Tag Archives: relativity

The Real E=mc^2

What Makes Light Move?

Light always moves at the speed of light.

It’s not alone in this: anything that lacks mass moves at the speed of light. Gluons, if they weren’t constantly interacting with each other, would move at the speed of light. Neutrinos, back when we thought they were massless, were thought to move at the speed of light. Gravitational waves, and by extension gravitons, move at the speed of light.

This is, on the face of it, a weird thing to say. If I say a jet moves at the speed of sound, I don’t mean that it always moves at the speed of sound. Find it in its hangar and hopefully it won’t be moving at all.

And so, people occasionally ask me, why can’t we find light in its hangar? Why does light never stand still? What makes light move?

(For the record, you can make light “stand still” in a material, but that’s because the material is absorbing and reflecting it, so it’s not the “same” light traveling through. Compare the speed of a wave of hands in a stadium versus the speed you could run past the seats.)

This is surprisingly tricky to explain without math. Some people point out that if you want to see light at rest you need to speed up to catch it, but you can’t accelerate enough unless you too are massless. This probably sounds a bit circular. Some people talk about how, from light’s perspective, no time passes at all. This is true, but it seems to confuse more than it helps. Some people say that light is “made of energy”, but I don’t like that metaphor. Nothing is “made of energy”, nor is anything “made of mass” either. Mass and energy are properties things can have.

I do like game metaphors though. So, imagine that each particle (including photons, particles of light) is a character in an RPG.

For bonus points, play Light in an RPG.

You can think of energy as the particle’s “character points”. When the particle builds its character it gets a number of points determined by its energy. It can spend those points increasing its “stats”: mass and momentum, via the lesser-known big brother of $E=mc^2$ , $E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4$ .

Maybe the particle chooses to play something heavy, like a Higgs boson. Then they spend a lot of points on mass, and don’t have as much to spend on momentum. If they picked something lighter, like an electron, they’d have more to spend, so they could go faster. And if they spent nothing at all on mass, like light does, they could use all of their energy “points” boosting their speed.

Now, it turns out that these “energy points” don’t boost speed one for one, which is why low-energy light isn’t any slower than high-energy light. Instead, speed is determined by the ratio between energy and momentum. When they’re proportional to each other, when $E^2=p^2c^2$ , then a particle is moving at the speed of light.

(Why this is is trickier to explain. You’ll have to trust me or wikipedia that the math works out.)

Some of you may be happy with this explanation, but others will accuse me of passing the buck. Ok, a photon with any energy will move at the speed of light. But why do photons have any energy at all? And even if they must move at the speed of light, what determines which direction?

Here I think part of the problem is an old physics metaphor, probably dating back to Newton, of a pool table.

A pool table is a decent metaphor for classical physics. You have moving objects following predictable paths, colliding off each other and the walls of the table.

Where people go wrong is in projecting this metaphor back to the beginning of the game. At the beginning of a game of pool, the balls are at rest, racked in the center. Then one of them is hit with the pool cue, and they’re set into motion.

In physics, we don’t tend to have such neat and tidy starting conditions. In particular, things don’t have to start at rest before something whacks them into motion.

A photon’s “start” might come from an unstable Higgs boson produced by the LHC. The Higgs decays, and turns into two photons. Since energy is conserved, these two each must have half of the energy of the original Higgs, including the energy that was “spent” on its mass. This process is quantum mechanical, and with no preferred direction the photons will emerge in a random one.

Photons in the LHC may seem like an artificial example, but in general whenever light is produced it’s due to particles interacting, and conservation of energy and momentum will send the light off in one direction or another.

(For the experts, there is of course the possibility of very low energy soft photons, but that’s a story for another day.)

Not even the beginning of the universe resembles that racked set of billiard balls. The question of what “initial conditions” make sense for the whole universe is a tricky one, but there isn’t a way to set it up where you start with light at rest. It’s not just that it’s not the default option: it isn’t even an available option.

Light moves at the speed of light, no matter what. That isn’t because light started at rest, and something pushed it. It’s because light has energy, and a particle has to spend its “character points” on something.

