Correspondence Principle
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CORRESPONDENCE PRINCIPLE*
Everybody knows that we are all made of stardust. Following the Big Bang, in the first few minutes, deuterium formed through fusion of protons and neutrons. Thousands of years later, as the hot cosmic matter cooled down, heavier atoms were formed. After a few hundred million years stars started forming due to gravitational attraction and in their cores nuclear reactions led to synthesizing even more elements, including those needed for life. Stars like our Sun still convert hydrogen to helium; older stars produce heavier elements all the way up to iron. A star that has followed the progress of fusion to the point where iron is produced in its core is a star that is about to die. It is a star that has run out of ‘fuel’ and is about to start collapsing from the outside in and then explode. Once it explodes, the elements it has produced in its core disperse throughout the universe and eventually get incorporated into other celestial systems. Boom. Stardust. In everything.
Before scientists understood the evolution of the universe to such a staggering extent as they do now, there were creation myths. People thought they were brought into existence by an act of the divine from the materials readily available, or maybe through an act of ingenuity. They could cling to that story and imagine that in themselves they carry the divine and that they are one with the world that surrounds them. Understanding the science has made the story slightly less personal, but being evidence based did not subtract from it being a story. Science gets filtered through people and people like stories. At some point we thought we could channel the divine through a hypothetical act of creation, now we know we can rightfully claim to be star-children instead. To have come from the universe and therefore carry the potential of the universe within us, despite are daily failures and defeats.
The aim of science is harder to pin down than it seems. Maybe its goal is to further our understanding of everything that surrounds and ourselves. Maybe its goal is to make our lives easier, to help us ‘hack’ and ‘engineer’ and ‘apply’ everything that surrounds us (and ourselves) for the sake of comfort and prosperity. Likely, it is some combination of the two, and individuals that partake in it set the ratios for themselves. We imagine that what comes afterwards, after setting of the goals, is objective, calculated and logical. There is the scientific method as the ultimate canon, peer review as its own kind of judge-jury-executioner complex. Seemingly, there is a prescription, an algorithm, for doing science and it resembles a slightly involved soup or stew recipe – the right order of chopping and mixing and boiling will eventually lead you to something worth sinking your teeth into.
In one of my papers, a collaborator included a line claiming our work was relevant “from laboratory-based micron scales to astronomical scales”. This is exactly the type of sentence that reads well as a part of an introduction to a niche, technical paper that most non-specialists might skim over. It works so well because it brings together two extremes – very small and very large – that are typically hard to marry. Things get murky at micron scales, murkier than when we look at the night sky and observe objects far away in both space and time**. The language we use to talk about the outcomes of following the cookbook-like steps often fails us. Electrons are not little chunks of charge that are constantly spinning and it is easier to say that an MRI works because of electronic spin than to explain that ‘spin’ is just the best our classical language has to offer and we should really all be looking at the rigid mathematical formalism instead. However, we still tell stories in our publications and in our attempts to reach those outside of our niche. To an extent, we have to tell stories to justify the time spent on our work. And they are compelling stories, dealing with such exciting things like flipping every single spin in your body when you need a medical scan (and you can’t even feel it!) and about being made out of remnants of violent stellar deaths. Regardless of the lack of nuance and the shortcoming of language, others find inspiration and purpose in these stories.
Science is a human endeavor and its punchlines are identified through human eyes. The take-home messages are the ones that a person decides to take home. There is no divine presence dictating the truth but there are catchy phrases and lyrical interpretations. Stars are just nuclear reactors floating in space somewhere far away from us, just some very warm masses that produce energy. They don’t die and they don’t grow older. We are not their children – we just happen to be a part of the system that employs the same matter. We are made of carbon and hydrogen and iron and many other elements; why should we take inspiration in where they came from?
Regardless of how we justify the need for science to ourselves, the side effects of engaging in scientific discovery, the consequences of claiming that we have come to understand something, are unavoidable. Science is humbling in that it emphasizes how much we actually don’t know and it is dangerous in that it makes us think that eventually we might know everything. It is therefore crucial to not lose sight of the human element, the fact that whatever underlying universal truth we aim to be seeking is revealed to us in the shape dictated by our questions and narratives formed by our need to replace all of the myths that came before we decided to cling to a notion of objectivity instead.
In college, I attended a course on the history of science and medicine taught by a professor who routinely wore leather blazers and dark sunglasses and cited W. H Auden whenever he could. We were asked to write short weekly essays and he would read the ones he liked out loud. Most weeks he would follow up the reading by underlining that “all is forgiven to those who write well”. It is un-cool to admit that a college professor teaching a general education requirement class was exactly right about something, but the notion that the more one feeds into the human desire to tell stories, the more powerful their message becomes is one that may have been a more worthwhile lesson than most discussions that transpired in his lectures. He never read any of my essays out loud; maybe he would have had I written them about being stardust.
Best,
Karmela
* In physics, the correspondence principle states that quantum mechanical theories should reproduce classical behavior in appropriately ‘large’ limits. As a heuristic, quantum mechanics is an accurate description of physical systems when they are either very small or very cold while classical physics has been proven to work well for warm, macroscopic objects such as basically anything you might be using at room temperature right now. The correspondence principle then requires quantum calculations to agree with classical calculation if temperature is increased or large objects are considered.
