Brian Cox's diamond

[Khandro]

Can anyone help Professor Khandro? I saw a few days ago on TV, the latter part of a lecture given by Brian Cox in which he rubbed a large uncut diamond between his hands and said by doing so, not only made changes to the atoms within the diamond, but this had a knock-on effect to every atom in the universe! I have tried over Christmas to pass on this amazing information to my family but, being sadly lacking in facts, my submission has been rudely Pooh-pooh'd by my family. What was he actually formulating please?

[rojash]

Get them to watch the video

http://documentaryhea...night-with-the-stars/

[Zacs-Master]

Nope, nuffink to do with chaos theory I'm afraid.

[johnny37]

What he was trying to explain was quantum theory. Basically if you move one molecule it has an effect on every molecule next to it and so on to the end of the universe. I cant get my head round it either. I had it explained to me once by my maths teacher if you move a penny from one side of the desk to the other something else in the universe moves to compensate. Physicists explains it in formulae which they can demonstrate to be true but make little sense to we mere mortals. Very interesting lecture!

[Calibax]

Pauli's exclusion principle states that no two electrons can occupy the same space so if you move one electron, the others nearby will shift to accommodate the change and the ones near these will shift too and so on.
In the weird world of quantum mechanics though, it all happens instantaneously across the whole universe!

[boxtops]

He was also comparing the diamond with the white dwarfs out there in the universe. He's on every night this week on BBC4, early - worth a watch.

[Zacs-Master]

Not quite boxtop. There is a White dwarf which is pure carbon I.e. A diamond the size of the earth ( or something similar)

[Khandro]

Thanks rojash for the link, I have now watched it in its entirety, - fascinating! I can just about grasp the idea, but I found the blackboard maths - along with Jonathan Ross - a little bewildering!

[jake-the-peg]

I saw the show I rather thought he was a bit too abitious with his subject matter.

I don't know if I can do better but it's woth a shot.

If you confine an electron in an atom it has a particular energy state defined by the Schroedinger equation - interesting chap Schroedinger bit of a Ladies man - came up with the equation after a night with someone else's wife but I digress.

That energy state is unique in the atom another electron can occupy the same state but only if it has opposite spin which is why they pair.

Now bring another atom close to it - the available energy states are now combined - they can't occupy the same energy level (normally there are exotic exceptions) so the energy levels split a tiny bit

Say you had 2 hydrogen atoms, the base energy level is -13.6eV ( don't worry about the eV that's just a unit of energy) as you bring them together that might become say -13.59999 and -13.66601

Now the thing is that this interconnectedness drops off with distance but is never exactly zero - much in the same way that you gravitationally attract the Andromeda galaxy

Consequentially when you add energy to a diamond all the other energy levels change but the effect over any sort of distance is miniscue.

Now a note of caution - this is theory *as far as we can measure* - when you get to very large or tiny scales our ability to measure vanishes and we just assume the same physical laws apply.

Just as Einstein showed Newton doesn't apply in the extreme - all this may not apply in the extreme but so far as far as we can measure it does.

There is a major complication to this called quantum delocalisation whereby quantum effects on states that are related change immediately - not at the speed of light but immediately - but that's probably beyond what I can sensibly try to explain in an answerbank box

[jake-the-peg]

The blackboard maths was silly and just confused everybody and Johnathon Ross really acted up to it - in reality it's very easy

It's called standard form and it's the way you deal with big numbers

10³ is 1000 right?

so 6x10³ = 6000 that's just how we display big numbers

2x10² = 200 yes?

so say we want to divide 6x10³ by 2x10²

First you divide the 6 by the 2 to get 3

Now you divide 10³ by 10²
(all you have to do here is subtract 2 from 3 to get 1) = 10
( which is ten to the power 1)

so the answer is 3x10 or 30

It's actually in GCSE maths


Quite disappointing that it was handled so badly by people playing up for comic effect

so

[jake-the-peg]

delocalisation is indeed a symptom of delocalisation.

In case anybody's still interested this came about due to Einstein's inability to accept quantum theory - he and a couple of others came up with a thought experiment callerd the EPR expeiment.

In this two particles are emitted from an atom by a decay guaranteeing that they both have equal momentum - you measure the speed of one very accurately and the position of the other very accurately infering that you can know the momentum and position of both breaking Heisenberg's uncertainty principal.

The measurement of one would cause the othe two change state - if you did this when they were far enough apart that would mean communication between the two faster than the speed of light

It pits Relativity against Quantum Theory

In 1980 Alain Aspect at the University of Paris found a way to do this with light.

Einstein lost