Fun with Misunderstandings

9 Replies

Perimeter had its last Public Lecture of the season this week, with Mario Livio giving some highlights from his book Brilliant Blunders. The lecture should be accessible online, either here or on Perimeter’s YouTube page.

These lectures tend to attract a crowd of curious science-fans. To give them something to do while they’re waiting, a few local researchers walk around with T-shirts that say “Ask me, I’m a scientist!” Sometimes we get questions about the upcoming lecture, but more often people just ask us what they’re curious about.

Long-time readers will know that I find this one of the most fun parts of the job. In particular, there’s a unique challenge in figuring out just why someone asked a question. Often, there’s a hidden misunderstanding they haven’t recognized.

The fun thing about these misunderstandings is that they usually make sense, provided you’re working from the person in question’s sources. They heard a bit of this and a bit of that, and they come to the most reasonable conclusion they can given what’s available. For those of us who have heard a more complete story, this often leads to misunderstandings we would never have thought of, but that in retrospect are completely understandable.

One of the simpler ones I ran into was someone who was confused by people claiming that we were running out of water. How could there be a water shortage, he asked, if the Earth is basically a closed system? Where could the water go?

The answer is that when people are talking about a water shortage, they’re not talking about water itself running out. Rather, they’re talking about a lack of safe drinking water. Maybe the water is polluted, or stuck in the ocean without expensive desalinization. This seems like the sort of thing that would be extremely obvious, but if you just hear people complaining that water is running out without the right context then you might just not end up hearing that part of the story.

A more involved question had to do with time dilation in general relativity. The guy had heard that atomic clocks run faster if you’re higher up, and that this was because time itself runs faster in lower gravity.

Given that, he asked, what happens if someone travels to an area of low gravity and then comes back? If more time has passed for them, then they’d be in the future, so wouldn’t they be at the “wrong time” compared to other people? Would they even be able to interact with them?

This guy’s misunderstanding came from hearing what happens, but not why. While he got that time passes faster in lower gravity, he was still thinking of time as universal: there is some past, and some future, and if time passes faster for one person and slower for another that just means that one person is “skipping ahead” into the other person’s future.

What he was missing was the explanation that time dilation comes from space and time bending. Rather than “skipping ahead”, a person for whom time passes faster just experiences more time getting to the same place, because they’re traveling on a curved path through space-time.

As usual, this is easier to visualize in space than in time. I ended up drawing a picture like this:

IMG_20160602_101423

Imagine person A and person B live on a circle. If person B stays the same distance from the center while person A goes out further, they can both travel the same angle around the circle and end up in the same place, but A will have traveled further, even ignoring the trips up and down.

What’s completely intuitive in space ends up quite a bit harder to visualize in time. But if you at least know what you’re trying to think about, that there’s bending involved, then it’s easier to avoid this guy’s kind of misunderstanding. Run into the wrong account, though, and even if it’s perfectly correct (this guy had heard some of Hawking’s popularization work on the subject), if it’s not emphasizing the right aspects you can come away with the wrong impression.

Misunderstandings are interesting because they reveal how people learn. They’re windows into different thought processes, into what happens when you only have partial evidence. And because of that, they’re one of the most fascinating parts of science popularization.

The Three Things Everyone Gets Wrong about the Big Bang

27 Replies

Ah, the Big Bang, our most science-y of creation myths. Everyone knows the story of how the universe and all its physical laws emerged from nothing in a massive explosion, growing from a singularity to the size of a breadbox until, over billions of years, it became the size it is today.

A hot dense state, if you know what I mean.

…actually, almost nothing in that paragraph is true. There are a lot of myths about the Big Bang, born from physicists giving sloppy explanations. Here are three things most people get wrong about the Big Bang:

1. A Massive Explosion:

When you picture the big bang, don’t you imagine that something went, well, bang?

In movies and TV shows, a time traveler visiting the big bang sees only an empty void. Suddenly, an explosion lights up the darkness, shooting out stars and galaxies until it has created the entire universe.

Astute readers might find this suspicious: if the entire universe was created by the big bang, then where does the “darkness” come from? What does the universe explode into?

The problem here is that, despite the name, the big bang was not actually an explosion.

