Terrestrial Unknowns
The Path of Particles:
A journey to quantum mechanics
-devansh mishra
Try to imagine a world where everything is perfect. Economies are thriving; every person in each household is enjoying their lives, apples are falling to the ground with the acceleration they are supposed to. Well, it wasn’t exactly like this in the 1920s due to the aftermath of the Great War, but you get my point. It was at this time when scientists started examining the behaviour of light more closely, and the very nature of reality was put into question.
Now take this thought experiment. You have a large body of water, like a lake or a pond. You are sitting on the side with a few pebbles. Take two stones and throw it into the lake at around the same spots and watch the patterns the waves make. Here’s an image to help you out. The places where the high parts of both waves or low parts of both waves coincide, they add together and make an even higher or even lower wave. The places where a high portion of one wave coincides with the low portion of the other wave, they negate each other. The pattern which forms is known as an ‘interference pattern’.
The interference pattern in water waves. Source: ThoughtCo
Interference in light as part of Thomas Young’s model.
Source: physics.bu.edu
It was May of 1801. Thomas Young was an enterprising and young physicist who was curious about the nature of light. He took a red torch along with a sheet with two tiny slits in them. Young flashed the torch towards the two slits, and the pattern he saw behind was astonishing. On the other side, he expected just two bands of light to be formed because light travelled in straight lines. Boy, was he wrong! The pattern projected on the other side of the sheet was similar to the interference pattern with water waves! Thus, Thomas Young established a connection between light and water waves, and light was proclaimed to be a wave. The experiment was famously named the ‘Double-Slit’.
​
Fast-forward to a hundred years in the future. Einstein was at the peak of his career and was proving and disproving hypotheses left and right. It was then that he stumbled upon the photoelectric effect. Einstein developed an experiment demonstrating that light transfers discrete packets of energy. The photoelectric effect proved that light could only behave in the way that it did if it travelled in the form of a particle! People started to reject physics entirely, as classical approaches weren’t able to resolve this gigantic hurdle. I wouldn’t want to be a physicist at that time for sure!
After the entirety of physics delved into a realm of chaos, some people went back and questioned Young’s model, and re-ran tests with the same apparatus, but with little success. In an incident which was bound to fail, they subjected electrons to a similar double-slit experiment, as electrons were previously established to be particles. Their inspiration, unfortunately, was entirely lost, but their investigation was genuinely remarkable. What they saw on the projection was a similar interference pattern. Physics was indeed a complete mess - light was a wave and now a particle, electrons were particles and now also a wave.
The abnormality doesn’t end here, though. Following this, scientists placed a detector near the two slits to check which slit the particles entered through. Scientists now felt that they had physics backed up in a corner - the electrons couldn’t make the interference pattern unless they passed through both slits simultaneously. And therefore, they didn’t. Once the detector was in place, electrons formed solid bands on the wall behind like any particle would! It’s like the electron knew that the sensor was there, so it behaved nicely and the way it should, much like my little brother if he knows a punishment awaits him in the next room.
Now, this was uncharted territory. Classical physics broke down to a point where reassembling it was impossible. The very nature of reality was put under a microscope, as physicists were on the verge of giving. However, all was not lost. Matter was proclaimed to be in a state of duality, both a wave and a particle simultaneously. The unimaginable world of quantum physics had now arrived.
The Universe:
what we don’t know we don’t know
-Aashaya Anand
They say there are three types of things – what we know we know, what we know we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. Most of the universe falls into the third one.
​
The universe extends to 93 million light years. This number is far beyond what the human mind can process. Even though we know how big the universe is, there is only so much we can see using space telescopes and exploratory probes. This is called the observable universe, and is in the shape of a sphere. ‘Observable’ is vital; the observable universe limits what we can see but not what is there.
​
Astronomy was the first science. It started with humans noticing several sparkly little dots in the sky at night, and of course, the bright beaming sun; very hard to miss. Then, ancient Babylonians decided that it would be cool to connect these sparkly little dots, create figures such as bears and hunters, and build stories around these objects. They called them ‘constellations’. This development led to the beginning of horoscopes and superstitions, and the branch of astrology evolved from then onwards.
​
After that came the debunking of the geocentric theory, that stated that the earth was the centre of the universe and everything else revolved around it. Soon, all of us, (uh, I mean most of us) accepted that the Earth, being a spheroid, along with other planets revolved around the sun. Etymology traces this moment as the root to the term ‘solar system’.
​
After that, our dear friend Sir J. Kepler walks into the picture. His study of planetary motion was so revolutionary, and out of this world, he even made it to our textbooks. Then came Galileo Galilei with the first ever telescope. Soon, Isaac Newton, Herschel, Bunsen, Einstein and many others did not fail to make the pages of science later on.
​
The point here is that we have come a very long way in understanding astronomy. But, our knowledge of the universe is nothing compared to the number of astonishing things present, waiting to be discovered. And many of these may never see the light of day.
To enlarge the enigma, allow me to introduce you to some of the most mysterious things in space.
Oumuamua (Hawaiian for ‘scout’), is an elongated object that formed in outer space and promptly made its way into our solar system. This body is no longer than a kilometre and simply cannot be bound by the sun’s gravity. Scientists have gone from thinking this was an asteroid, to an alien space probe. Oumuamua has now left our solar system, but the mystery still lingers.
“Anything that takes up space and has mass can be defined as matter”, said the excellent grade 9 chemistry teacher. But what is ‘antimatter’? It’s not a vacuum. It is the opposite of matter. To break it down for you, matter contains particles. Atoms, more specifically. Atoms have a nucleus, protons and electrons. Antimatter particles have a similar structure, but their electrical charge is reversed. Their electrons show a positive charge and are called ‘positrons’. They are found in high-speed collisions such as the time after the Big Bang.
