Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
9 - What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
from Part One - Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
Summary
Ed hai corragio di traitor scherzando un negozio si serio? [And you have the nerve to joke about so serious a business?]
– SusannaMy amiable friend Professor Mozart dropped by the other day. Now that his NSF grant has been cut way back, he has more time to think about things, and it's a pleasure to chat with him. Some of his views, though, are more than a little peculiar, as the following conversation clearly reveals.
“I have to admit,” Mozart began sadly, “that particle physics over the last 40 or 50 years has been a disappointment. Who would have expected that in half a century we wouldn't learn anything really profound?”
“Nothing profound?!” I exploded. “What about parity nonconservation? What about the breakdown of time-reversal symmetry?”
“To be sure,” sighed Mozart, “we've learned that left can be distinguished from right and that time past is different from time future. But most ordinary people knew the difference between left and right all along, and who except the most highly trained physicists—temporarily, it now turns out—ever doubted for a moment that they could tell the future from the past? So establishing that the asymmetry is really there after all is certainly commendable. But about really serious problems we've discovered nothing—nothing whatsoever about the central puzzle.”
“And just what might that puzzle be?” I urged, for he seemed in danger of succumbing to an attack of melancholia.
He revived. “All particle physics has taught us about the central mystery is that quantum mechanics still works. Perfectly, as far as anybody can tell. What a letdown!”
“Letdown? It's a triumph!”
“Letdown!” he insisted. “Think of the previous half-century, when we went down from the macroscopic by seven or eight orders of magnitude. What delicious confusion! All the verities of the preceding two centuries, held by physicists and ordinary people alike, simply fell apart—collapsed. We had to start all over again, and we came up with something that worked just beautifully but was so strange that nobody had any idea what it meant except Bohr, and practically nobody could understand him. So naturally we kept probing further, getting to smaller and smaller length scales, waiting for the next revolution to shed some light on the meaning of the old one. But what happened? For 65 years, since 1925, we've been probing, at finer and finer levels.
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- Why Quark Rhymes with PorkAnd Other Scientific Diversions, pp. 57 - 66Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016