Physics confuses me....

I just came to the realization that I have no clue what I'm studying.

The more I study Quantum Mechanics the more confused I get.

What's the deal with Quantum Mechanics? Right now we just started perturbation theory
and it's just some little kink in a solvable potential....What the hell? Putting a bump in the
bottom of a box? Why does nobody ever explain what this means?

What's the point of doing that? It's all just solving first-order, second-order corrections,
nondegenerate, degenerate...degenerate, I know- two states share the same energy. A
state, a wavefunction...what does that mean?

I'm still not quite sure exactly what a wave function even is...and I'm in second semester
quantum mechanics!!...I know it has a statistical interpretation and that makes sense, kind
of.

But it comes out of some magical thing called the schrodinger equation which nobody
ever bothered to explain. Where the hell did this equation come from? It's just MAGIC?
WTF? I might as well believe in Zeus for christ sake.

All this dirac notation, hermitian operators, ladder operators, ....Solving for the hydrogen
atom was the only thing that made any sense.

Even worse I don't think I really even know what the hell A FORCE IS! Everyone just
throws around force, force, it's a force. It does this because a force is there. WTF is a
force? I know there are four of them, but why are they there and why do they work the
way they do?

Sigh.....It's quite pitiful the amount I don't know. Does anyone know any quantum
mechanics books that explains the concepts and not just how to calculate all these
abstract complicated homework problems I have to do. Something to really explain why
I'm solving these problems......

Should I already know this stuff by now? Maybe I missed everything along the way and
got lost in the math...

-Tom
hey tom dont sweat. the patter as one learns physics is: at first feeling you know
something, then realizing you dont,,then this leads to deeper understadning till you think
you know something,,,then you again realize you dont,,,and each cycle leads to a deeper
understanding.

perhaps you should look at a more axiomatic approach to qm.,,, to understand the
assumptions...you should also understand the simple two slit expirements better... i know
it sounds lame,, but this is really where one gets an awe for the wierdness of qm, and
develops a sense of intuition for qm systems,,, otherwise its easy to get lost in
calculations..

i bet you didnt know that those egeinvectors of the position operator are not claimed to be
realizable in nature,,,they are not actually in your hilbert space.. however,,any
properly normalized linear combination is... same for the momentum eigenstates..

something i didnt know until a few days ago,,it came out of a feeling of being uneasy
about those delta functions that come from overlapping position egeinkets..

Originally Posted by Tomrocker

But it comes out of some magical thing called the schrodinger equation which nobody
ever bothered to explain. Where the hell did this equation come from?

1) Einstein explained the fact that the photolelectric effect is proportional to the
frequency of the impinging light rather than its intensity by postulating that EM comes in
quanta (later called photons), and that for a quantum of frequency f the energy is given
by e = hf, where h, of course, is Planck's constant.

2) DeBroglie saw that he could explain electron statistics showing up in spectra by

positing that they also satisfied e = hf and were in orbits that "waved" in the frequency f
and had to come out even once around the circle, which gave quantized orbits and
worked with the spectra.

3) Schroedinger said "Hey! Debroglie's idea is neat, but he only does that fixed frequency
f, which means a fixed energy e. In dynamics particles interact with potentials and the
enrgy will vary - be a solution of a differential equation in fact. And how would that work
with e = hf?" And working through the math that is giving you the pip, he DERIVED that
equation from first principles. It was the very reverse of magic, it was built up logically!

As for not knowing what the wave function "really" is, welcome to the club. Your
professor doesn't know either and neither does anyone here. You won't find any lack of of
people who want to sell you an interpretation, though. The wave function is what came
out of Schroedinger's equation when he had it built. He originally thought it was a real
field like EM, but that didn't work out. And since then the math has gone from one
strength to another, but understanding hasn't kept up.

Perturbation theory

For some systems we can solve the energy-eigenvalue problem and determine all the
energy eigenstates (also known as the time-independent Schrodinger equation). This
includes a particle in infinite/finite potential wells, particle in quadratic potential (simple
harmonic oscillator), particle in Coulombic potential (hydrogen atom) among others.
However, the number of systems we can solve is severely limited.
So what we can do is take a system which we can perfectly solve (i.e. have energy
eigenvalues and eigenstates), and add a small "perturbation" to it. The idea is that if the
perturbation is small, then the changes in the corresponding eigenvalues and eigenstates
will also be small (much like Taylor series). There are well defined procedures for
obtaining the first order, second order shifts. These procedures depend on whether or not
our original solvable system was degenerate or not, and also if our perturbation is time-
dependent or not.