Speaking of the Big Bang, here’s how we know it could be more than just a theory. Cosmic Microwave Background, also known as CMB, is radiation left over from the Big Bang, was first discovered as a radio noise in the 60s. It was observed to be completely dark, having a faint glow and noise. It is considered one of the best pieces of evidence that prove the Big Bang.
If this article left you with more questions than answers, you are not alone. The more we learn about the universe, the more questions we have. We cannot fathom the true extent of the universe, but we’re working on it. Space exploration will outlive both you and me, and our understanding of our universe increases by the day. Today, we are one step closer to knowing the universe, than we were yesterday, and that’s what matters.
The chaos theory:
From peace and calm to absolute non-sense
-Devansh Mishra
Can the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas? That was the title of Edward Lorenz’s 1972 paper. Well, the answer? Potentially yes! This question haunted physicists and mathematicians alike for decades, causing huge amounts of unrest in their respective fields. Welcome to the theory of chaos.
Since Newton, scientists were firm believers of a clockwork universe, i.e., a simple set of equations govern the universe. The Newtonian dream was to get those particular equations, and we could predict the future indefinitely. Along came chaos, and it was literally a delve into the unknown.
Edward Lorenz' famous Butterfly Effect
Predicting weather was a gigantic task. But Edward Lorenz attempted to scale this mountain. On his journey, he rounded one of his measurements to 3 decimal places instead of using an exact number. What resulted was a hilarious miscalculation from a pleasant sunny day to the atmosphere making an absolute wreckage of the place. When he took exact values, the prediction came out to be totally different. He wondered if rounding off some measurements results in a drastically different solution than before, and he was right. This was one of mankind’s first glimpses into the theory of chaos, and it was given to us by the official father of chaos.
Let me try and give an example closer to home, and I encourage you to try it out. I am positive at the end of it you will question the origin of reality like I was. Take three points on a sheet of paper and draw out a triangle. Now take any random point outside or inside the triangle to start off with. Take a six-sided dice and assign two of its numbers to each of the corners. Once you roll the dice and get a number, move halfway from your previous dot towards the vertex associated with the number you rolled. Now bear with me here, these dots are going to seem completely random at first. When you’ve gotten a fair number of dots, let’s say around 300-400 dots, you will start to see a pattern. An elegant and almost unbelievable pattern of the Sierpinski’s triangle emerges in an impossible circumstance!
A formal definition of chaos elaborates that any simple set of equations that generates a behaviour so chaotic that you cannot predict where it’s going to be at a certain point of time is called a chaotic system. In the dots making up the Sierpinski’s triangle, there was a simple set of rules that you needed to follow. The placement of the dots was apparently chaotic and random at first, showing chaos. Later on, order and pattern was restored, portraying a deceptively simple image. The system oscillated between order and chaos and back to order again.
We can conclude that order and chaos are not just opposites, but are more internally linked that you could ever imagine. One cannot live without the other. From the development of an embryo inside a mother to a double pendulum to the weather, it is all governed by the law of chaos.
So next time you blame a Buzzfeed quiz or a magic 8-ball for predicting your future incorrectly, it’s not them to blame, it’s chaos theory.
Schizophrenia:
-Aashaya Anand
The human mind is rather difficult to understand. Regardless of how much we may wish to, we can seldom regulate our emotions and instincts. Sometimes, we get angry or frustrated or excited or happy for reasons we cannot explain. Many of us have frequent mood swings, as if the way we perceive our surroundings changes at the blink of an eye. But, at the end of the day, all of this is only an organised set of jumbled chemical reactions. Isn’t it terrifying, that just a few seemingly random reactions could drive anyone insane? Even people who can meditate for days and days cannot fully dominate their minds. The human mind is not compliant. It’s a wanderer. This wandering can especially be observed in certain people with a disorder called schizophrenia.
​
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder where people experience distortions of reality. They encounter hallucinations, delusions, isolation, and disorganised speech and movement. People with this disorder are not monsters, but prisoners in their own minds. They could be hallucinating their worst fear at any given moment, and still appear like everything is okay. They go through such traumatic experiences on a daily basis that put them in a permanent defence mode. It takes a lot of work for someone with schizophrenia to be able to condition themselves to regular life.
Cecilia McGough, an American mental health activist, once said in her TED talk at Penn State, that it took a lot of time and patience for her to come to terms with her disorder. She said that she has schizophrenia and that does not make her a monster. She then proceeded to describe one of her recurring hallucinations as the clown from the movie ‘It’, and mentioned that the colour red triggered it.
The face behind the schizophrenia movement, Cecila McGough
The hallucinations people with schizophrenia face seem completely real. Just as real as everything else in their life. They can hear and see them, and sometimes, they feel they can touch them. The naturalism of their hallucinations is the primary reason people with schizophrenia don’t seek out help in the early stages of their disorder. Once the disorder is diagnosed, it gets a lot less confusing. While talking to someone with schizophrenia, it is advised to never ask them if they’re hallucinating in the present moment and to never look in the direction of their hallucination, because once somebody other than themselves acknowledges it, their vision is transformed from imagination into reality.
​
The best kind of help for people with schizophrenia is talking to a psychiatrist. There are also several medications that suppress delusions and hallucinations. If you know somebody with schizophrenia, the best thing you can do for them is to treat them normally and respect their boundaries. Make sure to check up on them regularly because someone may never open up about the battles they’re fighting until we ask them about it. With the right kind of assistance, someone with schizophrenia can live a safe and normal life.