>> Kim Ricketts: My name is Kim Ricketts, and I'm here to introduce and
welcome James Kakalios, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research
visitor research series. James is here today to discuss his new book, The
Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics.
Science has met more demands of science fiction than most people realize,
thanks to quantum mechanics. Though we don't see the world of the Jetsons
with flying cars, people getting to work by jet pack or Star Trek's teleporters, yet,
we do have smart phones, pocket-size computers and hybrid vehicles.
Because of quantum mechanics, we may also see many more science fiction
technologies become a reality.
James is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of
Minnesota. He served as a consultant for the film Watchmen and won a regional
Emmy Award for his role in the Science of Watchmen. He is the author of the
critically acclaimed The Physics of Superheroes. So please join me in
welcoming James Kakalios to Microsoft.
[applause].
>> James Kakalios: Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction.
Thank you all very much for inviting me and welcoming me. I must say the
working title of my new book originally was the World Of Tomorrow and so it's
kind of a pleasure to come here, see the guys responsible for that.
Actually Microsoft seems to be following me. Two weeks ago I was in New York
for some media events and walking around Times Square at night seeing these
huge throngs of people lined up. And what impose are concert are they going
to? No, they're waiting for the Connect to go on sale at midnight. So I assume
that you just like give one out to the speakers, but [laughter].
So I want to talk about the The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, my new
book. First let me give you a little bit of background. How did a mild-mannered
physics professor get associated with comic book superheroes, Spider-Man,
Superman in my day job I'm a condensed matter experimentalist though I do
basically solid state physics. I've been doing this for over 20 years. Doing
research on amorphous semiconductors, you know, this is amorphous silicon
used in solar cells or flat panel displays. Done film transistors. I've done a lot of
work on studying electronic noise in these materials. For about ten years I
studied sand piles. Sand was quite hot in physics there for a while. We call it
granular media when we talk to the funding agencies. [laughter].
And most recently collaborating with professors in neurosciences using
techniques that developed a semielectronic noise into sorted semiconductors
and applying them to voltage fluctuations in the brain.
But that's not why I'm here. I'm here because back in 2001 I created a freshman
seminar class at that time University of Minnesota called everything I know about
science I learned from reading comic books. Which my colleagues said
explained a lot. [laughter].
This is a really physics class that covers everything from Isaac Newton to the
transistor, but there's not an incline plane or pulley in sight. All the examples
come from superhero comic books and as much as possible those cases where
the superheroes get their physics right.
Now, obviously, you know, the super powers themselves are impossible, but
once you grant a one time miracle exemption from the laws of nature, what
they're showing doing with their powers is scientifically correct.
I showed this cover here because this is actually a comic that I bought as a kid,
even though I wasn't a big fan of Superman at the time because Superman is
here visiting a college campus and I was just fascinated to find out what life in
college was going to be like.
Even as a kid, back in the '60s I knew that this part wasn't too accurate. But
there are things here on the cover that, you know, as you all know turn out to be
correct, namely all professors at all times always wear caps and gowns.
[laughter]. And all professors are 800 year old white men.
But from this class then in May of 2002, I wrote an op ed that was published in
the Minneapolis Star Tribune pointing out how a key scene in a classic
Spider-Man comic book turns out to be a textbook illustration of Newton's laws of
motion. I thought, well, the Spider-Man movie is about to open, the first one.
And so this might be a good opportunity to get some science into the newspaper.
The University of Minnesota put out a little press release saying, well,
Spider-Man's on the big screen but if you want to know about the science of
superheroes, the person to ask is Jim Kakalios, he teaches this freshman
seminar, blah, blah, blah.
I should point out that they've sent out press releases about me before, about my
work on amorphous semi-conductors or one over F noise. Result? Zero. You
write one story about Spider-Man, however, and the movie opened on Friday, the
on end appeared on Friday. By money was getting calls from the BBC, the
London times, CNN Headline News, the Associated Press came to my office
where I just happened to have these lecture demonstration tools on hand.
[laughter]. That was a lucky break.
At this stage of my life, I've reconciled myself to the fact that I can win three
mobile prizes and I know what photo they're using in my obituary. My colleagues
say win three mobile prices like how, on eBay?
