👀 Einstein Was Right, when Everybody Thought He Was Wrong, Again! 👅
2023 Nobel Prize for Attosecond Tool for Microworld
In Time Matters (free eBook, also available on Google and Amazon) we discussed that Einstein was originally right about our Universe being static, not expanding. But later, under peer pressure, both from the Academia and the Church, he changed his mind to the expanding Universe, and even recognized his original position as his biggest blunder.
Another interesting example of Einstein’s disagreement even with nowadays mainstream, is about Black Holes and the surrounding them Event Horizon: Einstein was confident (just by physical principles) that Event Horizon is just a math blunder, and he was right again.
This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics shines another light on Einstein’s understanding of our world, “microworld” in this case. Traditional physics studies “macroworld” — space and time, and quantum physics studies “microworld”. Though Einstein is popular for macroworld study, the Nobel prize that he got was for photoelectric effect, which describes how photons knock electrons out of atoms. Studying microworld was always a challenge from tool and scale perspective, for example diameter of Hydrogen atom is 10 ⁻¹⁰ m, and diameter of the proton, which is a nucleus of the Hydrogen atom, is 1.9×10 ⁻¹⁵ m. Because of that, quantum physics is very much a statistical science, which can be confusing and even “unworldly”. The best example of how wrong the mainstream can be is the last year’s Nobel Prize about our world not being “locally real”, popularly explained in my story Gambling and Nobel Prize For Physics. Einstein strongly resisted microworld being completely different from macroworld, and to the statistical misinterpretations. For example, quantum physicists claimed that position of electron in atom is unpredictable not because of infinitesimal 10 ⁻¹⁰ m size of atom and very fast speed of electron there moving at about 6×10 ⁵ m/sec (this speed is known from the photoelectric effect), but because of so-called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a feature of nature, a feature of microworld. Brief introduction to Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from Dr. Lincoln:
But physicists awarded this year came out with tools that can test events attosecond apart (attosecond = 10 ⁻¹⁸ sec), with a light impulse/wave length attosecond×c (where c is the speed of light, c = 3×10 ⁸ m/sec), at the scale of 10 ⁻¹⁸ sec × 3×10 ⁸ m/sec = 3×10 ⁻¹⁰ m, which is already the size of an atom (larger than hydrogen atom, but close to bigger elements’ diameters, like iron, Fe: 2.7×10 ⁻¹⁰ m). But to track electron movement inside atom, as electron speed is 6×10 ⁵ m/sec, which is much smaller than c, the attosecond tool gives much better resolution for electron’s whereabouts, a hundred times better than 10 ⁻¹⁰ m, which is the size of an atom:
10 ⁻¹⁸ sec × 6×10 ⁵ m/sec = 6×10 ⁻¹³ m — resolution for electron's tracking.
Now physicists can track electrons in atoms. Please watch 1 minute of this video on what it means:
Like Event Horizon appeared from math blunder, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is based on the fault of Fourier approximation for Dirac function, meaning it rather reflects micro-tools-limitations than a property of nature:
Delta Δ, the value of the gap at x-axis, is the actual uncertainty of the measurement: its non-zero value is the fault in determining an electron’s position.
2023 Nobel Prize: the shorter wavelength, the better approximation, the better localization = the gap at x-axis (delta Δ) reduces.
Attosecond tool is similar to filming with a billion of billions of snapshots per second: tracking when an electron on consuming an impulse, raised to a higher orbital, falls back and radiates. That radiation gives up electrons’ real position inside an atom.
vs. Quantum belief: an electron in an atom is like a cloud, it has no real location but probabilistic in that cloud.
Continued 👉 Is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Real? — Forget it: it is about time only.
