Can Dan Brown Decode QM?
Amanda is about to read The Da Vinci Code and I noticed that we had a copy of one of Dan Brown’s earlier books, Angels and Demons, so I thought I’d give it a read. I started it last night and found that Angels and Demons deals a decent amount with physics, and that Dan Brown gets very basic facts of physics very wrong, especially when it comes to the dominant field of physics today, quantum mechanics.
The character of Vittoria Vetra, daughter of a brilliant physicist and described as one herself, has succeeded in isolating and storing anti-matter and as she explains her father’s and her major breakthrough (and their belief that it is evidence for the existence of God), she says, “’Matter,’” Vittoria repeated, ‘Blossoming out of nothing (71).... He not only proved that matter can be created from nothing, but that the Big Bang and Genesis can be explained simply by accepting the presence of an enormous amount of energy.’” “’Matter from energy? Something from nothing? It’s practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility (83).’”
Let’s leave the God argument aside and just look at the physics here. For starters, the idea of something from nothing isn’t new to physics. Maybe Mr. Brown hasn’t heard of Stephen Hawking, because if he understood Hawking’s Radiation then he’d know that, at the quantum level, something really is created from nothing all the time. Back in 1974, Hawking based his theory that black holes, the enormously massive gravity sinks that carry so much gravitation that even light cannot escape them, aren’t so black on this principle.
On the quantum level, the sub atomic, cause and effect break down, and the vacuum of space boils with the constant spontaneous creation of particle/anti-particle pairs. A pair of particles, one matter and the other anti-matter, will spontaneously appear out of nothing and a moment later meet and annihilate each other. This raucous roil is called quantum foam, and physicists have been talking about it for decades (for a more technical explanation see here).
When these particle pairs appear right next to the event horizon of a black hole, Hawking theorized, one particle would fall inside the horizon from which it would not escape, causing its twin to wander off where it could be detected.
Like Einstein, many of Hawking’s theories have become well known outside the world of academic journals, as sales of Hawking’s popular books, like A Brief History of Time, can attest. And while that book probably didn’t sell as well as The Da Vinci Code, many people have read it and the ideas are well known. Oh, yeah, and there was that movie version of it. So, while the spontaneous generation of particle/anti-particle pairs may not be as well known as E=mc2, it’s not obscure by any means.
Speaking of E=mc2, the most famous equation in the world, Brown proves that he doesn’t understand it. Brown’s character (and not only this one) confuses energy with nothingness. Energy is a “something,” and as Einstein first explained in 1905, energy and matter are really the same thing. What Einstein showed was that Energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times the speed of light in a vacuum (c) squared. Mass is essentially super concentrated energy. This fact of matter and energy being two sides of the same coin has given us nuclear power and the atomic bomb. Energy and “nothing” have nothing to do with each other.
What I want to understand is, how did this get published without someone saying, “Hey, you need to fix some of the physics here?”
The character of Vittoria Vetra, daughter of a brilliant physicist and described as one herself, has succeeded in isolating and storing anti-matter and as she explains her father’s and her major breakthrough (and their belief that it is evidence for the existence of God), she says, “’Matter,’” Vittoria repeated, ‘Blossoming out of nothing (71).... He not only proved that matter can be created from nothing, but that the Big Bang and Genesis can be explained simply by accepting the presence of an enormous amount of energy.’” “’Matter from energy? Something from nothing? It’s practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility (83).’”
Let’s leave the God argument aside and just look at the physics here. For starters, the idea of something from nothing isn’t new to physics. Maybe Mr. Brown hasn’t heard of Stephen Hawking, because if he understood Hawking’s Radiation then he’d know that, at the quantum level, something really is created from nothing all the time. Back in 1974, Hawking based his theory that black holes, the enormously massive gravity sinks that carry so much gravitation that even light cannot escape them, aren’t so black on this principle.
On the quantum level, the sub atomic, cause and effect break down, and the vacuum of space boils with the constant spontaneous creation of particle/anti-particle pairs. A pair of particles, one matter and the other anti-matter, will spontaneously appear out of nothing and a moment later meet and annihilate each other. This raucous roil is called quantum foam, and physicists have been talking about it for decades (for a more technical explanation see here).
When these particle pairs appear right next to the event horizon of a black hole, Hawking theorized, one particle would fall inside the horizon from which it would not escape, causing its twin to wander off where it could be detected.
Like Einstein, many of Hawking’s theories have become well known outside the world of academic journals, as sales of Hawking’s popular books, like A Brief History of Time, can attest. And while that book probably didn’t sell as well as The Da Vinci Code, many people have read it and the ideas are well known. Oh, yeah, and there was that movie version of it. So, while the spontaneous generation of particle/anti-particle pairs may not be as well known as E=mc2, it’s not obscure by any means.
Speaking of E=mc2, the most famous equation in the world, Brown proves that he doesn’t understand it. Brown’s character (and not only this one) confuses energy with nothingness. Energy is a “something,” and as Einstein first explained in 1905, energy and matter are really the same thing. What Einstein showed was that Energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times the speed of light in a vacuum (c) squared. Mass is essentially super concentrated energy. This fact of matter and energy being two sides of the same coin has given us nuclear power and the atomic bomb. Energy and “nothing” have nothing to do with each other.
What I want to understand is, how did this get published without someone saying, “Hey, you need to fix some of the physics here?”
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 6:19 PM
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