P.S. I'm sure I repeated stuff that was obvious to you, so sorry for that.

was kind of irritable/grumpy and in an uproar when I wrote the post. So I'll just say that
I've calmed down a bit now.

Quote:
i bet you didnt know that those egeinvectors of the position operator are not claimed to be
realizable in nature,,,they are not actually in your hilbert space.. however,,any properly
normalized linear combination is... same for the momentum eigenstates..

Yeah, I learned that last semester. Thank you for reminding me though, I had forgotten.

Quote:
Schroedinger said "Hey! Debroglie's idea is neat, but he only does that fixed frequency f,
which means a fixed energy e. In dynamics particles interact with potentials and the enrgy
will vary - be a solution of a differential equation in fact. And how would that work with e
= hf?" And working through the math that is giving you the pip, he DERIVED that
equation from first principles. It was the very reverse of magic, it was built up logically!

Yeah, I knew it had to have been derived from something. It just seems magical to me
because I do not quite understand the details of where it comes from. I suppose it would
help me to read up on some of the history of quantum mechanics.

Tomrocker,

First of all, you're asking exactly the right questions. When you do physics, you should
ask "what does this mean", otherwise your just doing math. Secondly, I can offer no
answers, only my opinion of the questions you've asked, it's up to you to gather as many
opinions as possible, read as many interpretations as possible and then develop your own
educated opinion on what these things mean. Remember, Relativity came about because
Einstein said to himself "what does it mean that the speed of light is constant no matter
the reference frame, what does that mean?" Next thing you know, space is bending, time
is stopping, twins are aging at different rates, it's chaos, chaos! Sorry. Anyway, if you like
physics, never stop asking these questions.

Now, here are my opinions,

What are forces? Forces are how pieces of matter interact with each other. Without
forces, matter wouldn't be matter (what would hold it together?). It would be just a bunch
of fundamental particles flying through space at constant velocities floating right through
each other (collisions require force). That's why force is equal to mass times a change in
velocity (acceleration). It's shaking things up! That's the simple answer. There are two big
fundamental answers/definitions (as far as I know), one from QFT and one from
Relativity. I leave it to others to beat those horses to death.

Wavefunction - A wavefunction is related to a probability distribution (where something

probably is). Heres the thing, in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle says that
you can't know both the position and the momentum of a particle exactly at the same
time, so you end up with a probability distribution of where it probably is (and how fast
its probably moving). All of quantum mechanics consists of manipulating probability
distributions instead of a point like in classical mechanics. That's the beauty of classical
mechanics, you can say "the energy is there" and do your math. In quantum mechanics,
you don't know where anything is exactly, just where it probably is. You start with where
it probably is, you apply a force, you end with where it probably will be. (Igbkfte)

Schrodinger Equation- Schrodinger just took the Hamiltonian from classical mechanics
(which worked with definite position and momentum) and applied it to this quantum
world of probability. It even looks like the classical Hamiltonian. The classical
Hamiltonian equation which was just the Kinetic Energy + the Potential Energy of a
system was a clever trick that allows us to handle complicated systems by just keeping
track of the energy. So things can be spining, falling, sliding, whatever, you add up the
energy and you can derive equations of motion, which will tell you what the system will
do. Take a good look at that Schrodinger equation, it's just the kinetic energy plus the
potential energy times a wavefunction is equal to "gasp" the total energy times the
wavefunction. Why times the wavefunction? Because the energy isn't all in one place, it's
spread out over a probability. (Remember though, wavefunction does not equal
probability, it is the math math tool we use to manipulate probabilities (It's a subtle
difference)

Degeneracy- This just means that you can't tell two things apart just by looking at their
energy. Here is a real world example (kind of). Imagine a ball spinning clockwise with a
certain rotational speed in space, it has kinetic energy. Now imagine the same ball, in the
same spot, spinning at the same speed in the opposite direction, it has the same kinetic
energy as the first example, but the two balls are clearly different. So you can't tell the
two apart just by looking at the energy, they are degenerate. Why does it matter? Because
when we use the Hamiltonian, we are using energy to calculate. We better account for
this or our answer will be off.

