The scientist's view of the world Four hundred years ago, most men believed that they lived on a stationary earth at the center of the universe. The world beyond the solar system was a mystery: The submicro- scopic domain of atoms and molecules was a complete unknown, Even the immediate en- vironment impinging on man’s senses was largely not understood, or else misunderstood. Except for the simplest facts about the balancing of static forces, not a single law of nature governing man's own world was accurately formulated. The Copernican theory of the solar system, whieh places the sun at the center, had been published, but it had few adherents and many powerful opponents, There was no science-based technology, There was scarcely any activity that we would today call science. Mathematics was in its infancy, Now, four hundred years later—the mere blink of an eye in the lifetime of the human, race—man, surveying the panorama of nature from elementary particles to galaxies, has reason to stand in awe of his own achievements. [n terms of a remarkably few fundamental theories of nature, his understanding spans a vast scale of sizes in the universe, He sees, woven into the rich complexity of the world of his senses, simple patterns, In domains far beyond the range of his sense perceptions, he has discovered surprisingly different but equally simple patterns, As a human activity, science has become a large enterprise. The technology spawned by science touches every facet of life, Standing on the shoulders of physical science, the biological and medical sciences have grown to powerful stature, In parallel with science, mathematics has matured, In all of human history, there has been no more stunning triumph of the intellect than the creation over the past few centuries of a scientific structure encompassing a large part of the physical world. Yer the insights into the workings of nature afforded by this develop- ment are not so widely appreciated as they could be and should be. The aim af this book is to present the modern scientist's view of the physical world. Everywhere the emphasis will be on the concepts used to describe nature and the pictures of nature to which physical theo- ries have led. But pictorial description alone is not sufficient for understanding, Science is an area of human activity in which precision is vital. This is a book of science, not merely a book about science. Definitions will be exact; the essential content of most important physi- cal theories will be presented; and at key points where it is necessary, mathematics will be used. ‘Two themes run through the following chapters. The first is a theme of simplicity. The abstractions of science have led from the complexity of everyday experience to the simplic- ity of the underlying laws of nature. The second is a theme of activity, Science and our pic- ture of the physical world are creations of the human mind. Science has provided insight, Not absolute truth, The creative activity of science is continually altering as well as enlarg- ing our view of the physical world, 1.1 The faith in simplicity The commonly known and accepted miracle of science is the enormous power it has giver. le to man ta change the world around him, There is another miracle of science, less often ap- preciated, It is the miracle of the simplicity, generality, and beauty of fundamental physical4 THE SCIENTIST'S VIEW OF THE WORLO CHAPTER 1 theories, The straitjacket of experimental confirmation, far from enclosing the imagination af the scientist in a cheerless and airless roam, has spurred on his imagination, and the suc- cessful theories of physical science that have been created possess a simplicity and inner harmony as satisfying to the mind of man as any creation of the free and unfettered imagi- nation. Expressed differently, we should be grateful to nature for revealing its secrets to us in such a rewarding way. Scientists like to say that nature is simple. What they mean js that it has been found pos- sible to describe parts of nalture—the parts we understand—in a simple way, Without the underlying faith in simplicity and the rewards of success, man would lack the stamina to overcome the obstacles to understanding that line the route to the discovery of simplicity, As every student of science is well aware, the simplicity of nature is not synonymous with ease of comprehension, The theory of relativity, viewed as a formal structure, is exceed- ingly simple. But to understand it and to use it requires a heroic effort of the mind, for the concepis employed, and the ways of thinking required, are largely foreign to our everyday experience, Simplicity to the scientist means economy and compactness—of assumptions, of fundamental concepts, of mathematical equations. The fewer the basic elements of a theory and the greater the range of phenomena described by the theory, the simpler does he declare nature to be, ‘Throughout human history, the faith in simplicity has been a primary motivating force in seience. In. essence it is the faith in the possibility of science at all, that nature, or parts of nature, follow an orderly and predictable pattern governed by fixed laws, But more than a mere faith in the existence of laws of nature, the faith in simplicity adds a conviction that these laws are sufficiently simple that man dare hope to find and comprehend them. So powerful was the faith in simplicity among some Greek philosophers that simplicity itself came to be regarded as a sufficient test of the truth of a theory. Aristotle accepted circular motion as the rule in the heavens not because careful measurements showed the stars and planets to move in circles, but because the circle is the simplest (or most “harmonious” or most *perfect”) of plane figures. In describing motion on earth, he advanced a theory of ut- most economy. It required but four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and but two kinds of natural motion, vertically up and vertically down. Surely the simplicity of Aristotelian physics must have contributed to its durability, ‘The birth of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought with it no change in the ancient faith in the simplicity of nature, Rather a new element was added: the reliance on accurate observations (usually in carefully controlled experiments) to test the acceptability of a theory. The pyramiding successes of science in the past few centuries have richly rewarded the scientist's faith in simplicity coupled with his insistence on experi- mental confirmation, Because the simplicity of basic science is so little appreciated, it is proper to emphasize it, even to extol it. At the same time, we must keep in mind that, at Least in part, science is fundamentally simple because man has made it so. From science man gets simple answers because he asks easy questions, But what exactly is an easy question? Compare these two, the first scientific, the second nonscientific: 1, What is the electric dipole transition probability from the metastable 2s state in hy- drogen? 