When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but didn’t quite get it all together.<\/p>\n
Kate asked about what it would’ve been like to be a physicist working at that time, when both relativity and quantum mechanics were being born, trying out new approaches and not really knowing whether a given approach would turn out to be the revolutionary new discovery that would solve everything, or whether it would fail to pan out in some way. After thinking about it a little, I think the answer is “Like working with the Internet today.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think it’s a decent analogy, because everybody doing anything net-related seems to have an unshakable confidence that their particular favorite widget is going to Change Everything, and most of them are wrong. But in the space of the last twenty-odd years, everything really has changed, not so much by the individual efforts of any one genius, but the rapid accumulation of lots of not-quite-revolutionary-on-their-own steps. <\/p>\n
For every really revolutionary development that panned out– light quanta, matter waves, special relativity– there are a bunch of not-quite-right things that are now largely forgotten. There was an “old quantum theory” in the years between the Bohr model and the Heinsenberg\/ Schrodinger development of modern QM. Bohr spent a while pushing a wacky model that tried to avoid the quantization of light, at the cost of discarding conservation of energy. Lorentz and Poincare produced models that had most of the weird features of relativity, but tried to keep an aether-like privileged frame of reference. These failed models are basically the Pets.com and Friendster of the history of physics.<\/p>\n
To some extent, any active field of science has a little of this feel– cold-atom physics in the 1990’s was a pretty exciting subfield to be in, with all sorts of incredible new discoveries including but not limited to BEC. It’s usually not that pervasive or prolonged, though– the excitement is usually limited to a smallish area of science, and generally doesn’t last that long. The early 20th century was an extended period of major ferment over a wide range of physics, and I don’t think there’s anything quite like it in science today.<\/p>\n
In a broader cultural sense, though, I think the Internet phenomenon probably comes kind of close. It’s nigh on twenty years, now, that everybody has been talking about how the Internet is going to change everything, and while most of the specific predictions have been wrong, everything is different. I do almost all of my non-technical reading in electronic form these days, I keep in touch with my friends and family through email and Facebook and Skype, I buy all manner of things from Amazon, a company that doesn’t have any bricks-and-mortar stores anywhere.<\/p>\n
I don’t think there’s much of a larger point to be drawn from this– I’m not trying to equate Jeff Bezos and Niels Bohr, and I don’t think that this analogy lends any extra weight to whatever brand of Internet triumphalism we’re pushing this week. But I think that, if you want to know what physics felt like in the early 1900’s, you probably already do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but… Continue reading Relativity, Quantum, and the Internet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,7,11,75,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history_of_science","category-physics","category-science","category-society","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}