to be an absurd theory, but one that all the evidence suggested to be true. The result was shocking, but unavoidable. Reality itself, quantum physics was saying, must be sacrificed.
For years Einstein strived to resolve this problem. He believed firmly in the existence of reality, a universe that existed beyond the experimenter’s gaze. The Moon, he once argued, still exists even if nobody is watching it. Unfortunately the evidence continued to say otherwise, and Einstein, until his death, was unable to find a deeper, more satisfying theory.
Best of the Rest…
Two years ago astronomers captured the first picture of a black hole, appearing as a dark spot surrounded by an orange glow. That image does not show what our eyes would see - it actually shows the emission of powerful radio waves. The telescope that took the photo is a network of radio observatories; a set of antennas scanning the night sky for radio signals, as explained by Emily Levesque in Quanta Magazine.
Until recently American astronomers had access to one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, a three hundred meter wide disk in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Now, following the collapse of that telescope last year, American astronomers are being forced to turn to China for help. The world’s largest radio telescope now lies in the heart of China - and since the collapse of Arecibo, it eclipses any American competitor. Sarah Scoles describes the impact on western astronomy in The Atlantic.
Writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, Simon Winchester looks at the relationship between technology and humanity. In the last few centuries technology has developed at an accelerating rate. Are we as in control as we like to think? Does technology really present perilous risks to our own future, or will it, perhaps, end up saving us from ourselves?
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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