tion from traveling faster than light, what is happening here is that the
probability wave has collapsed instantly throughout the entire universe.
There is a dramatic moment in the first Star Wars movie (Episode Four)
when Obi-Wan Kenobi senses a great disturbance in the Force. You don’t
have to be Obi-Wan Kenobi to sense a disturbance in a probability wave;
the universe does it for you by collapsing it instantaneously and every-
where when an observation is made.
But how is this done? At present there are suggestions and ideas— in-
cluding the idea that this is something we may never know. Even if we
never know it, the pursuit of this knowledge will undoubtedly result in
developments, both technological and philosophical, that will greatly
change our world. Sir Arthur Eddington, who led the 1919 expedition
that confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity, may have put it best when
he said, “The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger
than we can imagine”^12 —because who could ever have imagined wave-
particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and entanglement?
Round 1
Samuel Johnson had his Boswell, but John Wheeler certainly deserves
one—possibly no physicist or mathematician is able to encapsulate the
dilemmas faced by science so succinctly. A key component of the incom-
patibility between the physics of the large (relativity) and the physics of
the small (quantum mechanics) is the mathematical model used to de-
scribe it. At the level of the really, really small, the hands-down winner—
for the moment—is the discrete view, because Max Planck’s hypothesis
resulted in discrete descriptions that were unbelievably successful in pre-
dicting values of all the relevant physical quantities. This triumph would
have come as a vindication to a small band of quasi-religious mystics who
lived two and a half millennia ago, and whom we will encounter in the
next chapter.NOTES- See http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Niels_Bohr. Go to this site for the bio, but stay
for the quotes. Neils Bohr is part Yogi Berra, part Yoda. Here’s a teaser quote,
which should be studied assiduously by every public figure: “Never talk faster
than you think.” - See http:// en .wikipedia .org/ wiki/ Rayleigh -Jeans _Law. This brief site is tremen-
dously intriguing, as it has the equations for both the Rayleigh-Jeans law and
Planck’s revision, as well as an attractive graphic that illustrates the ultraviolet
catastrophe.
All Things Great and Small 63