This article actually went across the nation. This is a clipping from the Chicago
Sun Times. It actually went around the world. I think I know what they're saying
about me here. In a Turkish clipping. And then I started showing up in places
that physicists don't usually appear.
So if you're ever playing Trivial Pursuit and you're playing volume six and you get
card 291, I'll tell you right the science question, the answer is Krypton's. The
question is what planet's gravity did science professor Jim Kakalios estimate by
calculating the force needed to leap over an earth building in a single bound?
Now, I didn't even know about this. One of the graduate students came to me
one day and showed me this card, brought this to my attention. I borrowed the
card, brought it downstairs, showed it to my department chairman. And I said,
Alan, who is the most famous scientist you know? [laughter]. And he looked at
the card and he looked at me and he said Steven Hawking. [laughter]. Who is
not a genius. Oh, well then it's you.
And so in 2005, one of the nice things about all this attention was the receiving
hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from students and teachers and people long
out of college who liked this idea of teaching science using comic books, asking if
I had a book, which eventually led to my writing a book, which is now out in a
second edition. And that has led me to the current talk and the current book
talking about the The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics that I want to talk
about today.
Because there is also a comic book connection to this. You know, reading comic
books, they all predicted what life was going to be like in the future. Here's -here's an old adventure comics where Superboy visits -- goes 1,000 years in the
future and meets these other super power teenagers, the legion of superheroes.
And this was a very popular feature and he constantly by being able to break the
time barrier would go a thousand years into the future and have adventures with
the legion of superheroes.
And in the future it was promised that we would be in a better place. And the
reason we would be in a better place is thanks to science. In a thousand years
from now, if you got in trouble, you wouldn't call for the police, you called for the
science police.
Here in another comic, one of the legionaires is falsely accused of betraying the
legion and so they lock him up. And he's got this computerized device that
provides the three necessities of life, food, water, books. [laughter].
But really, this goes back even further. Here's from 1928, if first appearance of
Buck Rogers in the science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. And they
promised us that in the future we'd have jet packs, flying cars, robot domestic
assistants, underwater cities. What we got instead why cell phones, laptop
computers, DVDs, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So some guys are reluctant to
give up on the jet pack. [laughter].
But we do have jet packs. And you can take a jet pack to work provided you live
just a couple of blocks from where you work. Because the problem is it -- they -the writers of the science fiction pulps and kind of books thought that we would
have a revolution in energy, which is necessary in order to have like flying cars
and death rays when what we got instead was a revolution in information.
And energy you're pretty much limited to the chemical bonding strengths
between atoms and molecules. And, you know, for the physicists it's on the
order of a few electron volts. That's the energy scale, visible like red light has an
energy of about a little under two electronic volts. So that gives you the sense of
the energy.
What you -- very few people in order to have enough energy to take an extended
trip or to levitate a car, you'd need like nuclear power which produces millions of
electron volts per reactive. And but few people are willing to have an unlicensed
nuclear power pack on their backs unless you're a member of the Ghost Busters.
But there was still -- it was promised that we might have, you know, nuclear
power in our day-to-day lives thought back in the '50s. This is the 1957 Ford
Nucleon, the prototype of a nuclear car. I like -- they never built it, but it would
have a little nuclear -- fission reactor with little mini cooling tower here with tail
fins longer than the car even. And the idea is that you could go 5,000 miles
before you would have to swap out the nuclear core. What you do in the case of
a fender bender was never really talked about.
But there's actually an interesting convergence between the science fiction future
and the real future that we had. Hugo Gernsback first publishes Amazing
Stories, the first pulp magazine devoted to science fiction in April 1926. Also
publishing in 1926, Erwin Schrodinger, publishing his -- the Schrodinger
equation, which would serve as the foundation for modern quantum theory.
Schrodinger and a handful of other scientists developed quantum mechanics
because they're trying to understand how atoms interact with light. A generation
later, groups of scientists at Bell Labs, other research laboratories developed the
laser and the transistor. You don't accidentally discover a laser, okay, you have
to go into the lab and willfully, with malice aforethought go in and build such a
device.
