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PLANCK'S
QUANTUM OF ACTION
Arthur
M. Young
Because
it led to quantum physics, the discovery by Planck in 1900 that light is
radiated in whole units, or quanta of action, is probably the most important
discovery made by science since its inception about four hundred years ago.
Another reason for its importance, in my opinion, is that it provided scientific
sanction for the idea that what is most basic is not material particles but activity.
It is not hard to think of a particle having energy due to its motion. It is
hard to think of activity with no particle. Of course you can think of the
quantum of action as a particle, but shorn of its energy there is nothing there.
This is why if one person sees a photon, or "particle" of light, it is
annihilated and no one else can see it. We never do see objects; we see the
light reflected from them.
What
does this do to the objectivity of the photon? Is something objective which can
only be seen once? It's no wonder that Planck had to wait nineteen years for
physicists to accept his thinking. This is the period given, but I don't think
there was any general acceptance until 1926, when Werner Heisenberg showed that
our uncertainty about the position and momentum of a particle is equal to
Planck's constant. Even Planck found it hard to believe his own theory, and
Einstein, despite his getting the Nobel Prize for using Planck's theory to
explain the photoelectric effect, would not accept quantum theory: "God
does not play dice with the universe."
As
I have heard it, Newton thought the regularity of the planets' motion was
evidence for God. Others say that Newton thought that it would sometimes be
necessary for God to readjust their motion. In any case LaPlace said he had
accounted for their motion and made God an unnecessary hypothesis. The same
issue - God as regularity versus God as chance - was the subject of a
4000-year-old Egyptian myth. The myth relates that in former times there were
360 days in the year, and that the Supreme God decreed that there should be no
gods born on any day of the year. Then the moon played dice with the sun and won
from it five extra days, on which were born Horus and his four sons. Again, in
Genesis we have both that God gave man dominion over the beasts, implying free
will, and that he forbade man's eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil, which man did eat, so he must have had free will to disobey God.
Thus
there has been a 4000-year-old confusion between the notion of God as perfect
regularity, order and certainty, and God as spontaneous creativity, accident and
uncertainty.
We fear uncertainty when we pay fees for insurance against unforeseen losses,
and ask for it when we buy lottery tickets in hope of a quick gain. I suppose
most
people
think of uncertainty as to be avoided, but the virgin birth, which is an event
without a cause, is a symbol in almost all religions of salvation - the birth
of the hero (the god in man) who conquers the forces of evil and attains divine
status. Another such interpretation of uncertainty is The Cloud of Unknowing,
one of the great religious books, which tells us that in all other subjects we
should use discretion, but in the religious quest, none. We should go about with
a cloud of unknowing over our heads.
How
could Einstein use God's regularity to exclude uncertainty if LaPlace could use
regularity to make God unnecessary? The point is that there could be no novelty,
no creativity, in a universe with no uncertainty. This merit of uncertainty,
novelty, contrasts sharply with the interpretation of the quantum of action as
an inevitable defect of observation, but it does not conflict with the
interpretation of the quantum as spontaneous creativity or freedom. "Don't
hitch your wagon to a cement fence post," it says; "hitch your wagon
to a star!"
Such
references as I've cited above might seem inappropriate to our topic, "The
Errors and Misconceptions of Science," but they can help delineate the
province of science. Science is the quest for certainty, but science can only
find it in what is less than ourselves. Uncertainty is what characterizes what
is greater than ourselves. Why then is uncertainty and its interpretation
important for science? Because science discovered uncertainty! After 4000 years
of speculation about uncertainty, there followed the belief up to 100 years ago
that science would put an end to it. But science now admits that uncertainty is
not only inevitable, it is the most basic ingredient - the photon, or quantum
of action.
What
remains is for science to see this uncertainty in a better light - as
spontaneous creativity, the source of life and the drive that sustains evolution
in its ten-billion-year quest to surpass itself.
Science
is halfway to this recognition already, especially in biochemistry, in which
more and more evidence is showing how photons or quanta of action initiate and
sustain the molecular changes that constitute cellular metabolism, growth and
reproduction. In other areas science clings to its now obsolete dogma of
determinism.
The
Minuteness of the Quantum of Action
Another
important misconception is to view the minuteness of energy in the quantum of
action as grounds for its confinement to the micro world of quantum physics, and
thus for its unimportance in general. This view overlooks the trigger effect,
by which a minute energy can control a large-scale event. A single photon can
open the supermarket door, or blow up a city. Presumably an aberrant photon
displaced a gene in Queen Victoria's germ plasm that caused the Tsarevich to
become hemophiliac, hence precipitating the Russian Revolution.
Another
important point about the quantum of action, or photon, is one I cannot describe
either as an error or a misconception; it is rather an oversight. This is the
slight
attention
given to the fact that the quantum of action, in the process called pair
production, creates protons and electrons, the two particles that constitute
atoms and hence all organized matter. Current physics has devoted most of its
attention to the hypothetical constituents of baryons, heavy particles that
decay into protons, and leptons, which disintegrate into electrons. This work
may be very important, but it ends up with a greater variety than the variety it
started with - quarks and subquarks with differences in "color" and
"flavor," (up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom) - all of which
distracts us, as in
the
old nursery rhyme -