I'm out of time, I hope it helps. Remember, this is just my opinion, you must make your
own. Nice job asking the questions though.
Originally Posted by RogerPink
Tomrocker,

First of all, you're asking exactly the right questions. When you do physics, you should
ask "what does this mean", otherwise your just doing math. Secondly, I can offer no
answers, only my opinion of the questions you've asked, it's up to you to gather as many
opinions as possible, read as many interpretations as possible and then develop your own
educated opinion on what these things mean. Remember, Relativity came about because
Einstein said to himself "what does it mean that the speed of light is constant no matter
the reference frame, what does that mean?" Next thing you know, space is bending, time
is stopping, twins are aging at different rates, it's chaos, chaos! Sorry. Anyway, if you like
physics, never stop asking these questions

Now, here are my opinions,

What are forces? Forces are how pieces of matter interact with each other. Without forces,
matter wouldn't be matter (what would hold it together?). It would be just a bunch of
fundamental particles flying through space at constant velocities floating right through
each other (collisions require force). That's why force is equal to mass times a change in
velocity (acceleration). It's shaking things up! That's the simple answer. There are two big
fundamental answers/definitions (as far as I know), one from QFT and one from
Relativity. I leave it to others to beat those horses to death.

I don't like the idea of dealing with forces personally.

Thinking of force as

is a bad idea IMO, simply because it is not relativistically invariant. The laws of physics
should be the same to all inertial observers (this is the principle of relativity).
Formulating force this way breaks that principle. Much better to simply think of force as

Of course, this doesn't answer the question of what is force? Again, in IMO it is better to
think of things not in terms of forces but in terms of energy.

don't know how much of the history you know but it really does help to understand what
QM is striving toward. It basically began with the question "Whats the smallest thing that
exists?". We eventually found the atom and things were looking pretty good except that
classical physics couldn't describe thermal anomalies that were apparent in hot bodies.
Plank then figured out that you could correct the problems by assuming energy always
comes in a discrete packet with a particular value and called that the Plank constant (this
is an extremely brief and generalised account). So then we dicovered that particals have a
wave property through Young's double slit experiment and then what the differential
equations were to describe that wave came soon after. From here the phillosophical idea
of what's the smallest thing we can find sort of lost it's drive and QT took off with a drive
of it's own because it became apparrent that we had stumbled onto something equally
important to our understanding of the universe. From the 1940's onward it's pretty much
been an exploration in mathematics with only reletively recent physical delving through
atom smashers and experiments in entanglement. Having said this you should read about
the EPR parradox and Einsteins debates with Bhor as the description iv'e put here is very
short and lacks much of the flavour of a fuller desciption. PS sorry if iv'e insulted anyone
by abbreviating the history of this extremely complicated and easily miss understood
topic, that was not my intention.
Originally Posted by franznietzsche

Thinking of force as

is a bad idea IMO, simply because it is not relativistically invariant. The laws of physics
should be the same to all inertial observers (this is the principle of relativity).
Formulating force this way breaks that principle. Much better to simply think of force as

Of course, this doesn't answer the question of what is force? Again, in IMO it is better to
think of things not in terms of forces but in terms of energy.

I agree, describing things in terms of energy always seems like the best way to go. Force
of course being a (negative) small change in potential energy over a small distance, area,
volume, etc.
This "crisis of faith" is a natural thing. It probably occurs to many people when they get
to a certain level in their studies. When I was an undergraduate I thought I knew a lot of
****. It wasn't until I got to graduate school that I realized how very, very little I really
did know.

Also, I think it's expected that while you should be able to pick up the mechanics of
doing Physics, a deeper understanding is a continuing project via research, seminars,
teaching, etc.

An approach to QM I find fascinating is to start with measurement in experiments (e.g.

Stern/Gerlach or photon polarization) and work your way up to the Dirac formalism by
induction. Schwinger does this in his QM lectures, but find I can't always follow his train
of thought very well. Amazon has an excerpt (that ends about the point it starts to get
really interesting, of course.) Baym does something similar in his lectures, but he's much
less ambitious and more heuristic in his approach.
I'd also like to recommend, again, Chester's Primer of Quantum Mechanics, which does
an excellent job motivating the Dirac formalism.