And you can't do it without an understanding of how atoms and light interact
provided by quantum mechanics. A generation later you get CD players,
personal computers, laptops, cell phones, everything my teenage children would
say without which life is not worth living. None of these are possible without the
transistor and or the laser, neither of which are possible without quantum
mechanics.
This is pure -- nowadays, we would say that this is curiosity based research.
Schrodinger is just trying to understand how the world works. Schrodinger,
Heisenberg, Pauli, Born. If you went to him and said, nice equation, Erwin,
what's it good for, he's not going to say well if you want to store music in a
compact digital format, but really without the insights provided by a handful of
people, the world we live in would be profoundly different.
For example, you know, we'd still have computers, but they would use vacuum
tubes. So to have a computer that has the same power as a laptop, it would
have to have -- be about the size of the room. So there would be very few of
them. Only corporations and the government would own them. There would be
very little reason to link them together in an Internet. There would be no World
Wide Web. So there's all sorts of things that the world has changed that we don't
really think of.
I think I once figured out that in an average hospital there's probably more
transistors than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So we don't notice how
often this comes about. So this all came about thanks to semiconductor and
solid-state physics which was enabled due to quantum mechanics.
How many people don't know quantum mechanics here? Great. That will
change by the end of the talk. I have like about 40 minutes to teach you all
quantum mechanics which leaves me with a problem. What am I going to do
with the other 35? [laughter].
It has a reputation for being weird and incomprehensible. The ideas are certainly
weird, but they're no weirder than saying that we live in a sea of invisible
electromagnetic waves, only a small slice we can actually detect. We never think
about that unless you can't get five bars or your phone or your laptop. Then you
notice that the sea is missing.
So let's -- let me boil it down to understand how quantum mechanics leads to
something like a laser. Let me boil it down to three things like in the comic book,
three suspensions of disbelief, three things that you would have to buy into.
That light has both a wave and particle like property associated with the term
photons, matter has both particle and wavelength properties, and of everything,
light and matter has an intrinsic spin. These are -- this is all -- if you buy that,
that's -- this is not, this has nothing to do with, you know, wave indeterminacy or
the measurement problem or Schrodinger's cat. This is -- I'm taking what I
describe a working man's view of quantum mechanics. This is the stuff that we
experimentalists make use of when designing semiconductor devices.
So let's look at the first principle. Light has both a wave and particle like
property, photon. A manifestation of that is that when you shine light on a metal,
if light was just a continuous series of waves like washing up on a beach, the
waves might eventually push some pebbles up the slope of the beach. But really
what the light is composed of is a series of -- is a machine gun bullet spray. And
by changing the frequency of the light, is the waves would just -- the frequency
would just be the spacing between the crests, and that would just determine the
rate at which the pebbles are advanced.
But the frequency actually controls the energy of the bullets and so by increasing
the frequency we can have bullets that can promote the electrons out of the
material. This is called the photoelectric effect. There are of course practical
applications to this that we all know, right, that you can get [laughter] photon in
this way.
Matter has both partially and wave like properties. One of the most striking
examples of this is interference. That's the hallmark of wave phenomena. You
have a wave striking a surface and it gets reflected. But maybe part of it passes
through and reflects off the bottom and if these two waves are in phase they
would add up coherently, we would get a very strong signal. But if they come in
out of phase here, then they would add up destructively and cancel out.
And so when you look at an oil slick on a wet driveway, the oil slick floats on the
water and create a free floating -- freestanding film. And if it's not too thick, some
of the light can be reflected from the top or passed through and come out
because the oil slick is not a uniform thickness. Some regions might have a
thickness such that some colors add up coherently. We'll see the red light out of
the white light that's striking the surface whereas the other wavelengths interfere
destructively and cancel and then we might get a blue light over here and so on.
And this interference pattern is a hallmark of the wave phenomena.
If I pass a laser light through a screen, I can get an interference pattern. By
choosing the grid of the screen, I can get this nice circular with dot pattern. But if
I send electrons on a crystal, electrons have a wavelike nature that's associated
with their momentum. We don't notice our wavelike aspect because we're made
of lots of atoms. So we have even moving very slowly, we have an enormous
momentum compared to an electron.
