Quantum quacks

Could I fund my retirement not by writing, but by hawking “zero point energy wands” sold by a real quantum mechanic? 

For  $119.97 (marked down from $169.99) you can buy a “scalar energy tool… infused with a full spectrum of over 18000+ beneficial vibrational frequencies.” Made of a  “ proprietary blend of semi-precious minerals, bioceramics, and crystals.” Ah, and a free wanding guide is included. 

Zero point energy is the inaccessible energy that a quantum mechanical system can have. For example, at absolute zero molecules are still moving, quivering in their places. This residual kinetic energy isn’t recoverable, by physics or by a wand of any sort. The wanding guide would be funny ("Drink a glass of wanded water before wanding yourself as it frequently speeds things up as your internal water molecules listen more effectively to the wand energy.") except that the list of maladies they purport to treat tells you that they are preying on the vulnerable. Cancer pain.

So definitely not how I'll be funding my retirement. 

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Walmart sells them for $19.99.

I'm not linking to the wanding guide or the wands themselves, because I don't want to give them more visibility.

“Quantum quacks” is the title of my next column in Nature Chemistry — about semantic drift and the woo that clings to “quantum” these days. It’s framed around zero point energy wands.

Breathing is complex

"Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring." Edward Gorey

The trick, perhaps, is to see the astonishing underneath the boring.  Every once in a while I recall that more than fifteen of every hundred nitrogen molecules I breathe is behaving in a way that would cause any self-respecting 19th century physicist to shriek, "Impossible! Imaginary^* velocities? No, no and simply, no!" (Also, that's on the order of 10²¹ molecules in each and every breath I take.)

Or, to Gorey's point, that there is a non-zero probability that I could tunnel through the closed door of my study. Vanishingly small, true, but still, non-zero. Could today be the day that the door shivers and my wavefunction slips through its wavefunction to emerge on the upstairs landing? The door is marginally more exciting when seen in that light, no?

Or perhaps the boring is what would delight us? I follow TinyTales on Bluesky for a quick step outside the maelstrom of current events. (Browse their offerings if you, too, need a moment of respite: tinytalesdaily.com) The other day the story was about a diary:

The diary predicts tomorrow, but only the boring parts.
"You'll forget your keys," I read. "Lunch will be adequate."

My diary these days is pretty boring. Errands. Medical appointments. Email. I might forget my keys (roughly as likely as that air molecule being stretched beyond its classical limit.) Lunch will be adequate. (#defaultLunch: plain yogurt, cheese and crackers, a piece of fruit — the same thing I have had for lunch most days since graduate school.)  

And in the mornings, I write. Don't tell my diary. It's not in the least boring.

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*By "imaginary" I don't mean the velocities are made up, I simply mean that the values are complex. Just to complicate things, "complex"in this context doesn't mean complicated, but means they are not real numbers. Right. Well, they involve factors of i, where i is the square root of -1. Never mind...just trust me, it's very, very upsetting to a classical physicist.

Chewing photons for inspiration

I have been riding my bike to campus this semester. My route takes me through a stone archway and then to the top of the green that leads to the science building. The campus landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed Central Park (and the grounds of the now-closed Jesuit Center at Wernersville). When I hit the top of the hill I’m looking down an aisle of enormous oaks, their canopies merging in a magnificent green arch, a nave of a living cathedral. I never fail to take a deep breath when I see it. A literal inspiration. 

I can feel my shoulders relax, and all my anxiety slide off.  Is it all the oxygen those leaves are churning out, as they sit there chewing photons? Is it that the rest of my ride is downhill, away from traffic? Or is it awe?

A short Roman archeological expedition

Termini Station at midmorning

I got an early train into Rome on Monday, headed to the physics library at Sapienza to look at a copy of the proceedings from the first conference on the periodic table, held in 1969 in Rome (and Vatican City) and Turin. I was hoping to find a photo of the conference attendees, or barring that a list of participants, but was destined to be disappointed.

Smaller than Bryn Mawr geology van, but a sign that I was
in the science zone.

Sapienza is about a 10 minute walk from Termini Station in Rome, so an easy trip. I had no trouble finding the physics buildings, I just followed the physicists. I can spot them anywhere (I think). The stacks are closed, but the student at the desk was delighted that I'd brought all the information he needed to pull it for me. I was surprised to find the book was for the most unopened, that is it had come with the folded pages uncut. The reader was supposed to cut them with the paper knife that surely lay on the little side table next to the comfortable leather wing chair. Unsupplied with a paper knife (and trying to imagine the reaction of the desk staff to my taking out such a knife and slicing into the book given that I was scolded for trying to scan with my phone a single paper from the volume), I was glad the one paper I really wanted, along with the lists of contributors and table of contents, had been opened.