** Since light travels at the same fixed speed in all frames of reference, we are never seeing the stars and the sun in ‘real time’ but rather what they were like when the light left them. This means that, for instance, if the sun suddenly changed color or went dark we would only find out about it (see it) roughly eight minutes later. This is also why telescopes and detectors can be used to look back in time – some radiation from the very early universe is still travelling towards us because the universe itself has been expanding.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LEARNING: Consider an ultracold superfluid that has been forced into the shape of a thin, hollow shell. Now, consider adding a vortex, a small whirlpool devoid of fluid in the middle, to that superfluid somewhere within the shell. Does this cost energy if the shell is spinning? Does it cost more or less energy if the vortex is not on the axis of rotation? In the past week I read a few papers related to this problem, briefly consulted with a collaborator and carried out enough calculations to be able to answer about half of those questions. (And my advisor briefly roped in our local Nobel laureate into a quick conversation on the topic when he walked by during one of our meetings.) In this coming week I will try to work on this further in addition to preparing for an upcoming conference, meeting with a group of experimentalists that work with mechanical systems I never even knew could carry quantum quantities and continuously scrambling to keep my quasicrystal project going forward as well.
I saw three talks in this past week: one on fractional electromagnetism and strange metals, one on teleporting quantum bits of information to the International Space Station by using lasers, and one on trying to look into the remnants of the early universe by mounting a detector made largely of superconducting circuits onto a football-field-sized balloon and flying it over Antarctica. Writing all of these words together serves as a good reminder of how amazing science can be, and how amazing it is that some of us can call these sorts of endeavors our jobs.
Finally, my campus is still engrossed in preparations for a teaching assistant strike and even being a small part of this organizing effort has definitely been a learning experience. Organizing takes a lot of time and emotional energy and I am constantly impressed by student activists willing to commit both to make sure we all obtain a fair contract with the university administration. Unfortunately, this only makes it that much more disheartening to recall that over twenty bargaining sessions over the course of more than two hundred days have resulted in little to no progress. I am very naively still hoping that some sort of an agreement can be reached before the chosen strike date and that this process will not include another lesson that is hard to accept and deal with.
LISTENING: At the most basic level of thinking about science, this episode of Stuff You Should Know explaining the scientific method is a fairly good introduction (with the caveat that Josh and Chuck are not academic scientists and can be as critical of peer review as they want to since their job prospects don’t involve dealing with it). In the category of thinking about the way in which a question is phrased can affect our determination of the answer, this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the anchoring effect is quite striking as well.
I also finished Radiotopia’s mini-series podcast Secrets this week and while I think some of the narration and framing of stories within the show itself could have been better, it is definitely interesting to think of a successful lie, or a successfully kept secret, as the ultimate feat of storytelling. Finally, on a completely unrelated note, this episode of Every Little Thing grappling with the mystery of how old Winnie the Pooh might be is just a really fun thing to listen to.
On the music front, this past week I have mostly been listening to the two vinyls I bought recently: one by Witch and one by the Ventures. And since the end of the weekend ended up being unexpectedly sunny I revisited this Fuzz album as their music somehow always makes me think of lazy spring and summer weekends I am perpetually trying to have. The first summer we were together, my boyfriend would often play one of their records (on the record player that I use now) whenever we found ourselves spending time in his apartment and I guess the connection just stuck with me.
EATING: I ate a fair amount of fruity, sweet breakfasts even before I became vegan but in the past year of eating an exclusively plant based diet, yogurt and smoothie bowls definitely became a staple of my morning routine. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with eating mostly fruits and peanut butter at the start of the day, I have also been trying to expand my breakfast options and include more savory dishes. The breakfast I am sharing below is something of a compromise between the two. More precisely, I have been pairing this sweet potato, chickpea and tahini assembly with a green smoothie (I like these two) for what I hope is a fairly well balanced breakfast. I roast a bigger batch of sweet potatoes on Sunday and then eat them cold throughout the week and lately I have also been cooking chickpeas from scratch but canned (drained and well rinsed) will do the trick as well.
For a single serving you will need
½ sweet potato, cut into two or three wedges
¼ tablespoon olive oil
½ cup chickpeas
2 teaspoons tahini
A pinch of salt
1 ½ teaspoon of hemp hearts (optional)
Toss the sweet potato wedges with olive oil and a bit of salt and roast them cut side down at 400 F for about 20 minutes, then flip and roast for another 10 minutes or until fork tender and visibly caramelized (they will brown to the point of looking slightly burned)
Layer the sweet potato wedges and chickpeas in a bowl, drizzle with tahini and sprinkle with a bit more salt and hemp hearts
Tips: One can of chickpeas is typically about 2 cups so if you roast 2 sweet potatoes in advance you can have breakfast mostly ready for four days of the week, which is pretty convenient.
To turn this into a full meal without making a smoothie, double the amount of sweet potato and add avocado or cucumber slices (or both). You could also layer these over a bed of lettuce or massaged kale for something more similar to a salad. To turn this into dinner, simply add more roasted vegetables such as cauliflower, Brussels sprouts or broccoli (you can roast them all on the same sheet-pan at the same temperature for roughly the same 30-40 minute time).
Hemp hearts are a good source of plant protein and omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids but they tend to be terribly expensive so I would suggest buying small quantities from bulk bins if possible. They have a slightly nutty flavor that works well in this combination but chia seeds, sesame seeds or even chopped nuts of some sort (roasted cashews or almonds) would work as well.