There are actually whole books on the concepts of force. (Haven't read it.)

It also can't hurt to read over parts of your classical mechanics text that you may not have
had a chance to really ponder at the time.

Originally Posted by RogerPink

I agree, describing things in terms of energy always seems like the best way to go.
Force of course being a (negative) small change in potential energy over a small
distance, area, volume, etc.
For conservative forces.

I think I was kind of confusing the concept of force in general (F = dp/dt) with the four
fundamental "forces." Or is it probably more accurate to say fundamental interactions? I
guess these would be called action at a distance forces....?

As I understand there are theories for why each of these things cause a body to accelerate
(or to cause a change in momentum) ....like quantum chromodynamics, QED, General
Relativity.....and I don't understand any of this stuff....So I don't really have an
understanding of why these work or why they're there at all....

The book on Force and the QM lectures look quite interesting. I'll definitely give them a
read
Interaction is a better word than force. The term force comes from Newtonian mechanics,
and gets upgraded in special relativity, but (from what I know) it's better not to think in
terms of forces.

Instead we have fields permeating every point in space (and time), and different fields
interact with each other (and themselves) in certain ways. One of the things physicists do
is try and write down how these fields interact with each other (e.g. this is what Einstein
did with general relativity: he showed how the metric field and matter fields interact).

The more ambitious physicists try and answer your questions of "where they come
from?" I doubt anyone has a good answer to that.

The inevitable bias

The way in which individual philosophers construct their idea of a state of nature is
highly revealing of their own societies and contexts. By describing a state of nature, they
are describe an 'Other', which is held in contrast to government in their own society.
Hobbes believed he had seen how his people would behave without the rule of law, as he
had observed the death and bloodshed as neighbour fought against neighbour. It is true
that such behaviour can be observed when the rule of law is removed from modern
societies: witness the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the insurgency in
post-Saddam Iraq, or even the Paris riots of autumn 2005. There is a big difference,
however, between a people whose previous rule of law has been removed, and a people
who have never experienced such rule. The difficulty with the use of thought experiments
is that one's own subjective experiences will inevitably shape the results. Rousseau paints
a highly idealised picture of man under the state of nature. While never referring explicit
to the ideal of the 'noble savage', he nonetheless takes a decidedly Primitivist approach.
The culture of decadence and excess prevalent at the time lead many at the time to hark
back to an idealised simpler age, as it seems apparent that Rousseau's state of nature is
coloured by similar sentiments. The year before writing his Discourse on Inequality, his
prize-winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences had argued that the rise of science and
arts had lead to a degeneration of public morals.

It is clear that both Hobbes and Rousseau had been strongly influenced by contemporary
reports from the colonies. It is illuminating that both authors can cite the same example:
the 'savage' peoples of America (i.e. Native Americans), and on the one hand use them as
an example of the superior abilities of the savage and the other of the brutality of savage
man. Both examples are weakened somewhat by the fact that said peoples were not living
in anything like the state of nature described by the authors. They were rather living in
relatively complex tribal structures that would not be classed as pre-political.

The myth of the state of nature

Regardless of either side's merits as a thought experiment, it is without doubt that

Rousseau's conception of the state of nature is the more realistic when viewed in the light
of anthropological evidence. Even if one were to follow the evolutionary path back to
beyond the point at which proto-hominids emerged from the relative security of the
forests onto the savannah, we cannot find a point where Man is living a life that is
"solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short". On the contrary, such proto-hominids were
consistently sociable, and lived in flexible, open groups, with little evidence of inter-
group aggression. Hobbes himself concedes that it is unlikely that there were ever a
period in history where such a state of war existed all over the world, but this does raise
the question as to how such a state is "natural" if this is the case. There is more evidence
to support Rousseau's description of the state of nature, but it is still based on a mistaken
premise. It shares with Hobbes's view an underlying assumption that political action is
not a natural part of human behaviour. "Hobbes very clearly saw the defect of all modern
defintitions of Natural right.". The defect Rousseau refers to is "that they define it in
terms of man's being rational and sociable - in the sense of political". Hobbes and
Rousseau agreed that this was not a true desciption of natural man. This assertion is not
supported by anthropological evidence, however, and a quite different conclusion is
found in that literature.
"features found in one form or another throughout human societies - such as political
authority (actual if not titular) in the hands of males, [and] tribal and kinship systems with
a recognition of a nexus of roles and relationships [...] - are all present in some form or
another in all human cultures, and express part of man's genetic behavioural inheritance."
(Reynolds, 1966:451)