I was interested to discover that this meeting on the periodic table was attended mostly by physicists, or at least the contributors to the proceedings were physicists, and eminent physicists at that: Emilio Segré, John Wheeler, spectroscopist Charlotte Moore from the National Bureau of Standards (who discovered technetium (element 43) in nature, after it had been produced artificially) and Georgy Flerov (for whom flerovium (element 114) would be named).

One of Fermi's early accelerators.

The best tidbit that I won't use in the talk is from Segré's paper, where he starts imagining that there might be worlds made of anti-matter in some remote corner of the universe, where anti-chemists would be doing anti-chemistry. But of course, that anti-chemistry would be anticlimactic, or at least uninteresting, as it would be the same as as the chemistry here. Somehow positing the existence of alien civilizations doesn't strike me an uninteresting (even if their chemistry mirrors ours)!

I arrived back to chaos at Termini. A fire had been deliberately set at a main junction north of the city and every long distance train was delayed 3 hours or outright cancelled. The place was filled with anxious travelers and long lines. Thankfully the train to Albano was running on time, and I walked the quarter mile out to the platform and an hour later was sitting at my desk in the Specola.

A Note on the Explanation of the D-lines in the Spectrum of the Night Sky

This is a tale of astrophysics, quantum mechanics and the hunt on Twitter for the unremarked, but utterly remarkable women physicists and chemists who dug out the secrets of atoms and molecules.  A version of this post appeared on the Vatican Observatory Foundation's Catholic Astronomer blog.

The moon and stars are not the only lights in the night sky, the very envelope of air that surrounds us glows, day or night.  One of the sources of the earth’s airglow is a 3 mile deep layer of sodium atoms about 50 miles above the earth’s surface.

There are roughly 8000 sodium atoms in a milliliter of air up there. In fact, there’s not much air at all, the pressure is about a millionth of what it is as sea level.  Even so, only 4 in a billion of the atoms in that layer of the atmosphere are sodium.  When these sodium atoms get energetically excited, they can relax back to their original state by releasing some energy in the form of light.

Quantum mechanics predicts the light won’t be white light (that is light comprising many different colors or frequencies) but sharp lines, single frequencies.  The marked lines on the top in the photo are reference lines from a flame test of sodium (Na) and lithium (Li) solutions. (If you’ve ever splashed salty water onto a gas burner, you’ve seen these spectral lines for sodium, the bright orange-yellow flash.) The line at 5892 Angstroms is the yellow sodium D-line (actually two lines that are so close together they aren’t resolved in this photo), the green line at 5577 is from excited oxygen atoms.  Long before anyone reached these altitudes, these ghostly lines could tell us something of the elemental make up of the atmosphere.

Where did these traces of sodium come from? Before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you another one.

My interest in the sodium atoms can be traced back to a photo from a 1938 conference posted to Twitter last Christmas by @curiouswavefn, trying to identify the one woman attendee.  Just like the more recent story of @mycandacejean's search for the identity of an unknown woman in a conference photograph (see the New York Times) Twitter was able to identify the woman. She turned out to be (not Marie Curie or Mrs. Einstein as some tweeters suggested) but Dr. Carol Anger Rieke, a Harvard trained astrophysicist.

Not long after that photograph was taken, Rieke would move to the University of Chicago, where she would do foundational work in my field of computational chemistry (with Robert Mullikan, who would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1966). But while there she continued to contribute to the astrophysics literature with James Franck (another Nobelist, who had just moved to Chicago from Germany) with this short communication:  A Note on the Explanation of the D-lines in the Spectrum of the Night Sky.

Rieke and Franck write that the source of the sodium atoms in these recently (1929) identified lines was thought to be salt kicked up into the atmosphere by sea spray.  We now know that these high-altitude metals are have an extraterrertrial origin, deposited there when meteors ablate, burn off.  Small amounts of sodium are found in meteors called ordinary chondrites, less than one percent.  As metals go, sodium evaporates pretty easily, and so is released high in the atmosphere.

In tracking down the source of the atmospheric sodium, I ran across another paper, which uses methodology I developed as part of my doctoral work, that can be fundamentally traced back to Rieke’s work with Mulliken.  It felt a bit like coming full circle.

