Monthly Archives: February 2022

The Only Speed of Light That Matters

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A couple weeks back, someone asked me about a Veritasium video with the provocative title “Why No One Has Measured The Speed Of Light”. Veritasium is a science popularization youtube channel, and usually a fairly good one…so it was a bit surprising to see it make a claim usually reserved for crackpots. Many, many people have measured the speed of light, including Ole Rømer all the way back in 1676. To argue otherwise seems like it demands a massive conspiracy.

Veritasium wasn’t proposing a conspiracy, though, just a technical point. Yes, many experiments have measured the speed of light. However, the speed they measure is in fact a “two-way speed”, the speed that light takes to go somewhere and then come back. They leave open the possibility that light travels differently in different directions, and only has the measured speed on average: that there are different “one-way speeds” of light.

The loophole is clearest using some of the more vivid measurements of the speed of light, timing how long it takes to bounce off a mirror and return. It’s less clear using other measurements of the speed of light, like Rømer’s. Rømer measured the speed of light using the moons of Jupiter, noticing that the time they took to orbit appeared to change based on whether Jupiter was moving towards or away from the Earth. For this measurement Rømer didn’t send any light to Jupiter…but he did have to make assumptions about Jupiter’s rotation, using it like a distant clock. Those assumptions also leave the door open to a loophole, one where the different one-way speeds of light are compensated by different speeds for distant clocks. You can watch the Veritasium video for more details about how this works, or see the wikipedia page for the mathematical details.

When we think of the speed of light as the same in all directions, in some sense we’re making a choice. We’ve chosen a convention, called the Einstein synchronization convention, that lines up distant clocks in a particular way. We didn’t have to choose that convention, though we prefer to (the math gets quite a bit more complicated if we don’t). And crucially for any such choice, it is impossible for any experiment to tell the difference.

So far, Veritasium is doing fine here. But if the video was totally fine, I wouldn’t have written this post. The technical argument is fine, but the video screws up its implications.

Near the end of the video, the host speculates whether this ambiguity is a clue. What if a deeper theory of physics could explain why we can’t tell the difference between different synchronizations? Maybe that would hint at something important.

Well, it does hint at something important, but not something new. What it hints at is that “one-way speeds” don’t matter. Not for light, or really for anything else.

Think about measuring the speed of something, anything. There are two ways to do it. One is to time it against something else, like the signal in a wire, and assume we know that speed. Veritasium shows an example of this, measuring the speed of a baseball that hits a target and sends a signal back. The other way is to send it somewhere with a clock we trust, and compare it to our clock. Each of these requires that something goes back and forth, even if it’s not the same thing each time. We can’t measure the one-way speed of anything because we’re never in two places at once. Everything we measure, every conclusion we come to about the world, rests on something “two-way”: our actions go out, our perceptions go in. Even our depth perception is an inference from our ancestors, whose experience seeing food and traveling to it calibrated our notion of distance.

Synchronization of clocks is a convention because the external world is a convention. What we have really, objectively, truly, are our perceptions and our memories. Everything else is a model we build to fill the gaps in between. Some features of that model are essential: if you change them, you no longer match our perceptions. Other features, though, are just convenience: ways we arrange the model to make it easier to use, to make it not “sound dumb”, to tell a coherent story. Synchronization is one of those things: the notion that you can compare times in distant places is convenient, but as relativity already tells us in other contexts, not necessary. It’s part of our storytelling, not an essential part of our model.

Geometry and Geometry

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Last week, I gave the opening lectures for a course on scattering amplitudes, the things we compute to find probabilities in particle physics. After the first class, one of the students asked me if two different descriptions of these amplitudes, one called CHY and the other called the amplituhedron, were related. There does happen to be a connection, but it’s a bit subtle and indirect, not the sort of thing the student would have been thinking of. Why then, did he think they might be related? Well, he explained, both descriptions are geometric.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve seen me talk about misunderstandings. There are a lot of subtle ways a smart student can misunderstand something, ways that can be hard for a teacher to recognize. The right question, or the right explanation, can reveal what’s going on. Here, I think the problem was that there are multiple meanings of geometry.

