Twenty-First Century Physicist
..... :,?i:i:i!, .... i!~ili~j~ii i ...... i! ~i. i84 ~ r.L i, nce upon a time, Cal~6~~ ~~n, Nob," !~ i ii!iii~;~:~i~~:~~'~'~?~!i~i~i...... Laureate leader of the last~~atgeneration...
...Bohr was wedded to particles...
...Than~son a very small scal...
...Unlike most analysts, Mead does not regard tunneling as a mysterious movement of particles through impenetrable barriers...
...Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing becomes a shell game...
...The atomic sources SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up...
...In the process, he is also implicitly coming to the defense of reason, science, history, culture, human dignity and free will...
...Why not...
...It is its own medium.You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up...
...Understanding quantum physics is hard enough as it is...
...But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for the physics itself...
...I'm amazed, for example, by the chemical complexity of neurological processes.They're not just digital or analogmthey're chemical and physical, with dimensions that we do not understand at all...
...In collaboration with Feynman, Mead also developed a definitive course on the physics of computation that has yielded a minor industry of books and tapes and imitators.After a year in Coblenz with Nobel-prize winning physicist-turned-biologist Max Delbruck, Mead pursued a lifelong multi-disciplinary interest in the physics of neural systems...
...Bohr argued quite passionately that intuitive understanding was just not possible any more, and that you were old-fashioned if you insisted on it...
...Looking at the principles II When we grasp onto some regularity, the temptation is to thinkwe understand it...
...But then it became more and more complex to calculate the orbits of visible planets.When you assume the earth is the center, you have to add epicycles to the existing orbits to adjust them...
...But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it.You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that...
...There are very few conceptual workers left in the field...
...He picks l~i up Feynman s challenge in a new book, Col~lective Electrodynamics (MIT Press), declaring that a physics that does not make sense, that defies human intuition, is obscurantist: It balks thought and intellectual progress...
...A coherent system is not more real, but it is much more pure and fundamental...
...But our physics community has been hammering away t/ at it for decades...
...They simply fill out the piece of wire.That's what all waves do...
...That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle...
...Between two of the camps, way back in the woods, we had a little school.Twenty kids for all eight grades...
...Amazin~ It could be a mile.The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long...
...That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented students out of physics.We have ended up with more and more mathematicians in the physics departments...
...So he said what we have done is we have gone back to the invisible angels except now they are pushing at a 90-degree angle to the motion...
...Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom...
...He predicted coherent phenomena, but he didn't have a single example that he could actually get his hands on...
...That's what waves do...
...We arrived at Mead's house in Woodside, high above SiliconValley...
...If you take today's standard theory of particle physics, and the standard theory of gravitation, it is well known that the result is "off" by " ~ a factor of maybe ten to the power of 50...
...All the important details are smoothed over by Einstein's curvature of space time)' Gravity remains shrouded in mystery...
...As I have found out more about what's going on, I have become more in awe...
...66 Einstein's basic point was that unpredictability does not mean intrinsic uncertainty jp And yet it all turned on some very open questions...
...A short lithe man with a small beard and a taste for undulatory rainbow shirts, Carver speaks with quiet authority, quirky humor and a gentle but inexorable persuasiveness...
...They said, "Well, an atom is so small, we'll never see one...
...It's very, very hard to ask the deeper questions, because you won't get tenure that way...
...Where did you go to school...
...Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable...
...It would be so dreadful if nature were so dull that we, with our pathetic little prejudices, had it all figured out already...
...Sounds like the gluon researchers might be closer...
...It's funnymthe most common force, everyone experiences it, and we just have no clue...
...Mead does not banish the mystery from science...
...Nobody was, until we come to A. O. Barut, John Dowling, John Cramer, and a few others...
...Perhaps more than any other man, Mead has spent his professional life working on intimate terms with matter at the atomic and subatomic levels...
...Are you saying, in effect, architectural principles...
...The experiments on which the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics were based were extremely crude by modern standards.The detectors available---Geiger counters, cloud chambers, and photographic film~had a high degree of randomness built in, and, by their very nature, could register only statistical results...