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More about Rieke and two other remarkable women of the atomic era who were not Marie Curie — or either of the two Mrs. Einsteins — can be found in an essay I wrote, Atomic Women, which appeared this month in Nature Chemistry.

For more stories of exceptional women scientists, listen to the fabulous Prof. Raychelle Burks bring to life three accomplished women chemists: Mary Sherman Morgan (rocket fuel!), Alice Ball (effective treatment for leprosy) and Rachel Lloyd (first American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry.

Wait, there's more.  The Story Collider has a great piece by another woman chemist who once taught at a nearby college (Swarthmore), Prof. Alison Williams:  "They would talk about thermodynamics like it was poetry and quantum mechanics was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I actually still think that sometimes.  I love quantum." Me, too! 

Advent 1: Messiah mix-up

In a sleep-deprived fog, occasioned by a delayed flight that got me home at 3 am yesterday, I wandered onto Twitter where two chemist friends noted that they never came away from a reading of Messiah without new insights.  My first thought was they were talking about the classic quantum mechanics text by French physicist Albert Messiah.  Actually, not.  Handel's Messiah was the text under discussion.

Evidence I really am a science geek first and foremost.  I used Messiah's text when I took a year long course in quantum physics as a graduate student (from the physics department, have exhausted the chemistry offerings as an undergrad).

The text is still in print, though Albert Messiah died in 2013 at aged 92.  We pronounced his name "mess-ee-uh" rather than "mess-eye-uh."  I wondered today how he might have pronounced his name, and dove into the interwebs to see if I could uncover any clues.  I discovered Messiah had been part of the French Resistance in World War II (joining at age 19, the same age of my youngest son), worked at Princeton with  Niels Bohr and returned to France to teach and write this text.

I also listened to a few minutes of a presentation Messiah gave in 2009 at Le Ecole Polytechnique.  It was oddly moving to hear the voice of someone whose written words I had spent so much time wrestling with almost forty years ago.  And at the end of the presentation, I learned how he pronounced his name.

A Year of Light

Antique Bunsen spectroscope. Interior.  c. Michelle M. Francl

Halloween is still a few weeks out, but I'm getting in the mood by writing a post for the UN's "Year of Light" blog.  2015 is the UN Year of Light, celebrating the 1000th anniversary of the publication of Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics and the 300th anniversary of Newton's Optics.

While much of the excitement around the Year of Light is directed toward the physics of light, chemistry owes a huge debt to light as well (and vice versa as I argued in a recent more scholarly essay).  Bunsen and Kirchhoff's invention of the spectroscope in 1860 would allow chemists to add more than a dozen new elements to the periodic table by looking for their spectral (ghostly) lines in the light from flames.  You can read the whole thing at the UN's blog.

Light is something I think about in many of my hats — as theologian and writer and as quantum mechanic.  What would a Year of Light look like from the religious end of things?  We have a year of Mercy coming up, why not a Year of Light?  All Advent, all the time?  My favorite season!

Improving my car-ma: blessings

I have a new car (Holy Spirit red, though I opted out of flames down the side), and after the last six months (in which I have had 4 car accidents), my community was taking no chances.

This morning after Lauds, one of the Augustinians whipped up a new batch of holy water, we gathered up the Book of Blessings and the aspersorium (the bucket in which you put holy water to be used in an asperges — sprinkling — rite, the sprinkler itself is called an aspergillum) and processed (perhaps meandered would be a better word?) out to the parking lot to bless my car (and a couple of others as well):

"All-powerful God, Creator of heaven and earth, in the rich depths of your wisdom you have empowered us to produce great and beautiful works. Grant, we pray, that those who use this vehicle may travel safely, with care of the safety of others. Whether they travel for business or pleasure, let them always find Christ to be the companion of their journey." — from The Book of Blessings

I feel better, not necessarily because I think the car has been crash proofed (though please God, we're done with this game of bumped cars), but because I'm reminded that the boundaries between sacred and quotidian are permeable. God is present, in my car, as I drive, as inside the church walls.  And I love the reminder to have a care for others as I drive...