One of the descriptions the student asked about, CHY, is related to string theory. It describes scattering particles in terms of the path of a length of string through space and time. That path draws out a surface called a world-sheet, showing all the places the string touches on its journey. And that picture, of a wiggly surface drawn in space and time, looks like what most people think of as geometry: a “shape” in a pretty normal sense, which here describes the physics of scattering particles.

The other description, the amplituhedron, also uses geometric objects to describe scattering particles. But the “geometric objects” here are much more abstract. A few of them are familiar: straight lines, the area between them forming shapes on a plane. Most of them, though are generalizations of this: instead of lines on a plane, they have higher dimensional planes in higher dimensional spaces. These too get described as geometry, even though they aren’t the “everyday” geometry you might be familiar with. Instead, they’re a “natural generalization”, something that, once you know the math, is close enough to that “everyday” geometry that it deserves the same name.

This week, two papers presented a totally different kind of geometric description of particle physics. In those papers, “geometric” has to do with differential geometry, the mathematics behind Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The descriptions are geometric because they use the same kinds of building-blocks of that theory, a metric that bends space and time. Once again, this kind of geometry is a natural generalization of the everyday notion, but now in once again a different way.

All of these notions of geometry do have some things in common, of course. Maybe you could even write down a definition of “geometry” that includes all of them. But they’re different enough that if I tell you that two descriptions are “geometric”, it doesn’t tell you all that much. It definitely doesn’t tell you the two descriptions are related.

It’s a reasonable misunderstanding, though. It comes from a place where, used to “everyday” geometry, you expect two “geometric descriptions” of something to be similar: shapes moving in everyday space, things you can directly compare. Instead, a geometric description can be many sorts of shape, in many sorts of spaces, emphasizing many sorts of properties. “Geometry” is just a really broad term.

Valentine’s Day Physics Poem 2022

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Monday is Valentine’s Day, so I’m following my yearly tradition and posting a poem about love and physics. If you like it, be sure to check out my poems from past years here.

Time Crystals

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
     effortlessly
         until the end of time.

This is, of course, impossible.

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
      not effortlessly,
	   but driven,
with reliable effort
input energy
(what the young physicists call work).

This, (you might say of course,) is possible.
It means more than you’d think.

A thing we model as a spring
(or: anyone and anything)
has a restoring force:
a force to pull it back
a force to keep it going.

A thing we model as a spring
(yes you and me and everything)
has a damping force, too:
this slows it down
and tires it out.
The dismal law
of finite life.

The driving force is another thing
no mere possession of the spring.
The driving force comes from

    o u t s i d e

and breaks the rules.

Your rude “of course”:
a sign you guess
a simple resolution.
That outside helpmeet,
doing work,
will be used up,
drained,
fueling that crystal life.

But no.

That was the discovery.

No net drain,
but back and forth,
each feeding the other.
With this alone
(and only this)
the system breaks the dismal law
and lives forever.

(As a child, did you ever sing,
of giving away, and giving away,
and only having more?)

A physicist dreamed,
alone, impossibly,
of a life like a crystal.

Collaboration made it real.

Book Review: The Joy of Insight

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There’s something endlessly fascinating about the early days of quantum physics. In a century, we went from a few odd, inexplicable experiments to a practically complete understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter. Along the way the new ideas ended a world war, almost fueled another, and touched almost every field of inquiry. The people lucky enough to be part of this went from familiarly dorky grad students to architects of a new reality. Victor Weisskopf was one of those people, and The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist is his autobiography.