In picturing the universe as an explosion, you’re imagining the universe as having finite size. But it’s quite likely that the universe is infinite. Even if it is finite, it’s finite like the surface of the Earth: as Columbus (and others) experienced, you can’t get to the “edge” of the Earth no matter how far you go: eventually, you’ll just end up where you started. If the universe is truly finite, the same is true of it.

Rather than an explosion in one place, the big bang was an explosion everywhere at once. Every point in space was “exploding” at the same time. Each point was moving farther apart from every other point, and the whole universe was, as the song goes, hot and dense.

So what do physicists mean when they say that the universe at some specific time was the size of a breadbox, or a grapefruit?

It’s just sloppy language. When these physicists say “the universe”, what they mean is just the part of the universe we can see today, the Hubble Volume. It is that (enormously vast) space that, once upon a time, was merely the size of a grapefruit. But it was still adjacent to infinitely many other grapefruits of space, each one also experiencing the big bang.

2. It began with a Singularity:

This one isn’t so much definitely wrong as probably wrong.

If the universe obeys Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity perfectly, then we can make an educated guess about how it began. By tracking back the expansion of the universe to its earliest stages, we can infer that the universe was once as small as it can get: a single, zero-dimensional point, or a singularity. The laws of general relativity work the same backwards and forwards in time, so just as we could see a star collapsing and know that it is destined to form a black hole, we can see the universe’s expansion and know that if we traced it back it must have come from a single point.

This is all well and good, but there’s a problem with how it begins: “If the universe obeys Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity perfectly”.

In this situation, general relativity predicts an infinitely small, infinitely dense point. As I’ve talked about before, in physics an infinite result is almost never correct. When we encounter infinity, almost always it means we’re ignoring something about the nature of the universe.

In this case, we’re ignoring Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics naturally makes physics somewhat “fuzzy”: the Uncertainty Principle means that a quantum state can never be exactly in one specific place.

Combining quantum mechanics and general relativity is famously tricky, and the difficulty boils down to getting rid of pesky infinite results. However, several approaches exist to solving this problem, the most prominent of them being String Theory.

If you ask someone to list string theory’s successes, one thing you’ll always hear mentioned is string theory’s ability to understand black holes. In general relativity, black holes are singularities: infinitely small, and infinitely dense. In string theory, black holes are made up of combinations of fundamental objects: strings and membranes, curled up tight, but crucially not infinitely small. String theory smooths out singularities and tamps down infinities, and the same story applies to the infinity of the big bang.

String theory isn’t alone in this, though. Less popular approaches to quantum gravity, like Loop Quantum Gravity, also tend to “fuzz” out singularities. Whichever approach you favor, it’s pretty clear at this point that the big bang didn’t really begin with a true singularity, just a very compressed universe.

3. It created the laws of physics:

Physicists will occasionally say that the big bang determined the laws of physics. Fans of Anthropic Reasoning in particular will talk about different big bangs in different places in a vast multi-verse, each producing different physical laws.

I’ve met several people who were very confused by this. If the big bang created the laws of physics, then what laws governed the big bang? Don’t you need physics to get a big bang in the first place?

The problem here is that “laws of physics” doesn’t have a precise definition. Physicists use it to mean different things.

In one (important) sense, each fundamental particle is its own law of physics. Each one represents something that is true across all of space and time, a fact about the universe that we can test and confirm.

However, these aren’t the most fundamental laws possible. In string theory, the particles that exist in our four dimensions (three space dimensions, and one of time) change depending on how six “extra” dimensions are curled up. Even in ordinary particle physics, the value of the Higgs field determines the mass of the particles in our universe, including things that might feel “fundamental” like the difference between electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. If the Higgs field had a different value (as it may have early in the life of the universe), these laws of physics would have been different. These sorts of laws can be truly said to have been created by the big bang.

The real fundamental laws, though, don’t change. Relativity is here to stay, no matter what particles exist in the universe. So is quantum mechanics. The big bang didn’t create those laws, it was a natural consequence of them. Rather than springing physics into existence from nothing, the big bang came out of the most fundamental laws of physics, then proceeded to fix the more contingent ones.