The myth of the state of nature

Regardless of either side's merits as a thought experiment, it is without doubt that

Rousseau's conception of the state of nature is the more realistic when viewed in the light
of anthropological evidence. Even if one were to follow the evolutionary path back to
beyond the point at which proto-hominids emerged from the relative security of the
forests onto the savannah, we cannot find a point where Man is living a life that is
"solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short". On the contrary, such proto-hominids were
consistently sociable, and lived in flexible, open groups, with little evidence of inter-
group aggression. Hobbes himself concedes that it is unlikely that there were ever a
period in history where such a state of war existed all over the world, but this does raise
the question as to how such a state is "natural" if this is the case. There is more evidence
to support Rousseau's description of the state of nature, but it is still based on a mistaken
premise. It shares with Hobbes's view an underlying assumption that political action is
not a natural part of human behaviour. "Hobbes very clearly saw the defect of all modern
defintitions of Natural right.". The defect Rousseau refers to is "that they define it in
terms of man's being rational and sociable - in the sense of political". Hobbes and
Rousseau agreed that this was not a true desciption of natural man. This assertion is not
supported by anthropological evidence, however, and a quite different conclusion is
found in that literature.

"features found in one form or another throughout human societies - such as political
authority (actual if not titular) in the hands of males, [and] tribal and kinship systems with
a recognition of a nexus of roles and relationships [...] - are all present in some form or
another in all human cultures, and express part of man's genetic behavioural inheritance."
(Reynolds, 1966:451)

TheOctarineMage wrote:
Time-reversible processes are rare in the real world and irreversible ones (such
as scrambling an egg) are occurring all around us every day – but not until
Prigogine did anyone seriously attempt to include this obvious irreversible flow
of time in the laws of physics. In doing so, he transformed physics, giving it a
new cultural relevance. In the arts, medicine, business, social science, and
technology, professionals have acknowledged their debt to his fundamental and
resounding insights.

Now Prigogine presents to the general reader his profound break with the
 classical description of nature, examining the Western approach to time and
showing that we follow the probabilistic processes of the real world, we travel
far beyond the dead mechanics of determinism. In expounding his argument, he
leads us on a marvelous intellectual adventure beginning with the Greeks,
through Newtonian trajectory and deterministic chaos, and onward to the heights
of a unified formulation of quantum theory and ‘free lunch’ cosmology. His
dramatic findings include that quantum mechanics can be extended to
demonstrate time’s natural irreversibility, and further, he argues that time
actually preceded the Big Bang.

Mage, can you elaborate on his arguments with respect to time irreversibility, and the
contention that time preceded the Big Bang?
Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:38 pm Post subject: Laplace's Demon Revisited
In order to discuss irreversible processes a basic understanding of what constitutes
reversible processes was, for me, first necessary. The words themselves, of course, imply
the concept of time, the fundamental dimension of our existence. Time’s incorporation
into the conceptual scheme of Galilean physics marked the origins of modern science. In
classical physics, as far as the fundamental descriptions of nature is concerned, there is no
distinction between past and future. It is a matter of faith for many physicists that there is
no arrow of time because Newtonian objectivity expresses the equivalence of the
symmetry between past and future. This time paradox was first identified in the latter half
of the nineteenth century by Ludwig Boltzmann. However, his findings were relegated to
the realm of phenomenology which stressed the responsibility human observers have for
the difference between past and future through the approximations introduced in the
descriptions of nature. This is still the prevailing scientific wisdom.