2. What are the advantages of foreign travel? ‘The average reader without scientific training will regard the first question as incom- prehensible and therefore obviously difficult, But anyone should be willing to venture an answer to the second, which appears easy enough. Upon a little reflection, of course, you should convince yourself that it is after all the first question that is easy, the second that is difficult, Assuming the first question is meaningful (it is) and that science has progressed to the point that an answer exists (it does), then the answer is just a simple number uponhich the thousands who can give an answer amical and which the millions of others as amicably accept. The second question, on the other hand, deals with what is good e are no harder questions that man has posed to himself than questions Science as creative acti ity There are two outstanding misconceptions about science, The first is that it is a cold, dull emotionless cat old facts coupled with the plodding relentless discovery and or scientific method.” The secand is devoted to the invention and development of machines and gadgets, that the loped technology of the modern world Is science. Each of these misconceptions h; but as a characterization of sc each falls very wide of the such thing as the scientific method can be discerned in the creative human activ ity that has produced most of 1 es in science. And technology is # poor substitute ¢ magnificent structure of facts and theories that are the body of sc Mode { nature—to see mt rat than just against log dering of new facts according to something called th that science Science got its start around 1600, when men began to ask answerable questions relationships rather th. abe inal causes, and to test ideas against expe cis Bacon was one of the first to see how man could and should proceed to learn about nature, Yet Bacon, and after him Descartes, went too far their specula 1 foresaw an all-embracing power ofa selentific method which could act us a kind of recipe for scientific discovery, Their vision never came to fruition, {tis true that there have been important elements of method in science—the experimental for example, and the mathematical method, Yet at the key points of important tific discoveries, chan uition, insight, and trial and errar have been mare evident any well-defined scientific method. The trouble is that if one does not know where one is going, one does there, Scientific pr to the uni no reliable recipes fe to make that adi found, Probing into the the scientist is as im know how to get ess is the ad. vance wn, and so far the best way nce have been known, 1 his own age tist facing an empty eanvas. q as is a composer before a blank ora Se like man’s other achieve ments, has emerged from the tri umph of individual genius aver human frailty; the approaches of essful scientists have varied as much as human personalities v FIGURE 1.1 The frontier of the hamber, At the point in the cha Tracks of elemen1.3 The structures of the world Much of the history of science cai away from the world of n i the hum away to the infinitesimal submicroscopic world (Figure 1.1) and th hese distant limits is a ence hat world (Figure 1.2), Between that is understood, if only imps TABLE 11 The Struct fectly. be characterized as 8 probing v Ne sense experi Id which we c ¢. The frontiers of physical se macroscopic world and mo enormous cosmologica + of the physical world FIGURE 1.2 Elementary particle Atomic nuc Atom Molecule Giant molecule Solids Liquids Gase Plants and The plan Star Galaxy Galactic cluster The known part of the universe © Longths in and 305.em i 10°? em or less 10" em 10% 107m 1o*em 10cm to 10" cm 10" cm 10% em to 10 mn 107 om 10% em 10" em eed in cer Particle physics Nuclear physics Atomic physics Chemistry Biochemistry Solid-state physics Hydrodynamics Aerody Biology Geology Astrophysics Astronomy mics CosmologySECTION 1.3 THE STRUCTURES OF THE WORLD 7 From the subatomic elementary particles up to the collection of galactic clusters which is optimistically called the universe, man is now familiar with a hierarchy of objects joined together in structures of ever increasing size. Incomplete though the picture may be, it is a grand panorama spanning a factor of 10" in dimensions. The names of some of the struc- tures and of some of the special branches of science concerned with particular levels of the hierarchy are given in Table 1.1. AS a matter of convenience when dealing with large and small numbers, scientists use what is called the exponential notation, a practice followed in Table 1.1 and in the para- graph above. (Students who already have facility with the exponential jon should the next few paragraphs.) The number one hundred, or ten times ten, is written 10°, and spoken “ten squared” or “ten to the two,” One thousand, or 1,000, or ten times ten times ten, is written 10°, One million, which may be written as a one followed by six zeros, 1,000,000, is more compactly written 10%, One billion is 10°, This is spoken “ten to the nine,” which is short for “ten raised to the ninth power,” that is, ten multiplied by itself nine times, When numbers become exceedingly large, the value of the exponential notation becomes obvi- ous. The number 10" in the paragraph above, which is the ratio of the largest distance man knows anything about to the smallest distance he has been able to study, would be written ‘But as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Even expressed in wo as one hundred thousand million million million million million million, it is unwieldy. ‘The exponential notation for small numbers follows a similar pattern. One tenth is writ- ten 10° ("ten to the minus one”), one hundredth is written 107 (“ten to the minus two"), one thousandth is 10°, one millionth is 10°, and one billionth is 10°, Note that 10°? is the same as the number one divided by 10%, 10° is 1 divided by 10% and so on. In decimal notation, 10 is 0.000001. The