In fact, the big bang might not have even been the beginning of time! As I mentioned earlier in this article, most approaches to quantum gravity make singularities “fuzzy”. One thing these “fuzzy” singularities can do is “bounce”, going from a collapsing universe to an expanding universe. In Cyclic Models of the universe, the big bang was just the latest in a cycle of collapses and expansions, extending back into the distant past. Other approaches, like Eternal Inflation, instead think of the big bang as just a local event: our part of the universe happened to be dense enough to form a big bang, while other regions were expanding even more rapidly.

So if you picture the big bang, don’t just imagine an explosion. Imagine the entire universe expanding at once, changing and settling and cooling until it became the universe as we know it today, starting from a world of tangled strings or possibly an entirely different previous universe.

Sounds a bit more interesting to visit in your TARDIS, no?

What Can Replace Space-Time?

3 Replies

Nima Arkani-Hamed is famous for believing that space-time is doomed, that as physicists we will have to abandon the concepts of space and time if we want to find the ultimate theory of the universe. He’s joked that this is what motivates him to get up in the morning. He tends to bring it up often in talks, both for physicists and for the general public.

The latter especially tend to be baffled by this idea. I’ve heard a lot of questions like “if space-time is doomed, what could replace it?”

In the past, Nima and I both tended to answer this question with a shrug. (Though a more elaborate shrug in his case.) This is the honest answer: we don’t know what replaces space-time, we’re still looking for a good solution. Nima’s Amplituhedron may eventually provide an answer, but it’s still not clear what that answer will look like. I’ve recently realized, though, that this way of responding to the question misses its real thrust.

When people ask me “what could replace space-time?” they’re not asking “what will replace space-time?” Rather, they’re asking “what could possibly replace space-time?” It’s not that they want to know the answer before we’ve found it, it’s that they don’t understand how any reasonable answer could possibly exist.

I don’t think this concern has been addressed much by physicists, and it’s a pity, because it’s not very hard to answer. You don’t even need advanced physics. All you need is some fairly old philosophy. Specifically we’ll use concepts from metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with categories of being.

Think about your day yesterday. Maybe you had breakfast at home, drove to work, had a meeting, then went home and watched TV.

Each of those steps can be thought of as an event. Each event is something that happened that we want to pay attention to. You having breakfast was an event, as was you arriving at work.

These events are connected by relations. Here, each relation specifies the connection between two events. There might be a relation of cause-and-effect, for example, between you arriving at work late and meeting with your boss later in the day.

Space and time, then, can be seen as additional types of relations. Your breakfast is related to you arriving at work: it is before it in time, and some distance from it in space. Before and after, distant in one direction or another, these are all relations between the two events.

Using these relations, we can infer other relations between the events. For example, if we know the distance relating your breakfast and arriving at work, we can make a decent guess at another relation, the difference in amount of gas in your car.

This way of viewing the world, events connected by relations, is already quite common in physics. With Einstein’s theory of relativity, it’s hard to say exactly when or where an event happened, but the overall relationship between two events (distance in space and time taken together) can be thought of much more precisely. As I’ve mentioned before, the curved space-time necessary for Einstein’s theory of gravity can be thought of equally well as a change in the way you measure distances between two points.

So if space and time are relations between events, what would it mean for space-time to be doomed?

The key thing to realize here is that space and time are very specific relations between events, with very specific properties. Some of those properties are what cause problems for quantum gravity, problems which prompt people to suggest that space-time is doomed.

One of those properties is the fact that, when you multiply two distances together, it doesn’t matter which order you do it in. This probably sounds obvious, because you’re used to multiplying normal numbers, for which this is always true anyway. But even slightly more complicated mathematical objects, like matrices, don’t always obey this rule. If distances were this sort of mathematical object, then multiplying them in different orders could give slightly different results. If the difference were small enough, we wouldn’t be able to tell that it was happening in everyday life: distance would have given way to some more complicated concept, but it would still act like distance for us.

That specific idea isn’t generally suggested as a solution to the problems of space and time, but it’s a useful toy model that physicists have used to solve other problems.