Dynamic reversibility is one term used to describe the certitude of deterministic

processes, of isolated systems, that explicate the inexorable linkage between cause and
effect. It is the physics of equilibrium, based on the first and second laws of
thermodynamics, and concerns the trajectories of classical mechanics and wave functions
as described in the works of Heisenberg and Schroedinger. It is the concept of entropy
and the view that systems tend to equilibrium. This holds true mathematically for
macroscopic and quantum views. In the everyday world of human existence though,
irreversible processes are the norm and reversible processes and predictability are
idealized. In the words of Leo Resenfield, “No physical concept is sufficiently defined
without the knowledge of its domain of validity”.

Prigogine’s view is that the evolutionary character of the universe has to be reflected
within the context of the fundamental laws of physics. This need to overcome the
problem of determinism stems from the idea that deterministic process may fail when we
leave the reductionist view of classical physics and venture on to consider large classes of
dynamical systems in which the smallest perturbations in the initial conditions do not
produce corresponding effects but are instead amplified over time. A classic illustration of
amplification through chaos is the notion of the “butterfly effect” in which a simple cause
can produce non-converging effects. It is thus at the probabilistic level that the laws of
dynamics have to be formulated for chaotic systems, and the arrow of time is a necessary
component of such irreversible conditions.

After rereading Prigogine’s chapter on the possibility of time preceding the Big Bang, I
am somewhat persuaded it may be so, based on his convincing arguments that time has
no beginning. The anecdote is that he was asked at a physics colloquium in Moscow to
write a short inscription on a particular wall already inscribed with the sentiments of such
notable figures in history as Dirac and Bohr. After some brief hesitation, he wrote: “Time
precedes existence.”

Prigogine argues that irreversible processes associated with dynamical process have
probably played a decisive role in the birth of our universe. This brings closer the two
traditional views of cosmology: the steady-state theory of Bondi, Gold and Hoyle and the
standard Big Bang. He admits to speculation in this regard, adding that it is a tempting
view, and though he makes some attempt to delineate his suggestion through discussion
on Einstein’s special relativity, Hamiltonian dynamics, the twin paradox, gravitation, and
the like, he summarizes that physics deals with classes of phenomena and the big bang,
having no parallel elsewhere, does not seem to belong to any of these. He thereafter
concludes that “the idea that time has no beginning – that time indeed precedes the
existence of our universe – is becoming more and more plausible.”

guess I'm going to have to step through this minefield carefully, as it makes my head hurt.

From the quoted book jacket:

Quote:
Time-reversible processes are rare in the real world and irreversible ones (such
as scrambling an egg) are occurring all around us every day – but not until
Prigogine did anyone seriously attempt to include this obvious irreversible flow
of time in the laws of physics. In doing so, he transformed physics, giving it a
new cultural relevance.

Perhaps I've missed something, but where, and how, exactly, did he do this? You may
have explained it above but if so, I didn't get it.

I could have a naive view on this, and the blinking red lights of skepticism that are going
off all around me could well be unjustified, given the strong probability that Prigogine
knows much more about this stuff than I do, but let's just look at a so-called arrow of
time. If we run a movie of gas molecules colliding, the process is time symmetric: we
can't distinguish past from future. At the large scale, however, we can. If we pour gas into
a room, it just sort of dissipates, until it fills the room up. We don't see the gas
spontaneously running backward out of the room, or gathering in one corner, or the like.

But why not? Isn't it just statistical? There are about a billion more ways for the gas
molecules, colliding and zinging about, to fill up the room; and only a very small number
of ways for it to spontaneously float up to the ceiling or run in reverse, leaving the room.
So to me, the situations is still time-symmetric, and there is no time irreversibility -- no
real arrow of time at all. Just statistics.

Of course I could not only be wrong, I may have misunderstood the problem altogether.
But if Prigogine really claims to have demonstrated an irreversible time flow in nature,
I'm stubbornly dubious.

First of all, I would like to say that physics is simply an interest of mine, and only as a
layman. The mathematics eludes me although I am more familiar with its historical
development in much the same way novel of personal relevance unfolds for me. My main
interest in physics is how it relates to Taoism and how it impacts Taoistic teleological
descriptions. When I first encountered Prigogine’s book, it was the title and that alone
that prompted me to purchase it. The end of certainty would indeed implicate, in my
estimation, many Taoistic beliefs and practices concerning ethics, utility, and its views
and formulations of what constitutes nature and reality.

