Cornell University, New York, 1964. In one of his famous lectures, in an attempt to describe to his audience the enigmatic behavior of the smallest particles of matter, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman utters a phrase that makes history: “No one can understand quantum mechanics.” Sixty years later, the mystery remains. At the subatomic level, nothing similar to our ordinary everyday understanding of how the natural world works How can we not find it strange that these subatomic particles behave as if they could be in many places at the same time, or that they could instantly affect each other, even if they are And yet, even if we don’t understand everything about it, quantum physics (or quantum mechanics) defines our daily lives in ways we can’t even imagine, from the use of GPS to laser beams. In fact, last month in our country, students of the 3rd Lyceum for the first time began to be taught an introduction to quantum physics, which Oraya is the subject of the Panhellenic Examinations. And while research in this area continues, American physicist and professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) David Kaiser went back a hundred years and decided to catch the thread of this fascinating research path from the very beginning. . From Einstein to Hawking, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, skillfully crossing the border between science and history, he summarized, one might say, all of modern physics in a valuable book published in America three years ago called The Quantum Legacy. . In it, he popularizes complex scientific concepts while at the same time telling stories about people and societies — stories that manage, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne notes, “to integrate human history into science.” The book is now also available in Greece as Quantum Heritage by Ropi Publications. As the historian of physics Grigoris Panoutsopoulos, who, along with Themistocles Halikias, translated and scientifically edited the Greek edition, writes in the preface, “David Kaiser stitches world wars, spy stories, countercultural movements, Cold War conflicts, breakthrough ideas, human weaknesses, quantum wells into a single narrative. , giant particle accelerators, equations, university textbooks, and military research programs.”

– Indeed, despite the fact that today we use the equations of quantum physics in a variety of applications and deeply understand them, this infamous Feynman phrase is still relevant. The reason is that when we try to express in simple words or pictures how the world works in order to fit these equations, we still hit a wall. What is happening today is that some scientists claim that they understand the theory perfectly, while some of their colleagues say that they understand it even better – while all this only shows that no one understands it yet! So yes, we are still scratching our heads wondering at the phenomena of quantum mechanics.

“We immerse ourselves in the “gifts” of quantum mechanics research every day—every moment of every day, in fact. And it’s been that way for over half a century. Understanding how transistors work just after World War II has defined our daily lives ever since (think of computers). As far as lasers go, think how taken for granted it now seems to us to “scan” a product at a supermarket checkout with a small machine. We are talking, in fact, about discoveries in which deep quantum qualities are hidden, introduced into our understanding by Einstein himself a century ago. Not to mention an even more extreme example, which is the navigational tools we use today, which are based on a system called GPS, which works because we built clocks accurate to billionths of a second, commonly referred to as “atomic clocks.” . And trust me, nothing can be more “quantum mechanical” than an atomic clock! Thus, the fact that we can understand the tiny vibrations of specific particles and build devices that work based on this understanding shows, without exaggeration, that we deeply understand quantum mechanics, even if we do not know or notice it.

“Yes, strange things happen there too, but in a different way. One of the biggest problems we still face is how to reconcile the physics of the very large universe, so eloquently described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, with the theory of quantum mechanics and physics at the subatomic level. Our goal now is to figure out how to combine these two such beautiful but very different theories about how the world and nature work. And we’re still searching – too often, in the dark.

“More than anyone else in his generation, Hawking tried to find a solution to the problem we just described. First of all, he was an expert on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, an expert on the curvature of space-time and black holes, and to his credit, he didn’t stop there. He really wanted to see what happens when you try to connect these two very different understandings of the universe, quantum theory and general relativity, and like no one else, he still couldn’t. But he noted a number of strange phenomena that happen when we try to do this, such as the so-called “Hawking radiation.” He was the first to attempt to explain the world through the union of two theories, and had great influence in the scientific community.

Physicists are people too, they don’t live in isolation on islands

– Yes, I think so – especially when I think about all the things that children at school can feel during their first “encounter” with quantum theory. All this awe and admiration, while in amazement asking the question “how can the world work like this?”. Of course, the same is true for all of us, from high school students to adults to scientists: the study of quantum phenomena is like a police mystery in which we collect evidence but do not know how it will end. Especially among researchers and research groups, it also creates passionate competition, tension, and looks like a universal intellectual adventure, a first-to-one-answers drama. The surprise, the mystery, even the aesthetics and beauty contained in all this research are all elements that allow me to say that we are getting close enough to the rich spectrum of emotions that Kandinsky spoke about.

– I think because our research often seems abstract, expressed in “terrible” mathematics and takes place behind closed doors, in hard-to-reach places. It’s like everyone thinks we’re doing some weird theoretical research on some islands. But that never happened and never has: our personal, human stories make up a big part of the picture, from how shy one of history’s greatest physicists, Briton Paul Dirac, was, to how terribly insistent Stephen Hawking was, or the personal drama of Austrian physicist Paul . Ehrenfest. But what is even more interesting to me as a historian is how we can divide these figures into different cultures and times, into schools of thought about what can be right or wrong in nature or in everyday life. What was it like discovering new things in the Nazi era without knowing where they would be used, or what was it like doing rocket research during the Cold War? In other words, it’s about trying to find out how the world works in very specific places and at specific times. And this is very intriguing to me: how did the times, their context and institutions, influence our ideas, our scientific research? What was the priority in history, why do we know so much about some things and less about others? And this is something that goes beyond mathematical equations.