The world of quantum spaces is exciting. Between equations, cats and paradoxes, we find God throwing the dice. Everything is possible. For in the world of particles, imagination has always trumped all of reality ever since the Irish physicist GJ Stoney (1826-1911) one fine day put forward the hypothesis of a minimal unit of electric charge, which he called an electron.
In this way, the study of nature on a small scale found its basis in this quantum hypothesis. It happened in 1881, and in doing so, Stoney was the first to “quantize” a form of energy that was thought to be continuous. Then the others came. Among them is the British physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), who in 1928 formulated a relativistic equation to describe the electron. And he got it from another equation; the one that describes the temporal evolution of a quantum system formulated by Schrödinger.
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To understand each other, and roughly what Dirac achieved with his statement, was to explain the behavior of the electron at the subatomic level. And he achieved it by combining the principles of quantum mechanics with those of relativity in an equation that is considered one of the most beautiful in physics:
(i∂+m)Φ=0
Surely we’ve seen it tattooed before, because in addition to describing the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, it’s been interpreted as a love equation for some time. The thing is, this equation suggests that if two particles are related for a while and then separate, what happens to one continues to affect the other, despite the distance. The imagination, as we have already said, does not fit reality, even if we take reality and expand it.
In this way, popular culture transforms a mathematical formula into an icon that identifies quantum mechanics with love. It is strange that a lonely man, let’s say an ascetic, genius and madman at the same time, has formulated an equation so beautiful that in time it would become beyond the scientific dimension to be tattooed by young people who their Sealing love by closing a padlock on the railings of the bridges.
If we read the book dedicated to the quantum world by the physicist and essayist Jim Baggott (1957), entitled The History of Quanta (Buridán Library), we find the mathematical Dirac and the history of its formula explained in a very simple way. Baggott introduces us to a very close Dirac, a man who became mired in complex mathematical problems, had a fondness for relativity, and spent half his life searching for a relativistic form of quantum theory to claim as his own.
Dirac constructed a four-dimensional space-time with four-row by four-column matrices and freed the electron by describing its motion in an electromagnetic field. Using mathematics, he simplified it until he formulated the ingenious equation that has gone viral today thanks to his loving interpretation.
It’s funny, but couples talk about quantum entanglement as if there were a minimal unit of love charge that could be “quantized”. Well considered, they might be right, because love isn’t a continuous form of energy either.
the stone axe It is a passage in which Montero Glez, with a craving for prose, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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