Secondly, check out the following links. Some lead to sites in disciplines related to or
affected by Prigogine’s assertions. Once loaded and if necessary, use your browser’s text
search facility to scan for the keywords “Prigogine” or “certainty”. Also, a 600+ page
book of Prigogine’s work, more accessible to the layman and general reader, is reportedly
forthcoming.

Theoretical Physics: On Ilya Prigogine (*Highly recommended)

The Promise of Social Science
Monthly Review June 1998
Challenge the Philosophy
Medical Education and Curriculum Reform
SoloHQ: Forum
Chaos and Complexity

Thirdly, owing to the complexity (to me) of the math and physics involved in Prigogine’s
delineation of the historical development of the physical theory of chaos and self-
organization, I will here instead paraphrase the main of chapter 7, Our Dialogue With
Nature. Following it will be an example from the book requiring a minimum of
mathematical symbology to demonstrate.

A time-reversible world would be an unknowable world. Knowledge presupposes that the

world affects us and our instruments, that there is an interaction between the knower and
the known, and that this interaction creates a difference between past and future.
Becoming is a sine qua non of science, and indeed, of knowledge itself.
We live in an evolutionary universe whose roots, which lie in the fundamental laws of
physics, we are now able to identify through the concept of instability associated with
deterministic chaos and nonintegrability. Chance, or probability, is no longer a
convenient way of accepting ignorance, but rather part of a new, extended rationality.
For these systems, the equivalence is broken between the individual desciption
(trajectories and wave functions) and the statistical description (in terms of ensembles).
At the statistical level, we can incorporate instability. The laws of nature, which no
longer deal with certitudes but possibilities, overrule the age-old dichotomy between
being and becoming. They describe a world of irregular, chaotic motions more akin to
the image the ancient atomists than to the world of Newtonian orbits. This disorder
constitutes the very foundation of the macroscopic systems to which we apply an
evolutionary description associated with the second law, the law of increasing entropy.

We have seen we need two conditions to obtain our statistical formulations, which go
beyond the usual ones for classical and quantum mechanics: the existence of Poncare
resonances, which lead to new diffusion-type processes that can be incorporated into the
statistical description, and extended persistent interactions described by delocalized
distribution functions. We then observe new solutions for the statistical equations that
cannot be expressed in terms of trajectories and wave functions. If these conditions are
not satisfied, we return to the usual formulations. This is the case in many simple
examples, such as two-body motion and typical scattering experiments, where before and
after scattering, the particles are free. These examples, however, correspond to
idealizations. The sun and the earth are part of the many-bodied planetary system;
scattered particles will eventually meet other particles, and are therefore never free.

(Poincare recurrence theorem: The finding that the state of a closed system, as defined by
the value of the positions and velocities of all the particles, will recur arbitrarily closely
under time evolution of the system.)

(resonance: The constructive interference that appears when two frequencies in a system
are rationally related.)

It is only by isolating a certain number of particles and studying their dynamics that we
obtain the traditional formulations. Conversely, time-symmetry breaking is a global
property encompassing Hamiltonian dynamical systems as a whole. Irreversibility occurs
even in systems with few degrees of freedom due to the simplifications used to describe
the equations of motion.

My line of reasoning in this book is certainly less radical than most attempts made in the
past to solve the time or quantum paradox. Perhaps my craziest idea is that trajectories
are not primary objects, but rather the result of a superposition of plane waves. Poincare
resonances destroy the coherence of these superpositions, and lead to an irreducible
statistical description. Once this is understood, the generalization to quantum mechanics
becomes easy.
Let us consider a chemical model. If we start at time t0 with two identical samples of
mixtures of two gases, such as carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen (O2), a chemical
reaction leading to carbon dioxide (CO2) can be catalyzed by metallic surfaces. In one of
the samples, we introduce such a catalyst, and in the other, we do not. If we compare the
two samples at a later time t, their composition will therefore be quite different. The
entropy produced in the sample containing the catalytic surface will be much greater as a
result of the chemical reaction. If we associate the production of entropy to the flow of
time, time itself will appear to vary between the two samples. This observation is in
agreement with my dynamical description. The flow of time is rooted in Poincare
resonances that depend on the Hamiltonian, that is, on dynamics. The introduction of a
catalyst changes the dynamics, and therefore alters the microscopic description.

