Quantum Physics - Future Gold Mine
Posted: Friday, September 03, 2010
by Johan Hansson
FunPhysics
Quantum physics will in the near future be an inevitable, indispensable and useful part of everyday life. It is coming, and impossible to stop. In fact, we are already there, but have yet only scratched the surface of an enormous iceberg, the majority of which is still hidden and unused. Those who do not realize this fact will be left helplessly behind. In my job I often come across people - who should know better - who believe that today's engineers just need to learn Newton 's mechanics. Talk about living in the past! 300 years, to be more exact ... Modern engineers will not be able to function on 300-year-old physics alone! We are talking about the people who will develop (the technical aspects of) our future society. Steam engines and other mechanical gadgets of the industrial revolution will never again lead to real breakthroughs that time has long since passed.
Today virtually everything in society rests on the fact that we finally understood and learned how to apply electromagnetism. The "information revolution" which we now are living in the midst of (and imagine is cutting-edge-modern) is thus based on 150 years old basic research in physics.
Albert Einstein said: "You cannot solve problems at the same level of thinking that created them." Global warming, radiation risks from nuclear power and (possibly) mobile phones need entirely new techniques for their solutions - based on current (and future) fundamental research - they cannot be solved by the technology and the thinking that caused them. Perhaps an even bigger problem is that the developing countries are repeating our old mistakes, cheered on by Western corporations, using the same old technology that gave rise to the problems in the first place.
The physicist and science philosopher Thomas Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shift". Normally science develops slowly and remains within the same broad paradigms, i.e. the same framework. But sometimes revolutions happen that are impossible to arrive at gradually. Physics has undergone four really big paradigm shifts: 1. Newton 's mechanics from the 1680s. 2. Maxwell's electrodynamics from the 1860s. 3. Einstein's relativity theory of 1905 (special) and 1915 (general). 4. Quantum physics in the 1920s. These are represented in turn by: 1. Newton 's three laws of motion. 2. Maxwell's equations. 3. Einstein's equations. 4. The Schrdinger equation.
It seems that about 50 years is needed to translate revolutionary scientific discoveries into the first practical applications, and after roughly 100 years the really big money is capitalized from them: The Industrial Revolution was at its peak in the 1800s (railways, mechanical industries, etc.) and was based on Newton's equations. The Information Revolution - which we live in right now is based on Maxwell's equations. The Quantum Revolution is underway, but has barely started.
For a very long time to come, all pioneering applications (medicine, computers, communication, and every other "micro-engineering") will be based on quantum physics.
AND the Bill Gates of the new era will be a quantum engineer!
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FunPhysics.org is a resource for everything on physics, astronomy and the universe, featuring physics researcher, Prof. Johan Hansson - among many other things the discoverer of Preon Stars, as covered in e.g. Nature and Physical Review Focus
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