A Wet Wednesday

[hypatia_66]

Quantum entanglement leads to friction

A wet Wednesday

It was raining, it was Wednesday. And like all wet Wednesdays, there was nothing to do but twiddle the thumbs and sigh. And that was what he did, until his exasperated partner said, “Stop doing that! Do something useful.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know; read a book, read an article – read this!” He passed over a science journal he had been reading.

“It’s all gibberish.”

“Nonsense. It’s very simple, you just have to be open to new ideas.”

“OK, explain quantum physics to me in words of one syllable. Make me understand.”

“Can you manage a few more syllables? The two words have each got two.”

He sighed. “All right. Go on then.”

“Once upon a time,” the graduate-summa-cum-laude began, “some scientists began to realise that light travelled in waves.”

His partner closed his eyes and began to regret he’d started this. “So?”

“But light consists of photons – individual particles. When they travel as a wave, how do you know where an individual particle is?”

“You tell me.” As if I care, he thought.

“You might want to know where it is, or you might want to know how fast it’s going. If you look at where it is, you can’t measure how fast it’s going. You can only see it in one state or the other – not both. It’s called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

“Who? No don’t bother. Keep going.”

“As soon as you observe, or measure, one state of its existence, you cancel the possibility of its other state. I won’t bore you with Planck’s Constant…”

“Please don’t.”

“But it’s related to the product of the uncertainty in time and in energy.”

“You don’t say.”

“So, in the experiment to measure the weight of a photon and gauge the energy of emitted light…”

He continued to explain the inexplicable, the counterintuitive, the totally non-common-sense world of particle physics long after his brain-creased partner had stopped listening.

So, when the Physicist began to explain the corollary of quantum entanglement, the Gibbering Idiot felt a strong temptation to engage in friction, which is another branch of physics, a component of the science of tribology. The one that describes the relative motion of solid surfaces and the like. There’s dry friction, for example, which arises from the interaction of surface features (like fists and noses). There is also skin friction – a component of drag (like wiping the blood from your nose); and, of course, there’s internal friction which affects solid materials undergoing deformation (like bending suddenly when a fist is aimed at your stomach).

In the presence of friction some energy is always lost in the form of heat.  That’s a branch of physics, too. There would have been not only heat but possibly a lot of sound. And that’s yet another branch …

But there was no-one around to hear.

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Note: with apologies to any real physicists…