...It's really an acute embarrassment...
...Doyou have any thoul~s about gravitation...
...How if your faith is correct, behind that awesome complexity lies some simple set of rules...
...But these are all constructs of the human mind to help us to work with and visualize the regularities of nature.When we grasp onto some regularity, we give it a name, and the temptation is always to think that we really understand it...
...It's interesting, isn't it...
...That alters our picture of the world--most people's minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems...
...It's fascinating when you think about it...
...We found him eager to discuss his theories and his Promethean book...
...So much for the idea of the quantum world as microscopic...
...My grandmother lived in Fresno in the CentralValley.They had a better high school, so I lived with her and went to high school there.Then I interviewed to go to Caltech and I remained there for my whole career...
...One was the laser...
...So early on you knew that electrons were real...
...What's going on...
...Every time I talk to the biologists, I get all charged up again...
...Designed into every CD player and long distance telephone connection, lasers today are manufactured by the billions...
...So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium.The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape.Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small...
...When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully...
...Not many of your readers will have heard of them...
...Central to Mead's rescue project are a series of discoveries inconsistent with the prevailing conceptions of quantum mechanics...
...You bet...
...We are all just struggling our way in this wonderful realm of nature that we know really very little about...
...And so mathematical description was substituted for understanding...
...As late as 1956, Bohr andVon Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention...
...JJ used by living systems has been much more successful.There have been recent successes in recognizing faces, fingerprints, things like that...
...Then these infinities get removed once more by something called "renormalization...
...i84 ~ r.L i, nce upon a time, Cal~6~~ ~~n, Nob," !~ i ii!iii~;~:~i~~:~~'~'~?~!i~i~i...
...But any list of accomplishments underrates Mead's role as the most important practical scientist of the late twentieth century...
...pp itma hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor.A piece of wire is a container for electrons...
...What's the problem...
...F~r y~r~ arti~H~ | ~ r~m~ ~ imm~ m ~ tim ~n~ ~vn t~"ff we can just write enough code, we can fig...
...But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty...
...So Einstein didn't have that information...
...So electricity may be invisible, but it is powerful stuff...
...What about the power plant...
...So orthodoxy won the day...
...And after Bohr defeated Einstein, nobody else would take on the argument...
...Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg's rule...
...Silicon sensors have been built that can recognize motion...
...Mead did not see his electrons and photons as random or incoherent...
...behave like nothing you havedirect experience about...
...So we don't really know how to ask the question yet...
...While pursuing these researches, Mead responded to a query from Intel-founder Gordon Moore about the possible size of microelectronic devices...
...His researches on the human retina led to his invention of the revolutionary Foveon camera that achieves resolution and verisimilitude in cheap silicon superior to the best silver halide films...
...These discoveries of large-scale, coherent quantum phenomena all occurred after Bohr's triumph over Einstein...
...RightmBohr put his foot on the wrong stone, the Newtonian side rather than the quantum side.The underlying reason is that Newtonian physics was phrased in terms of things like position and momentum and force which are all characteristics of particles...
...He dismisses the photoelectric effect as an artifact of early twentieth century apparatus...
...K SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO1 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...
...Early photodetectors or Geiger counters may have provided both visual and auditory testimony that photons were point particles, but the particulate click coarsely concealed a measurable wave...
...Point particles got us into terrible trouble...
...But the truth is that we're still not even close...
...But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other.They want to be close together because one's positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower...
...Right.And once we have harnessed them in the laboratory, and begin to understand them, we can start to see them in the universe around us...
...The first we understand better than anything in physics, and yet gravitymwe basically have no clue what it is...
...Now, in the opening years of the new millennium, Mead believes that it is time to clear up the philosophical and practical confusion of contemporary physics...
...The theory has to be adjusted, with bandaids stuck on top of one another.This happens all the time with science, but especially with the statistical quantum theory...
...Thr do not behave like waves...
...In his new interpretation, quantum physics is united with electromagnetism and the venerable Maxwell Equations are found to be dispensable...
