Читать книгу Quantum Physics is NOT Weird - Paul J. van Leeuwen - Страница 9

“The shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary.”

Aristotle, Greek philosopher,

384 BC. – 322 BC.

As a child, you get to know the physical world as stable, solid, and trustworthy. You don’t notice that the earth is a sphere with a radius of almost 6,400 km (4000 mi) doing a complete rotation every day which means that you are spinning with a speed of about 1650 km/h (1025 mph) at the equator and at a somewhat lower speed of 1040 km/h (646 mph) at a latitude of 51 degrees in – say – Amsterdam. You also don’t notice that the earth also revolves around the sun at a speed of about 30 km/s (18 mi/s). These speeds are completely contrary to what you experience standing on the ground, which appears to you to be completely at rest. They are also in contradiction with the experience that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow your home will still be located where it always was. The earth’s gravity which ensures that your feet stay firmly on the ground is so normal and ubiquitous that you probably never realize that you might have a different weight elsewhere. This must have been the experience of ancient man. The earth under his feet at rest and the sun, the moon and the stars reliably revolving through their fixed orbits every day. Even having been educated about our solar system we still say, although knowing better, that the sun rises and sets.

For the ancient farmer, and his clients, it was important for a good harvest to know when to sow and to be able to predict the run of the seasons. The position of the sun, the moon and the stars provided a reliable clock, but before this heavenly clock was usable for predicting it had to be brought into a model fit for arithmetic forecasting. Seafaring man had to be able to navigate by the fixed stars. This is the way the study of the objects in our night sky, astronomy, must have begun. This study of the sky led to the observation that there were stars that had no fixed place in the night sky. They moved with respect to the fixed stars and sometimes they even went back in their own trajectory. Planets or wandering stars they were called, derived from the Greek word planastai: to wander around. Because of their deviant behavior a special meaning became assigned to those wandering stars.

To get an idea of how quantum theory originated and why it is so contrary to how we think our world functions, it will be a good idea to investigate first how our current western image of the universe originated. That western image has a history of at least 24 centuries, so no wonder it has become so naturally self-evident to us. But the question is, is this image correct?