HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Feb. 18, 2006 Modern physics, including the sciences involved in electronics, atoms, and "quantum mechanics," has become quite spooky. There are conclusions that seem just as otherwordly as many of the beliefs of various superstitions, myths, and voodoo. The thing that makes "scientific" beliefs different from those other categories of belief is that anyone (including you) can do an "experiment" in science and get the same result as anyone else doing a similar experiment, anywhere in the world. In other words, science can predict, accurately. All scientists agree that Newton's law, f = ma is true, and if anyone pushes with more force (in other words, a bigger f), then the mass (m) will accelerate more (have a bigger a), any place in the world, today, tomorrow or next year. Another beleivable thing about Newton's "classical" science is that much of it is "intuitive." We have an general feeling that more force will make the wagon go faster, and it does. However, ever since Einstein, there have been new scientific conclusions that no amount of human intuition could have predicted. In fact, our gut feelings would tell us that the new predictions are probably wrong, like enormous amounts of energy coming out of a couple of pieces of uranium 235 held close together. We need very complex mathematical analysis to predict such things, but every time someone does the experiment, it does really work the same way. Because of all the simple and also complex experiments that have now been done to verify Einstein's "relativity," I'm convinced that it's actually true. It accurately predicts. (To see the dates of discovery, you might check my history listing in this magazine, by clicking "HISTORY" below.) HISTORY. Then Einstein and Planck and others came up with still another new science, "quantum mechanics." This is just as spooky, if not more so. One of its conclusions is the "tunnel effect," which is somewhat misleadingly named. It predicts that an electron can be moving along through a conductor like copper (which we can intuitively imagine), until it hits a very thin insulator like glass. We could then imagine it going through the super-thin insulator, if it has enough kinetic energy. But wait a minute! Quantum mechanics says that under some circumstances, it doesn't go "through." The free-moving electron is not "allowed" by Mother Nature to be inside the glass --- that's a "forbidden zone." Not even for the very short time that it would take to go "through" the glass. Nope. What the electron does is that it disappears (!) when it hits the thin glass, and instantly reappears on the other side, and then it continues its flight. Well, what's the difference, and who cares anyhow? Well, we people who design electronic gizmo devices (I used to be one of them) do care. We have to time things exactly, and the predictions necessary for designing would be all wrong, if the electron were going into the glass for a while and then later coming out. But if we predict based on the electron disappearing and then instantly (and I do mean instantly!) reappearing on the other side, then the predictions are exactly (and I do mean exactly!) correct. Again, who cares? That knowledge won't buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. But all this quantum mechanics knowledge, put together with other "sophisticated" (counterintuitive) knowledge can buy more coffee than you can drink. It has made companies like Intel very rich. How does this affect our own daily lives? Well, it actually does. If you ever use a credit card size thing called a "smart card," the tunnel effect is operating right inside it. I use a smart card to pay for parking in my town, and some busses and subways use them also. They have a little square area that is gold colored, with some black lines going across it, but there is not any black magnetic stripe near the edge. In Europe and Japan, smart cards are used for telephones and banking, and we are going to see a lot more of them in the U.S. also. What is happening inside that card is that a silicon IC chip under the gold contact area has a super-thin insulator (silicon oxy-nitride, not glass), and some electrons tunnel through it when you put money into the credit-posting machine, along with the card. The electrons get stuck inside, at a certain thickness level. When you use the card, those electrons get more voltage put on them, and that makes them tunnel out of the other side and get free, but then your money credit is used up. You can learn more about all this if you look up, in wikipeda.org, the words "smart card," or "flash memory," or "EEPROM." (Incidently, I patented the first material used in a commercial EEPROM in 1969, and it became the cover story of the McGraw Hill magazine "Electronics," in 1970. You can see that if you bother to search "shanefield" in google and click on "CV." But, although it was the first, it wasn't very good, and nobody uses it for that purpose any more. Oh well, it was my 15 minutes of fame, I guess. Well, my inventions, somewhat modified, are now used for other things like the CD-RW, so they aren't completely dead.) There are many, many other everyday uses of quantum mechanics, and the tunnel effect plus other such sophisticated science nowadays, of course, usually without our being conscious of them. For example the Nano iPod uses the same EEPROM for its flash memory, with tunneling, and so on. In another article, I'll describe an even spookier modern science thing called "entanglement." Einstein himself called it "spooky action at a distance," and he resisted believing it. If you read my future article and don't get around to checking it in wikipedia, you'll think I've gone totally nuts. But I do "believe" it, because it predicts accurately. We can even use these things to make useful products that earn considerable money, and a lot of the new high tech jobs in the U.S. (replacing the old outsourced jobs) are based on such things. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email: shanefield@ieee.org Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