PrayTell today has a post about a story in the NY Times regarding spiritual cleansing of houses.  I was struck by two lines in the Times article:

"Running off the fumes of the big four religions, with a lacing of indigenous ritual and a dash of early 20th-century palaver — Madame Blavatsky by way of L. Ron Hubbard — the shamans and healers, mystics and mediums of the last century’s not-so-New Age have become indispensable exterminators for certain homeowners in New York and other big cities..." 

and

"Anyplace that sees a lot of traffic, she said, 'you really have to do it, just like you’re going to clean your carpets. You have a party, and you feel drained. Now we can explain it; we understand quantum physics.'"

I am a quantum physicist, and (a) I don't think we completely understand quantum physics (for example, there are these fascinating experiments that show that quantum mechanics applies to systems far larger than we thought) and (2) I don't think quantum physics explains the blessing of my car or the spiritual cleansing business.  But I still bless things.  For years (until Crash went to college) I blessed my children's heads with the sign of the cross before they went to bed.  Loaves of bread before I put them into the oven.  And remembering a priest friend who without fuss blessed my car before a late night trip back from a retreat, I blessed the car before the Boy departed for his first long solo trip (2 hours down to the beach).

Does anyone else bless the every day stuff of life? (The Book of Blessings has almost a thousand blessings in it...bridges, power stations, boats and fishing nets...)

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What Crash was shocked to discover long ago about where holy water comes from....

Gold is red and squirrels are purple? Yes and no.

I love color, particularly the subtle way in which it reveals the workings of the universe, and hints at the deeper mysteries hidden inside each molecule.  In midsummer, wearing my science writer hat I guested at Margaret Almon's blog, writing about turning gold into red glass.

Now thanks to Stratoz, I'm musing about purple squirrels (though not in this sense) and imperial violet (Tyrian purple), the structure of which is shown at the left, on my other blog.

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A beautiful photo of Tyrian purple in the wild (explore the rest of this Tumblr, do).

If you are curious about the many ways in which color manifests, browse this beautiful web exhibit:  Causes of Color.  Safe for the science tentative!

Schrodinger's cat

Fluffy double checks my marking of the quantum mechanics assignment. But no, she's not substituting for mPublish Poste while I'm away. I've got a real quantum chemist doing that for me. (Thanks, Dr. Lisa!)

I'm off to Japan on Monday with my contemplative students. The Boy is having separation anxiety, Crash wonders how many essay drafts I can read on the road, I'm in denial about packing, Math Man is watching football. A regular Saturday evening....

Seeing the universe with different eyes

I just finished teaching a semester long course in quantum mechanics today. Quantum mechanics gives you an odd view of the universe sometimes (which may explain much about me and/or my writing!). Humans can only detect a small portion of the light that suffuses the universe. This lovely site shows what it might look like if we could see with different eyes -- eyes that detected a wider range of light, and/or at different frequencies.

My favorite set of "eyes" are those shown in the picture, ones that see in the Hydrogen-α range of the spectrum (the light that is released when electrons in hydrogen atoms fall from one level to another - n=3 to n=2 in the Balmer series for those in the know). Suddenly our galaxy is aflame.

Give it at try - tell me which view you like the best!

"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus!" Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Oprah's take on quantum mechanics - and mine

I was checking my stats (read seriously procrastinating folding the laundry) and noticed that one of the search terms that was sending surfers my way was "Oprah's take on quantum mechanics". She has one?

I promptly popped it into Google to see what would come up. I had to know.

I found out. The Law of Attraction. Think and you can change what happens. Proven by quantum mechanics. The Quantum Cleanse. (Don't ask - you don't want to know.)

Somehow the word "quantum" manages to sound simultaneously mysterious and scientific, and so people attach it to things that they want to sound simultaneously mysterious and scientific. Like diets and the power of positive thinking, or even theology.

I named this blog "Quantum Theology" as a play on the two fields I'm trained in: quantum mechanics and theology. Recently a friend of almost forty years wondered just exactly what was quantum mechanics - just what do I do for a living. Repair broken quantums?

To a physicist or physical chemist, a quantum is a fixed portion of energy. (The word was coined by Max Planck in 1900.) Quantum mechanics considers the interaction of energy and matter on the atomic level. What happens when light hits an atom? Why is it that only certain amounts of energy can be absorbed? How is it that matter can behave as a particle, and as a wave?

When I say something is quantized, I don't mean it's mysterious, I mean that only certain values are allowed, and nothing in between. A good everyday example is your shoe size. You are a 5 or a 5 1/2, but never a 5 1/6. Off the rack shoes (are there any other kind these days?) are quantized.