number of zeros to the right of the decimal point is not six: it is five. ‘The rule for transforming the exponential notation to the decimal notation is the following. ‘Start with the number one with the decimal point to the right (1), Then let the exponent be an instruction for maving the decimal point—to the right for a positive exponent, to the left for a negative exponent. Thus, for 10-', the decimal point is moved one place to the 1.to give 0.1, For 10°, itis moved six places to the left from 1, to give 0.000001, For 10°, it is moved three places to the right to give 1,000 The rule for mukiplying exponential numbers can easily be developed from 4 few ex- ‘amples. Ten times one hundred is one thousand, or 10! x 10° = 103, One hundred times one thousand is one hundred thousand, or 10° x 10° = 10°. The rule is simply this: To multiply powers of ten, add the exponents, The same rule holds for negative exponents, For exam- ple, 10° x 103 = 10°, one thousandth of one thousandth is one millionth, (The sum of -3 and -3 is -6.) For mixed positive and negative exponents, the same rule continues to hold true, Since the sum of -2 and +3 is +1, the rule gives the result 10°? x 10° = 10!, that is, one hundredth of one thousand is ten. Notice that 10" is the same as 10 itself, What then is 10°? According to the rule for shifting the decimal point away from 1, the number 10° must be ex- actly 1, There is no shift of the decimal point, The same conclusion can be reached from the rule for multiplication, For example, 107 x 107 = 10°, one hundredth of one hundred is one. Let us return now to an examination of Table 1.1, Itis worth expending some effort try- ing to visualize the scale of this physical picture of the world, Ten miles or 1,000 miles or J inches conveys to immediate sense of distance, but 10" cm, the size of a nucleus, without some thought and extrapolation and analogy, is almost meaningless. Since 10- is ‘ane millionth, 10°" is one millionth of one millionth, If we could place one million nuclei in a line, this line would be only one millionth of one cm long. If we diligently lined up nuclei, adding one nucleus each second (night and day), we would have a line of nuclei one cm long after 30,000 years. If our one-centimeter line were expanded to stretch from New York to San Francisco, how big would a nucleus become? It would be blown up to a tiny speck which would still require a microscope to see Oddly enough, the structures of the world appear to grow simpler as we depart in either8 THE SCIENTIST’S VIEW OF THE WORLD CHAPTER 1 direction from the size of man, There is no organization of constituents either in the world of the very small or in the world of the very large that begins to approach the complexity and degree of organization found in living creatures. It might be argued that there exist larger and more complicated degrees of organization in the universe which man’s limited intellect is incapable of grasping, but this is an argument outside the scope of science. So far there is no evidence for any such organization and much evidence against it, Indeed the simple theories of the submicroscopic world have succeeded in dealing with the structure of the stars and to some extent with the structure of galaxies. There have even been some hints that the properties of the universe at large may be linked intimately with the laws governing the submicroscopic world. To discover if this is (rue remains one of the most challenging problems for the future of science. 14 ~The structure of science As indicated in Table 1.1, special branches of sclence have come to be associated with par- ticular sizes and levels of arrangement of the matter in the world. But at a deeper level sci- ence has evolved in quite a different way than according to the particular object studied. ‘The structure of physics, the science of concern to us here, is built not around objects or the physical structure of the world, or even about particular phenomena in the world. The a hasic framework of physics is rather a set of general theories (a very small set, as we see), each af which describes a wide range of phenomena and of abjects. Mechanics, example, is one such general theory, accounting for the behavior of matter aver almost the whole explored range of sizes from the submicroscopic to the cosmological. Electramagne- tism is another, whose area of application extends from the emission of gamma rays by el- ementary particles up Co the transmission of starlight throughout the universe. Some of the branches of study listed in Table 1.1 are merely special areas of application of some general theory. Atomic physics, for example, is the application of the theory of quantum mechanics to the properties of atoms, Most of the special branches, however, draw upon more than ane general theory, Hydrodynamics utilizes the theories of mechanics and of thermodynamics, and astrophysics draws upon every general theory of physics in its effort to account for the world of the very large. ‘The arrangement of this book is in the main according to the broad theories that form the most natural and most beautiful structure of physical science. There will be some ex- ceptions, however, Indeed, Chapter Two on elementary particles is an exception, for in this fascinating field of modern exploration, there exist as yet no satisfactory general theories. Particles come first in our survey of physics because they are the basic building blocks of the universe, 15 Theory and experiment in science Some areas of science, especially in the fields of biology and psychology, are purely experi- mental. Facts are being gathered and knowledge increased, but there does not exist the body of ideas, concepts, and relationships that are collectively called theory to tie together the facts into a coherent whole, that is, to “explain” the facts, In other areas of science, for ex- ample mechanics, the equations of a well-tested theory have been so elaborately developed that the branch of science seems to be almost a part of pure mathematics. But every area of science, regardless of its state of mathematical development, differs in a very fundamental way from pure mathematics and from nearly every other area of human activity, Science is essentially empirical, No idea in science survives because it is esthetically pleasing, or mathematically elegant, or magnificently general, although many ideas in science are all of these things, The idea must weather the test of experiment, and not just one experiment.