It’s the general principle I want to get across: if you want to replace space and time, you need a relation between events. That relation should behave like space and time on the scales we’re used to, but it can be different on very small scales (Big Bang, inside of Black Holes) and on very large scales (long-term fate of the universe).

Space-time is doomed, and we don’t know yet what’s going to replace it. But whatever it is, whatever form it takes, we do know one thing: it’s going to be a relation between events.

Made of Energy, or Made of Nonsense?

3 Replies

I did a few small modifications to the blog settings this week. Comments now support Markdown, reply-chains in the comments can go longer, and there are a few more sharing buttons on the posts. I’m gearing up to do a more major revamp of the blog in July for when the name changes over from 4 gravitons and a grad student to just 4 gravitons.

io9 did an article recently on scientific ideas that scientists wish the public would stop misusing. They’ve got a lot of good ones (Proof, Quantum, Organic), but they somehow managed to miss one of the big ones: Energy. Matt Strassler has a nice, precise article on this particular misconception, but nonetheless I think it’s high time I wrote my own.

There’s a whole host of misconceptions regarding energy. Some of them are simple misuses of language, like zero-calorie energy drinks:

Energy can be measured in several different units. You can use Joules, or electron-Volts, or dynes…or calories. Calories are a measure of energy, so zero calories quite literally means zero energy.

Now, that’s not to say the makers of zero calorie energy drinks are lying. They’re just using a different meaning of energy from the scientific one. Their drinks give you vim and vigor, the get-up-and-go required to make money playing computer games. For most of the public, that “get-up-and-go” is called energy, even if scientifically it’s not.

That’s not really a misconception, more of an amusing use of language. This next one though really makes my blood boil.

Raise your hand if you’ve seen a Sci-Fi movie or TV show where some creature is described as being made of “pure energy”. Whether they’re peaceful, ultra-advanced ascended beings, or genocidal maniacs from another dimension, the concept of creatures made of “pure energy” shows up again and again and again.

Even if you aren’t the type to take Sci-Fi technobabble seriously, you’ve probably heard that matter and antimatter annihilate to form energy, or that photons are made out of energy. These sound more reasonable, but they rest on the same fundamental misconception:

Nothing is “made out of energy”.

Rather,

Energy is a property that things have.

Energy isn’t a substance, it isn’t a fluid, it isn’t some kind of nebulous stuff you can make into an indestructible alien body. Things have energy, but nothing is energy.

What about light, then? And what happens when antimatter collides with matter?

Light, just like anything else, has energy. The difference between light and most other things is that light also does not have mass.

In everyday life, we like to think of mass as some sort of basic “stuff”. If things are “made out of mass” or “made out of matter”, and something like light doesn’t have mass, then it must be made out of some other “stuff”, right?

The thing is, mass isn’t really “stuff” any more than energy is. Just like energy, mass is a property that things have. In fact, as I’ve talked about some before, mass is really just a type of energy. Specifically, mass is the energy something has when left alone and at rest. That’s the meaning of Einstein’s famous equation, E equals m c squared: it tells you how to take a known mass and calculate the rest energy that it implies.

Lots of hype for a unit conversion formula, huh?

In the case of light, all of its energy can be thought of in terms of its (light-speed) motion, so it has no mass. That might tempt you to think of it as being “made of energy”, but really, you and light are not so different.

You are made of atoms, and atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Let’s consider a proton. A proton’s mass, expressed in the esoteric units physicists favor, is 938 Mega-electron-Volts. That’s how much energy a proton has alone and and rest. A proton is made of three quarks, so you’d think that they would contribute most of its mass. In reality, though, the quarks in protons have masses of only a few Mega-electron-Volts. Most of a proton’s mass doesn’t come from the mass of the quarks.

Quarks interact with each other via the strong nuclear force, the strongest fundamental force in existence. That interaction has a lot of energy, and when viewed from a distance that energy contributes almost all of the proton’s mass. So if light is “made of energy”, so are you.

So why do people say that matter and anti-matter annihilate to make energy?

A matter particle and its anti-matter partner are opposite in a lot of ways. In particular, they have opposite charges: not just electric charge, but other types of charge too.