...It is a modernistic aerie with hardwood floors and cathedral ceilings, perched on the precipitous slopes of the Los Altos Hills...
...The two long-range forces that we have in nature are the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force...
...It's just a really hard problem...
...It has the ability to see and navigate and make decisions on millisecond time scales...
...So we shouldn't expect machines to take over any time soon...
...I think it just totally failed.Those AI systems can't see.They can't hear.They can't act.And they can't learn...
...Its speed comes up and up, governed by this instrument called a syncroscope that looks at the relative phase [timing of the troughs and crests of the \ wave of electricity] on the grid, and the voltage from the generator...
...It blocks the light of the age...
...Laureate leader of the last~~atgeneration of phys cists, threw down the gauntlet toanyone rash enoul~ to doubt the fundamental weird~ss;~the quark-bosot muon-strewn amusement park ~ndscape of late 20tl century quantum physics...
...It's more likely that we will figure out first if there's missing matter in the universe...
...Coherence" seems comparable to electricity--it has existed forever, and we co~dsee k~theskyasUOm~ but on~ in the nketem~ century were we aide to harnmm it" And ~ recently have we been able to harness coherent phenomena...
...They do:not behave like particl( ...or like anything you have ever'seen...
...He revisits the debate between the Copenhagen interpreters of quantum physicsnNiels Bohr, Alfred Heisenberg,John von Neumann, Richard Feynmanmand the skeptics, principally Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger...
...With the transistor, the laser is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century...
...i! ~i...
...Light from an ordinary fluorescent bulb has a certain amount of coherence, but light from incandescent bulbs has almost none.With coherence, all the waves have a common phase.When they're out of phase you get all these fringes and interference patterns...
...I think there are principles.And I think there are principles of computation that get us this exponential advantage, which don't have to do with whether you do it with chemicals or electronics...
...So there are still lots of mysteries in nature...
...If so, what it is...
...It could be that when you find out what's really going on, you'd be even more in awe...
...But to distinguish between a computer and a carmthat is a really, really hard problem.And yet we do it effortlessly, and so do flies...
...It expands to fit the container it's in.That mav be a positive charge that's attractin~ . gsingthe equipment of the early twentieth century, it was amazingthat physicists could get any significant results at all...
...9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 1 ble with it...
...But they're also waves, right...
...He conveys the sense that during his fifty years of immersion in technology he has made electrons and photons his friends, and he knows they would never indulge in the outrageous, irrational behavior ascribed to them by physicists...
...In a career of nearly half a century that has made him the microchip industry's most influential and creative academic, Mead is best known as inventor of a crucial high frequency transistor, author of dominant chip design techniques, progenitor of the movement toward dynamically programmable logic chips, and most recently developer of radical advances in machine-aided perception...
...What's the problem with them...
...Can we finesse this business about time going backwards and forwards...
...When Bohr proposed the correspondence principle, he wanted to keep a single set of laws: "As above, so below...
...It was first demonstrated in 1995 by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in Colorado...
...In fact, if you do it properly, you can make atoms totally coherent...
...It makes us look so stupid.And you don't get popular by saying that...
...At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light...
...He also believes that General Relativity conceals more than it illuminates about gravitation...
...It's just invisible in the way we normally look at things...
...Einstein's basic point was that unpredictability does not mean intrinsic uncertainty...
...PHOTO BY TIM WHITEHOUSE/FOVEON SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OOI 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ~9 figure out what they were and why they were that way and how I could modify them...
...But under appropriate conditions--what you term ceheronm--dm micro-wmM seenm to ope~ antes in a quite different way...
...But it's true.And the more we try, the more we realize it's a much harder problem than we thought.What is it about the way that the fly, or the cat, or the fish process their information that makes it so much more effective at computing these things...
...Oh, there were things in the power plant that were just awesome...
...Both denied that the laser was possible...
...I thought many times that I was on the verge of getting ahold of one of those...
...That brings us back to Einstein--experimental results continue to vindicate his viewpoint, no...
...It doesn't fit with any of the other theories...
...A ten-foot electron...
