Reading a book can warp one’s mind | Columns | thecourierexpress.com – The Courier-Express

Do I understand quantum mechanics?

Well, no. I only recently came to understand something about the first word of the mathematical discipline we call quantum mechanics. It is defined as dealing with the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, incorporating the concepts of quantization of energy, wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the correspondence principle, according to something called Oxford Languages, which can be reached via Google.

My understanding is underwhelming. I understand what a quantum leap is not.

I now understand that a single electron does not whiz around a single atomic nucleus in a single perfectly round circle.

That is what I first learned about atoms. It was back in 1958, in sixth grade, as I recall. Science in 1958 was nowhere near what science is today. To us serious 1958 science students, atoms were clots of protons and/or neutrons, surrounded by neatly circular orbiting electrons.

Today, I am told that electrons do not follow bicycle-wheel circular orbits. Instead, electrons pop up here and there at predictable distances from the nuclei of atoms, nuclei being those clots of protons and/or neutrons.

Electrons get from here to there by traversing, invisibly, some teeny tiny distance called a quantum. How do they traverse this distance? Why, they leap, giving rise to our use of the term quantum leap.

That is what I just now learned this year. It constitutes the sum total of my knowledge of quantum mechanics and, for that matter, atomic physics. I have sons who are engineers and other children who are more recently educated. They understand such stuff. I am just learning about it.

For this knowledge, I am indebted to Bill Bryson.

Brysons A Walk in the Woods, gave millions of Americans the irrevocable impression that he is a doppelganger of Robert Redford, because that selfsame Handsomest Man of the Twentieth Century portrayed Bryson in the movie about his mostly successful and mainly hilarious attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, mostly for the hell of it.

But A Walk in the Woods did not teach me about quantum mechanics, though it did reinforce my predisposition to give the exercising that goes with cross-country hiking to my brain, as in reading about it, rather than to my arthritic knees, hips and assorted other joints.

A Short History of Just About Everything, also by Bryson and by now more than two decades old, explained the quantum clearly enough for me to claim its leap as my own for purposes of smart-alecky windbaggery, which I call conversation.

The book is a tour de force. It starts with the Big Bang, principally because all matter and energy that is, was or will be got its start with the Big Bang. I knew about that, but I knew zilch about the astronomy, cosmology, paleontology, taxonomy and dozens of other scientific disciplines that end in y. Bryson says he too did not know these things. Unlike me, he set out to learn about them by talking to experts and then translating their lingo into folksy, fun-to-read English.

The book ends with a depressing whimper. It notes that humans got here by an awe-inspiring series of billions upon billions of happenings, any one of which could have left us no more advanced than newts. Then it tells us that if the megavolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park does erupt, humans in our neck of the woods will likely be vaporized within nanoseconds.

Even if not, Bryson says, we are despoiling our only inhabitable planet at cataclysm-inducing clip.

But until that cataclysm is induced, we can revel in the knowledge that electrons leap, that great scientists often are petty and churlish people, that cells contain billions of ... things ... we didnt even dream existed back in 1958.

Brysons book, in sum, has quantumed my scientific knowledge by leaps and bounds, though what practical benefit that has at my age is puzzling. It took Darwin decades to perfect his theory of natural selection. Septuagenarians are unlikely to be sentient for decades.

Yet I am smiling broadly as I type these words, because gaining knowledge, even in subatomic quantities, is something worth smiling about.

I also gained knowledge, however evanescent, about trilobites and dinosaurs, dodos (the birds as well as the politicians) and gravity.

So there is something else to be said for our having disconnected our televisions satellite feed, besides the obvious blessing of having missed all of last years political advertising.

We fill that void by viewing sunsets, chasing chickens, chatting with friends and family, enjoying the company of dogs and, of course, reading books.

It is a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents.

I understood that. I really did for a nanosecond.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor/publisher at newspapers in DuBois, Brookville, New Bethlehem and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: notniceman9@gmail.com

Read the original:

Reading a book can warp one's mind | Columns | thecourierexpress.com - The Courier-Express