Episode 3 - Waves of life

Tonight, I'm going to tell you about the Thesis by Louis De Broglie. He was a duke, Duke De Broglie. In 1924 he submitted his thesis to a panel in Paris and they couldn't make sense of it. As a result, he almost failed his exam. But, they decided, upon reflection, that they ought to send the thesis to Einstein to have a look at it, because it was in his wheelhouse. Einstein wrote back and said that it was the first glimmer of light in the darkest times of quantum physics. De Broglie ought to get the the doctorate. Five years later he got the Nobel Prize for the material in his thesis because it opened up a new field of physics completely. In many ways he was a strikingly original thinker and yet nobody's heard of him except a small group of physicists. 

 

Einstein postulated that light could be thought of as being made of particles which he called corpuscles but these days we call them photons These are particles of light with the well-defined energy related to the frequency of the wave. Einstein was thinking of the waves actually behaving as if they're particles. If you strike a metal surface with one particle of light, an electron get's kicked off the surface in the photoelectric effect. It's a one-for-one process, and so he thought of it as a particle. These particles also must have a wave aspect because electromagnetic waves ARE waves.

 

De Broglie takes this idea and says that maybe, just maybe ALL fundamental particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons could behave as if they're waves. This could be a basic property of matter and reality itself. At the time the Bohr model saw atoms somewhat like planets. With electrons orbiting like little moons. It was a good model, but it didn't answer all the questions... But if you instead took the point value of the electron and replaced it with a wave of a precise frequency, and stretched that wave around the atom, you can see perfectly how the troughs and crests line up and define the orbitals the electrons inhabit.

 

And if they are supposed to behave like photons, or waves in general, then you should be able to harness them, focus them, and maybe use them for imaging? It turns out Electron microscopes use this very process to peer at objects in ever higher resolutions. Indeed if you look at matter at the theoretical magnification limit of electron microscopes, you start to strange line patterns. Like you're looking at the interference patterns caused by waves interacting. 

 

To demonstrate this phenomena, a crude, but effective experiment was conducted called the "Double Slit" experiment. Where you take photons, or electrons, and shoot them at a phosphorous target. Every photon or electron that strikes the screen shows up as a single point on the screen. Now if you take a card with two very small slits cut into it, parallel to one another, and place that card between the source and the phosphorous screen, a strange interference pattern emerges. If light or electrons behave as particles you would expect to see just 2 areas light up on the screen as the photons travel through either one or the other slits. But what you actually see is a series of lines gradually falling off in intensity as you move away from the centre of the target.  This can only happen if the photons are actually waves and can travel through BOTH slits at the same time, then interact with themselves causing the pattern on the other side of the slit card. The weirdest part of this experiment, and one that often gets misinterpreted, is that if you look at the card itself and try to discern which slit the particle traveled through, the pattern on the screen goes away, and you're left with just 2 lit sections. The particle's wave function has collapsed and is now following Newtonian rules. The act of measurement collapses this little piece of magic. 

 

The sticking point here is the term measurement. In order to measure something we need to interact with it in some way. Put in a photon detector and the photon has to hit the detector in order to register the result. But, according to the universe, ANY interaction can be considered a measurement. If it hits a molecule of air, or is affected by some stray magnetic field. Light is usually ok for this, but electrons and other charged fundamental particles are tricky. And no, your thoughts or intentions don't count as interaction.

 

Turns out, you can do this with anything as long as it's de Broglie wave extends past the confines of the object. The experiment has been done with molecules containing up to 100 atoms, with the same result. It could be that everything we see as solid matter is just a complex woven tapestry of waves. And we're only seeing it at a great distance. Probability smooths out all the underpinnings and our existence is nothing more than a collection of averages, floating in a massive series of quantum fields. 

 

Everything is waves of some sort. Different mediums, different rates, different frequencies, but all rising and falling like a chest in deep sleep. Your physical body sloughs off cells of differing tissues at different rates and replaces them anew. You get a whole new body in about 9 years. In a lot of ways we can consider ourselves as a collection of waves propagating through the substance of the earth. A heterodyne collection of simple sines, creating the full spectrum of human experience. Or of life itself. 

 

Your existence and your actions have a ripple effect as well. Depending on your actions, your presence can be felt long after your wave has crashed on that inevitable, distant shore. Your existence laps in the ever inward rushing tide. For the rest of time. Your life is an echo. Crossing the cosmos and eventually coming back to us. 

 

Can you feel your ancestors? Playing across your skin. A dance of light. A sine wave of an invocation. The world is an emergent illusion. The interplay of all things is a labyrinthine map. The interference pattern is ever changing. It’s impossible to explain it all. But it’s enough to know you’re a part of it all and it's all contained within you. Each of us, in some way has stepped out of the heart of a dying star, to lend a hand in understanding it all.