...And yes, in the microcosm, when things are jumbled up and "incoherent, ~ it does approximate the physics of the macro-world...
...He spent ten years exploring the intricacies of quantum tunneling and tunnel diodes, the first electronic devices based on an exclusively quantum process...
...You hsten to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive...
...It's just a property of waves...
...Feynman was one of the last ones, and he wasn't willing to take on the Copenhagen clan...
...Pointing to a series of experiments from the world ofmicroelectronic and photonic technology that still lay in the future when Bohr prevailed in his debates with Einstein, Mead rectifies an injustice and awards a posthumous victory to Einstein...
...A mile-long electron...
...And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand...
...He sees it as an intelligible wave phenomenon, resembling on the microcosmic level the movement of radio waves through walls...
...It's all completely crazy...
...Feynman has this wonderful quote about how the "theory of gravity" once was that the planets were being carried along by a whole / flock of invisible angels.Then we ended up with a theory that it is this force between two masses that pulls at right angles to the motion...
...The generator has huge inertia, but almost no friction, so you have to be really careful.You let a little water through and the rotation accelerates...
...Yes, I've been working on it quite actively...
...You could build up equipment and try things,just to see what happened...
...The fly has an autonomous system that avoids being swatted...
...That's what I was trying to find out...
...He regarded the concept of the "point particle" as an otiose legacy from the classical era...
...it hasn't worked very well...
...Isn't it wonderful that nature is like that...
...There are increasing indications that many of the objects in the universe have coherent things going on in them...
...But we haven't begun to get it...
...In the same way, when you assume photons are point particles, and all you can calculate is probability, you have to add epicycles of conceptual nonsense to "explain" even the simplest experiment...
...But the truth is we're still n0t even close...
...So there's a place where they are just right, and that's what determines the size of the hydrogen atom.And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation...
...But he believes he can explain the nature of the famous mysteries of quantum science, from the two slit experiment where "particles" go through two holes at once to the perplexities of" entanglement" where action on a quantum entity at one point of the universe can affect entities at other remote points at speeds faster than the speed of light...
...It's now thought that a lot of the beaming of pulsars has to do with laser-like action.That's just surmised from the actions of these very mysterious objects-mysterious within the normal realm of incoherent physics.The universe is probably full of coherent physics...
...On the other side, there are these one-inch diameter cables, going down to Los Angeles.As a kid, I would watch them bring a new unit on line...
...The early experiments that dealt with things like black-body radiation and light passing though double slits--couldn't they detect those effects...
...Are coherence and incoherence abstdutes--can semething be "a little bit pregnant...
...Once angels were the explanation, but now, for us, it is a "force," or "field...
...That was how I got my start--you could afford to do experiments, because the stuff was so cheap...
...It's conceptual nonsense.You can calculate stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don't make any sense...
...That's one to watch...
...The amount of matter in the universe is way, way more than what is observed.And that discrepancy comes, at its heart, from assuming that matter is made made up of point particles...
...The Bose-Einstein condensate, for example, or the quantum hall effect, or the superconducting quantum interference device-I list ten of them in my book, beginning in the mid-1930s and going up through 1995...
...Get used to it C~rver Me r~ ~i s~.~la s Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engi~l~i neering and Applied Science at Caltech, Mead l~i was Feynman s student, colleague and collaborator, as well as Silicon Valley s physicist in l~i residence and leading intellectual...
...But there's nothing uncertain about it...
...There was one teacher through 4th grade and then it became a twoteacher school...
...kight, that's what I was brought up on-this little grain of something...
...Because point particles are assumed to occupy no space, they have to be accompanied by infinite charge density, infinite mass density, infinite energy density...
...They use what seems like really slow, slimy computa- / tional material, and yet they perform miracles with tiny amounts of power, tiny amounts of space and in real time and very fast...
...Nobody ever gets those phases exactly right, but if you miss by much, the whole power plant goes boommthe difference in phase is enough to shear off the huge bolts, six inches in diameter, that bind the generator to the floor of the power plant...
...It's its own medium, right...