We are in a world of multiple fluctuations, some of which evolved, while others have
regressed. This is in complete accord with the results of far-from-equilibrium
thermodynamics. These fluctuations are the macroscopic manifestations of fundamental
properties of fluctuations arising on the microscopic level of unstable dynamical systems.
Irreversibility, and therefore the flow of time, starts at the dynamic level. It is amplified at
the macroscopic level, then at the level of life, and finally at the level of human activity.
What drove these transitions from one level to the next remains largely unknown, but at
least we have achieved a noncontradictory description of nature rooted in dynamical
instability. The descriptions of nature as presented by biology and physics now begin to
converge.

Suppose that we have a chemical reaction {A}—{X}—{F} in which {A} is a set of initial
products, {X} a set of intermediate ones, and {F} a set of final ones. At equilibrium, we
have detailed balance where there are as many transitions from {A} to {X} as from {X} to
{A}, with the same applying to {X} and {F}. The ratio of initial to final products {A}/{F}
takes on a well-defined value corresponding to maximum entropy if the system is
isolated. Now consider an open system, such as a chemical reactor. By controlling the
flow of matter, we may fix the values of both the initial and final products {A} and {F}.
We progressively increase the ratio {A}/{F}, starting from its equilibrium value. What
will happen to the intermediate products {X} when we move from equilibrium?

Chemical reactions are generally described by nonlinear equations. There are many
solutions for intermediate concentrations {X} for given values of {A} and {F}, but only
one corresponds to thermodynamic equilibrium and maximum entropy. This solution,
which is called the “thermodynamic branch”, may be extended to the domain of
nonequilibrium. The unexpected result is that this branch generally becomes unstable at
some critical distance from equilibrium. The point where this occurs is known as the
bifurcation point.

Beyond the bifurcation point, a set of new phenomena arises; we may have oscillating
chemical reactions, nonequilibrium spatial structures, or chemical waves. I have given
the name dissipative structures to these spatiotemporal organizations. Thermodynamics
leads us to the formulation of two conditions for the occurrence of disspative structures
in chemistry; (1) far-from-equilibrium situations defined by a critical distance; and (2)
catalytic steps. Such as the production of the intemediate compound Y from compound X
together with the production of X from Y.

It is interesting to note that these conditions are satisfied in all living systems:
nucleotides code for proteins, which in turn code for nucleotides.

Finally, in closing, I would like to thank the administration of this forum for allowing me
some latitude if it appears I have been somewhat evasive in directly addressing davidm’s
questions and points. It is due to my ignorance and lack of formal training in higher math
and physics. It was never my intention to provide an exposition of Prigogine’s theories,
which I can only understand in the grossest sense. I am far from qualified to make such
an explanation. However I can intuitively appreciate the importance of what he presents
for our mental digestion. It is for this reason I offer the subject here for your examination,
hoping, should you decide to purchase and peruse the material, it fills you with the
wonder and awe it has inspired in me. Thank you.

APPLICATION OF FRACTAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL METHODS IN

RADIOECOLOGY.

PAPERS

Health Physics. 85(3):330-342, September 2003.

Makarenko, Nikolay *; Karimova, Lyailya *; Novak, Miroslav M. +

Abstract:
mdash;: Effective management of radioactive contamination requires comprehensive
knowledge of pollutants' characteristics. The complicated character of the problem is due
to a number of issues, such as the very wide range of contamination, the presence of a
mixture of radioactive isotopes, the highly variable diffusion of radionuclides in soil,
water, and air, and the effect of climatic conditions. The resultant field has an irregular
mosaic structure, which restricts the choice of measurement methods and data processing.
In view of this, application of classical statistics techniques is often inappropriate in
modeling such an environment. Application of the tools of fractal and stochastic
geometry provides a good insight and helps to distinguish between distribution
characteristics of natural and man-made isotopes. Several techniques are implemented to
determine scaling aspects of contaminated fields. The discovery of multifractal scaling
leads to the hierarchical structure of contamination spots on different scales and intensity
and places restrictions on the measurement net for detecting anomalies. The method of
stochastic geometry further demonstrates that topological characteristics of contamination
fields differ from those of the Gaussian fields and the topology of man-made isotopes
differs from natural ones.

(C)2003Health Physics Society