Tag: quantum

The Posthumous Trials of Robert A. Millikan

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Millikan and EinsteinThe photograph beside this text shows two men standing side by side, both scientific celebrities, both Nobel prizewinners, both of them well-known and well-loved by the American public in 1932, when the picture was taken. But public memory is fickle, and today only the man on the right is still recognizable to most people.

Albert Einstein, Time Magazine’s “Man of the Century,” the father of special and general relativity, has a place in science that remains secure, regardless of what one thinks of his life as a whole. Despite activist efforts at demystification, Einstein the scientist is unblemished by any misgivings about his personal life or political activities. Robert A. Millikan, the bow-tied man on the left, is far less secure. The posthumous charges against Millikan have been against his scientific integrity and his political sympathies, and his detractors have made headway.

In 2020, Pomona College changed the name of their Robert A. Millikan Laboratory, noting Millikan’s “history of eugenics promotion,” along with his purported sexism and racism. In 2021, the California Institute of Technology, the institution that Millikan spent decades building, followed suit, renaming Millikan Hall as Caltech Hall, and discontinuing the Millikan Medal, previously the Institute’s highest honor. Citing Caltech’s precedent, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) renamed its own Millikan Medal later that same year.

Since I spend most of my time teaching physics, and since I am myself a member of the AAPT, it was the last of these name changes that rankled me the most. These allegations bothered me because I suspected that they weren’t quite fair. Read more »

The Philosopher of Quantum Reality

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

This column is ultimately a review of A Guess at the Riddle: Essays on the Physical Underpinnings of Quantum Mechanics, the short new book by David Z Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University and (as I found out last week) the graduate advisor of the founding editor of 3QuarksDaily, S. Abbas Raza. Unlike Raza, I have never met Albert, but my parasocial relationship with his work is midway through its second decade, which I am now acknowledging upfront.

I first became aware of David Z Albert when I was an undergraduate at a small Lutheran college in rural Iowa. On its top floor, the Wartburg College library had a large painting of Martin Luther, our hero, overseeing a bonfire of Catholic theology. But in the basement, where the unburnt books were held, I found a copy of Albert’s 1992 debut, Quantum Mechanics and Experience. The book’s style seemed wholly unusual to me. As a physics student, I wasn’t accustomed to books that were at once about science but somehow separate from it. I was impressed how Albert had retained only enough detail for a conceptual critique. I didn’t know, then, that its peculiar patois was just that of the analytic philosophers, with Albert merely adopting an eccentric dialect of that communal tongue.

In my last column for 3QD, I wrote about how quantum models work. A physical system is associated with a quantum state. As time passes, the quantum state changes according to a deterministic rule, the Schrodinger equation, branching smoothly into distinct outcomes. At the end, you compare how much of the wave-function—what percentage of its total squared amplitude—is parked in each possible branch, and this gives you the probability of observing each outcome.

Quantum Mechanics and Experience is a book about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which (roughly) is the question of how nature decides which one of the predicted possibilities within the final quantum state we actually end up observing. Albert’s book wasn’t my first exposure these issues—I had read Nick Herbert’s 1987 book, Quantum Reality, a few years earlier—but it represented the first time I got the sense that these issues were still debated, and still up for grabs. Read more »