...His study of the cochlea has informed the creation of unique directional hearing aids, produced by Sonic Innovations of Salt Lake City...
...it's not invisible really...
...And if not, what's wrong with the general theory of relativity.We'll figure that out before we figure out the brain...
...The dense stands of surrounding redwood trees, concealing the valley below, make for a cathedral outside as well as in...
...A lot of the trouble seems to come down to the idea of matter being composed of particles, rather than waves...
...It takes enormous work to take that theory and work it into a form that is useful for anySEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OOI 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 fly as an embarrassment, because its sensory abilities so vastly OUtStTip the most powerful computer...
...Do that with a lot of them, and you get Bose-Einstein condensatema bunch of atoms in phase that act like one big matter wave...
...Oh, I would say so...
...We don't know how even to formulate that problem, and we've been working on it since the dawn of computing...
...So how big is an electron...
...I haven't been able to make a crisp statement of one yet, but I feel on the verge...
...We've never been able to make artificial vision systems that come within orders of magnitude of that, with all the computation we can throw at them...
...Mead provided the empirical analysis behind Moore's law (predicting a doubling of computer power every 18 months).When single chips held only tens of transistors, he showed that in due course tens of millions would be feasible...
...Then what are they waving in...
...So when results don't fit theory...
...During a lifetime in the trenches of the semiconductor industry, Mead developed a growing uneasiness about the "standard model" that supposedly governed his field...
...Yes, it can be...
...In the genera- /i for there's this big wheel going around with these coils of wire, and this cascading water coming down two thousand feet through these great pipes and rushing through turbines...
...But if they get too close they wiggle too much and " ~ that makes the energy higher...
...In 1999, he won the half-million dollar MIT-Lemelson award for innovation...
...Not angels but angles...
...It just gets pasted on...
...Don't lose sleep over it.Anybody who says, "Oh my God.These things are going to take over...
...Unfortunately, it was not until the 1960s that those results became widely known...
...Every time we get another order of magnitude in computing capability, somebody says, "Now we've got enough...
...In Collective Electrodynamics, Mead cites nine other experimental discoveries, from superconductive currents to masers, to BoseEinstein condensates predicted by Einstein but not demonstrated until 1995...
...Ooes biology have a problem analogous to the phys~ probkn--k~ of peop~ baddne up tree~ and not rmny looking at the forest...
...The best results I have seen in reverse-engineering the brain have been the auditory processors done by my friend and collaborator Lloyd Watts...
...That's 10 followed by 49 zeroes...
...Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with mathematics--it's the language we use to express the precise relations of physical law...
...Our establishment rewards that kind of behavior...
...But Mead does not bow humbly before all of Einstein's conceptions...
...mit is just so far from anything real...
...He declares that physics is vastly farther away from a fundamental grasp of nature than many of the current exponents of a grand unified theory imagine...
...People don't even know where to put the decimal point...
...Absolutely...
...He is now emerging as the boldest theoretical physicist of the twenty-first...
...Now, it turns out, people have put atoms in cavitie,s i/ and you can see a single atom perfectly well.That experiment has been done many times now...
...That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it's the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people.The electron isn't the disturbance of something else...
...There are known to be masers in the atmospheres of some stars...
...Einstein called it Ptolemaic epicycles all over again...
...Every scientific discipline does...
...Ptolemaic astronomers assumed that the earth was at the center...
...People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across...
...But most people know what lasers and superconductors are, and they demonstrate nature acting in ways that Bohr and Heisenberg did not anticipate--a coherent state...
...Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy...
...ure out how to make the thing do logic and how to solve problems...
...His other complaint was that Bohr was removing understanding from the field of physics...
...It is its own thing.The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron...
...Because if they put Einstein under, think what they would do to you...
...Hold on...epicycles...
...Bohr and his followers had this notion that you got to the quantum world only when things were very small.Well that's because the only thing they knew that exhibited quantum characteristics was an atom...
...He has made remarkable progress by working with auditory neurobiologists and realizing the architecture of a much more capable hearing system in computational form...
...And vision...
...The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, the current was real.These were real things.They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