Evidence that matter could behave like a wave suggested to Erwin Schrodinger that he could write an equation to find a mathematical description of this behavior. (There's a steamy Oprah show for you - about Schrodinger, his mistress, the twins he was tutoring in physics, the pearls he put in his ears - and the development of wave mechanics!)

So what is it I actually do? I use quantum mechanics — specifically solving Schrodinger's handy little equation — to predict the structures of molecules and their energy, then use that information to think about what molecules might exist, or how hard it would be for them to react and what products are likely to form. Right now I'm exploring molecules that are uncomfortably twisted - and topologically "interesting" (Moebius strip molecules).

Want a bit of quantum theology? One of my Jesuit friends asked me a few years ago how I could manage to reconcile the idea that an electron could behave like light and like matter. "The same way I can believe that Christ is both God and man." It's rare you can render a Jesuit speechless.

Towards a Philosophy of Odd Numbers

I'm sitting in the garden, in the heat of the late afternoon drinking iced tea and waxing philosophical about the laundry that I'm not doing at the moment.

There are some problems too knotty for even philosophers to touch. Take the problem of dualism and socks, for example. If philosophy can take a crack at what it means to be human, why can't it tell me why I never have an even number of socks return from the wash? Why doesn't dualism work for me here?

Dualism is a pervasive philosophical concept and one that I find only marginally appealing even when applied to things other than socks, I'm going to admit.

There is light and darkness, good and evil, male and female, left and right. Dualism has an appealing kind of tidiness to it: thing either are or are not. Yet, I wonder how often we impose dualism on the universe rather than find it there.

We match socks, reflecting the underlying dualism of feet: right and left. But socks generally speaking, don't have a right or left, still we insist on pairing them and fret when they don't. (I do have two very fancy pairs of running socks that claim to be chiral - right/left specific.)

Once you admit of an intermediate state, things can quickly get more complicated. Consider the quantum mechanical case where you have two degenerate states (think "equal in dignity") where any intermediate state in the spanned space is an equally valid solution to the problem at hand. Or the biological tags male and female. XX and XY genotypes are only two of a larger set of expressed and viable possibilities, and the resulting phenotypes are more complex yet.

Are my unmatched socks trying to tell me something?

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Photo is from looseends via flickr.

Hidden Truths

As of the end of September, I've submitted about a third of a first draft of the book to my editor and have another third that is written - though in need of much work. The chapter I am currently working on takes off from a favorite quote from George Bernard Shaw: "When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth." Of csuroe, tihs menas you frsit hvae to nitoce stimnhoeg is fnnuy – and taht may be the hredsat prat. This pirtlacuar tset shows how well our minds can overlook something odd.

Five years before Röntgen figured out that the radiation emitted from his Crookes tube could produce an image on a photographic plate, a photographer and a physicist produced the first X-ray image. Mystified by the odd disks that appeared on a plate developed in 1890, they nevertheless filed it away. When Röntgen's work was made public in 1896, the two pulled out their old plate and figured out they had taken X-rays of two coins.

We look, but how often do we really see? And seeing, do we know what to make of the information?

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Do check out the link to the Crookes tube - the short clip of a Crookes flower tube, where copper blooms covered in what seems to be a white coating turns technicolor under the rays produced by the tube. It's the same principle as the glowing minerals in the YouTube video embedded above, but more aesthetically appealing. Imagine having one of these in your Victorian drawing room!

For his work, Röntgen won the first Nobel prize in physics in 1901. The Nobel prize in physics today went for work on detecting light as well - for the CCD.

Quantum Mechanics on YouTube

I drive my kids crazy when I critique dramas based on their science content. Don't get me started on Eureka! Listen to the science consultant for Watchmen (Physicist James Kakalio of University of Minnesota) talk about the quantum mechanical underpinnings of Dr. Manhattan's powers.

Personally the power I want is the ability to diffract! One copy could make dinner, another tidy the sunroom and a third grade papers - then I could happily take a walk! Though if I recall, Calvin tried this (scroll down to Scientific Progress goes "boink"?) in Calvin and Hobbes and it did not end well for Calvin.

The video is for class today - now, it's back to grading for this version of myself!

Schrodinger's Cat

With help from Fluffy, seen here trying to help me derive the skin depth (the distance a quantum mechanical particle will sink into a wall) while I was simultaneously making dinner, I finished my grading ! I may be as relieved as my students. It's a great way to start the holidays (usually my grading is hanging over my head like some kind of evil Christmas ornament).