Quantum Mysteries and Birdsong May or May Not Be On My Mind (Little Green Notebook)

Created by me, using Canva, something which I think would amaze Werner Heisenberg.

I’m drinking coffee, delighting in how the bird outside is chirping in time to the music Joe is playing, and checking in with science news of the week. I’m jostled to find it’s all aflood with celebrations of the hundred-year anniversary of the field of quantum mechanics.

Then I remembered. I even wrote a headline in my notebook back in January predicting the word “quantum” would make the news all year long, and not just in the world of science. “Quantum lipstick for timeless beauty!” “Quantum cookies leave you thinner than you were when you ate them!” “Quantum cell phones track all your identities’ locations at once!”

Those were the kinds of things I expected, with my extremely limited understanding of quantum physics, a field which suggests that tiny particles exist in multiple places and in multiple forms at once.

On one June day back in 1925, twenty-three-year-old German physicist Werner Heisenberg took advantage of his isolation on an island, a prescription for extreme hay fever, to contemplate packets (quanta) of energy between atomic particles, and the field of quantum mechanics was born.

I don’t know how to celebrate this anniversary, seeing as how I don’t understand quantum notions a’tall. I do recall the first time I pondered atomic particles, however.

My sixth-grade teacher, who wore a silver butterfly-shaped whistle on a chain around her neck, showed us models of atoms. Back then, we all learned the Bohr model, a circle with numbers inside to represent protons and neutrons, with concentric circles around that to represent electron shells. We drew electrons on these “shells” like cranberries on a garland.

I happily sketched atomic models of the first ten elements, adding color to make them more attractive, while listening to my teacher explain atoms.

“The protons and neutrons give an atom its mass,” she said, “but the electrons are spinning around so fast their mass doesn’t even count!”

How cute, I thought, drawing little smiley faces on my cranberry-strung electrons, wondering if they got dizzy as if on a Tilt-a-Whirl.

“Everything in the universe is made of atoms,” she went on.

Here’s the delightful thing about sixth grade, the year most children turn twelve. Twelve is the age when a typical brain develops abstract reasoning.

So, there I was with my in-between brain, sitting at my desk, coloring my atoms which make up . . . what did she say, “everything in the universe”?

I raised my hand. “Is my desk made of atoms?” I asked.

“Yes, everything, even your desk.”

“But you said the electrons in the atoms are moving,” I said, confusion clouding my thoughts.

“They are,” she said. I don’t remember how she explained that the particles in my desk were indeed in motion, held together with electromagnetic and nuclear forces. I was too busy staring at my desk. I knocked on my desktop with my knuckles. I leaned over and tapped the metal legs of my desk with my ruler.

Things are not as they seem, I realized, a thought which would recur throughout my life.

To this day, although I can parrot words that might explain how something that seems solid, like the cobalt-blue glass paperweight I’m looking at right now, can be composed of moving particles, I don’t own a real understanding.

I grappled with physics throughout my academic career, learning enough to get by but never feeling that dopamine-fueled deep-in-the-gut understanding like I got the morning I awoke visualizing in my mind’s eye biology’s “Central Dogma” play out, with genetic information flowing from DNA to RNA to protein, the protein folding in accordance with codons, hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acids pushing and pulling just so to create a nose or a foot. Biology has always felt more comfy to me than physics, but of course, nothing exists in a vacuum.

Bone, tooth, and hoof are made of moving parts. Nothing is as it seems.

When I taught sixth grade, I went one step further and told my babies about the subatomic particles called quarks. I can’t tell you much about quarks, but I like their names: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. I devised a game of Battleship the kids could play using quarks as game pieces; alas the logistics elude me now. What I really like about quarks, and the reason I taught my tender-aged students that quarks exist, in theory anyway, is that they are named after a nonsense line in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, “Three quarks for Mr. Mark!”

It was revelatory for me to learn that egg-headed physicists have a collective sense of humor. Neils Bohr himself once stated, “Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.”

Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.

Happy one-hundred-year anniversary, quantum mechanics! It’s a great year to celebrate birds singing in time to music, to ponder the mysteries of particles existing in multiple places at one time, and to embrace the limits of our perception of this wild, wide, wondrous world.

Thanks for reading, and for being here. Or not being here. Or being here in multiple universes all at once. It’s nice sharing atoms with you and the critters and the creepy crawlers and the diamonds in the mines and the stars in the skies.

As always, I have to have a pitch for my book at the end of these posts, or maybe today I’ll simply suggest you head over to marydansak.com and have a walkabout.