Charge must be conserved, so if a particle collides with its anti-particle the result has a total charge of zero, as the opposite charges of the two cancel each other out. Light has zero charge, so it’s one of the most common results of a matter-antimatter collision. When people say that matter and antimatter produce “pure energy”, they really just mean that they produce light.

So next time someone says something is “made of energy”, be wary. Chances are, they aren’t talking about something fully scientific.

Editors, Please Stop Misquoting Hawking

1 Reply

If you’ve been following science news recently, you’ve probably heard the apparently alarming news that Steven Hawking has turned his back on black holes, or that black holes can actually be escaped, or…how about I just show you some headlines:

Now, Hawking didn’t actually say that black holes don’t exist, but while there are a few good pieces on the topic, in many cases the real message has gotten lost in the noise.

From Hawking’s paper:

What Hawking is proposing is that the “event horizon” around a black hole, rather than being an absolute permanent boundary from which nothing can escape, is a more temporary “apparent” horizon, the properties of which he goes on to describe in detail.

Why is he proposing this? It all has to do with the debate over black hole firewalls.

Starting with a paper by Polchinski and colleagues a year and a half ago, the black hole firewall paradox centers on contradictory predictions from general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity predicts that an astronaut falling past a black hole’s event horizon will notice nothing particularly odd about the surrounding space, but that once past the event horizon none of the “information” that specifies the astronaut’s properties can escape to the outside world. Quantum mechanics on the other hand predicts that information cannot be truly lost. The combination appears to suggest something radical, a “firewall” of high energy radiation around the event horizon carrying information from everything that fell into the black hole in the past, so powerful that it would burn our hypothetical astronaut to a crisp.

Since then, a wide variety of people have made one proposal or another, either attempting to avoid the seemingly preposterous firewall or to justify and further explain it. The reason the debate is so popular is because it touches on some of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics.

Now, as I have pointed out before, I’m not a good person to ask about the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. (Incidentally, I’d love it if some of the more quantum information or general relativity-focused bloggers would take a more substantial crack at this! Carroll, Preskill, anyone?) What I can talk about, though, is hype.

All of the headlines I listed take Hawking’s quote out of context, but not all of the articles do. The problem isn’t so much the journalists, as the editors.

One of an editor’s responsibilities is to take articles and give them titles that draw in readers. The editor wants a title that will get people excited, make them curious, and most importantly, get them to click. While a journalist won’t have any particular incentive to improve ad revenue, the same cannot be said for an editor. Thus, editors will often rephrase the title of an article in a way that makes the whole story seem more shocking.

Now that, in itself, isn’t a problem. I’ve used titles like that my self. The problem comes when the title isn’t just shocking, but misleading.

When I call astrophysics “impossible”, nobody is going to think I mean it literally. The title is petulant and ridiculous enough that no-one would take it at face value, but still odd enough to make people curious. By contrast, when you say that Hawking has “changed his mind” about black holes or said that “black holes do not exist”, there are people who will take that at face value as supporting their existing beliefs, as the Borowitz Report humorously points out. These people will go off thinking that Hawking really has given up on black holes. If the title confirms their beliefs enough, people might not even bother to read the article. Thus, by using an actively misleading title, you may actually be decreasing clicks!

It’s not that hard to write a title that’s both enough of a hook to draw people in and won’t mislead. Editors of the world, you’re well-trained writers, certainly much better than me. I’m sure you can manage it.

There really is some interesting news here, if people had bothered to look into it. The firewall debate has been going on for a year and a half, and while Hawking isn’t the universal genius the media occasionally depicts he’s still the world’s foremost expert on the quantum properties of black holes. Why did he take so long to weigh in? Is what he’s proposing even particularly new? I seem to remember people discussing eliminating the horizon in one way or another (even “naked” singularities) much earlier in the firewall debate…what makes Hawking’s proposal novel and different?

This is the sort of thing you can use to draw in interest, editors of the world. Don’t just write titles that cause ignorant people to roll their eyes and move on, instead, get people curious about what’s really going on in science! More ad revenue for you, more science awareness for us, sounds like a win-win!