Less well-known today than his contemporaries, Weisskopf made up for it with a front-row seat to basically everything that happened in particle physics. In the late 20’s and early 30’s he went from studying in Göttingen (including a crush on Maria Göppert before a car-owning Joe Mayer snatched her up) to a series of postdoctoral positions that would exhaust even a modern-day physicist, working in Leipzig, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Zurich, and Copenhagen again, before fleeing Europe for a faculty position in Rochester, New York. During that time he worked for, studied under, collaborated or partied with basically everyone you might have heard of from that period. As a result, this section of the autobiography was my favorite, chock-full of stories, from the well-known (Pauli’s rudeness and mythical tendency to break experimental equipment) to the less-well known (a lab in Milan planned to prank Pauli with a door that would trigger a fake explosion when opened, which worked every time they tested it…and failed when Pauli showed up), to the more personal (including an in retrospect terrifying visit to the Soviet Union, where they asked him to critique a farming collective!) That era also saw his “almost Nobel”, in his case almost discovering the Lamb Shift.

Despite an “almost Nobel”, Weisskopf was paid pretty poorly when he arrived in Rochester. His story there puts something I’d learned before about another refugee physicist, Hertha Sponer, in a new light. Sponer’s university also didn’t treat her well, and it seemed reminiscent of modern academia. Weisskopf, though, thinks his treatment was tied to his refugee status: that, aware that they had nowhere else to go, universities gave the scientists who fled Europe worse deals than they would have in a Nazi-less world, snapping up talent for cheap. I could imagine this was true for Sponer as well.

Like almost everyone with the relevant expertise, Weisskopf was swept up in the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. There he rose in importance, both in the scientific effort (becoming deputy leader of the theoretical division) and the local community (spending some time on and chairing the project’s “town council”). Like the first sections, this surreal time leads to a wealth of anecdotes, all fascinating. In his descriptions of the life there I can see the beginnings of the kinds of “hiking retreats” physicists would build in later years, like the one at Aspen, that almost seem like attempts to recreate that kind of intense collaboration in an isolated natural place.

After the war, Weisskopf worked at MIT before a stint as director of CERN. He shepherded the facility’s early days, when they were building their first accelerators and deciding what kinds of experiments to pursue. I’d always thought that the “nuclear” in CERN’s name was an artifact of the times, when “nuclear” and “particle” physics were thought of as the same field, but according to Weisskopf the fields were separate and it was already a misnomer when the place was founded. Here the book’s supply of anecdotes becomes a bit more thin, and instead he spends pages on glowing descriptions of people he befriended. The pattern continues after the directorship as his duties get more administrative, spending time as head of the physics department at MIT and working on arms control, some of the latter while a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (which apparently even a Jewish atheist can join). He does work on some science, though, collaborating on the “bag of quarks” model of protons and neutrons. He lives to see the fall of the Berlin wall, and the end of the book has a bit of 90’s optimism to it, the feeling that finally the conflicts of his life would be resolved. Finally, the last chapter abandons chronology altogether, and is mostly a list of his opinions of famous composers, capped off with a Bohr-inspired musing on the complementary nature of science and the arts, humanities, and religion.

One of the things I found most interesting in this book was actually something that went unsaid. Weisskopf’s most famous student was Murray Gell-Mann, a key player in the development of the theory of quarks (including coining the name). Gell-Mann was famously cultured (in contrast to the boorish-almost-as-affectation Feynman) with wide interests in the humanities, and he seems like exactly the sort of person Weisskopf would have gotten along with. Surprisingly though, he gets no anecdotes in this book, and no glowing descriptions: just a few paragraphs, mostly emphasizing how smart he was. I have to wonder if there was some coldness between them. Maybe Weisskopf had difficulty with a student who became so famous in his own right, or maybe they just never connected. Maybe Weisskopf was just trying to be generous: the other anecdotes in that part of the book are of much less famous people, and maybe Weisskopf wanted to prioritize promoting them, feeling that they were underappreciated.

Weisskopf keeps the physics light to try to reach a broad audience. This means he opts for short explanations, and often these are whatever is easiest to reach for. It creates some interesting contradictions: the way he describes his “almost Nobel” work in quantum electrodynamics is very much the way someone would have described it at the time, but very much not how it would be understood later, and by the time he talks about the bag of quarks model his more modern descriptions don’t cleanly link with what he said earlier. Overall, his goal isn’t really to explain the physics, but to explain the physicists. I enjoyed the book for that: people do it far too rarely, and the result was a really fun read.