The bigger the momentum, the smaller the wavelength. If I walk across the
room, the momentum of my matter wave is a trillionth, trillionth smaller than the
nucleus of an atom. It's impossible to detect. There's no way to see such a
thing.
For electron inside an atom, its wavelength is about the size of the atom. It's
impossible to ignore. And that's why this wavelike nature only became evident
when studying the properties of atoms in detail. Back in the 1920s. You send -you choose the momentum of the electrons correctly and they scatter off the
atoms in a crystal and well, if the room were darker you could actually see this a
little bit better, but you see the same type of ring pattern with the spots that I saw
-- this is for laser light, and these are for electrons. So you have the same
interference pattern for matter or light.
And then the last part is that everything light and matter has an intrinsic spin. Of
course those who look at the old -- those old pulp magazines know that every
month had an application of spin. But I'm actually more talking about the spin
say like of a twirling ballerina. Even that is a bit of a misnomer. It's not as if the
electron were actually rotating like a top but this is still the phrase that's used.
This rotation is also associated with a magnetic field that has both the North and
South Pole, and we know the North and South Pole the magnetic fields flow out
of the north into the south. And so that means that electrons can have magnetic
fields that can point in two directions. It can either have a North Pole down here
or it can have a North Pole here. Because the charge of the electron is negative,
the magnetic field lines are drawn in the opposite direction. That's a technicality
that we don't have to worry about. But there's basically two ways to -- every
electron in addition to having a mass and electric charge has a little built-in
magnetic field, and that magnetic field can point up or it can point down. And
that's all we need. Right? So that took about five minutes.
Okay. So now you're all masters of quantum mechanics. So now we can -- oh,
that magnetism is also very important, at least a lot of practical applications. We
know from Dick Tracy comic strips it will give us flying garbage cans. And I love
this note, the nation that controls magnetism will control the universe.
But this internal magnetic field that electrons, protons, neutrons have actually
enables us to -- we can do things like we can store information on hard drives
this way. In the movies, Ray Milland had to take a serum in order to -- as a
doctor, in order to diagnose people and see inside their body. Now we have
Magnetic Resonance Imaging. And that's made possible by making use of this
internal magnetic field that the nuclei of all atoms have. And so it is impossible
without quantum mechanics. If you saw this in a 1930's movie, you'd say no
way. Did someone just go into this cylinder and the doctor sees inside them and
can diagnose what's, you know -- what has a tumor and what isn't? Right. And
now it's a standard diagnostic tool.
Oh, one of my colleagues at -- professor Bruce Hammer at the University of
Minnesota as a favor used his MRI and did a scan ever -- does anyone recognize
what these are? Huh?
>>: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?
>> James Kakalios: Yup. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
>>: [inaudible]. [laughter].
>> James Kakalios: The surprise inside. [laughter] yeah. Yeah. You could just
foolishly bite into it, but thanks to science, we can verify.
So how do we combine these three principles to explain how atoms interact with
slight? Let's use that first make use of the second principal that matter has both
particle and wavelike nature. For the electrons inside the atom that puts
constraints on the possible waves that can exist. We're used to their being
constraints on possible waves. Think about a guitar string. It's clamped at both
ends. So if I pluck it, it can vibrate and I might get this type of a wave that could
be created. But I could not get this wave because it's not clamped at the end
down here. It would be moving.
So this is not allowed, but this is an allowed wave. If I have an electron that goes
around in a circular orbit around a nucleus, this constraint means that there are
certain waves that fit exactly in and create nice standing wave patterns and -- but
there might be other waves that don't. And they're not -- they can't exist because
it doesn't make any sense to talk about a wave that doesn't join up smoothly.
But singles I said that the wavelength is associated with the momentum, then the
momentum is associated with the energy, it means that the electron can only
have certain energy values inside the atom. And so when you look and then you
ask what does that do in terms of how the atom then interacts with light, now we
make use of the fact that the energy of the lightly comes in discrete packets of
energy and photons so when the atom, when the electron and the atom moves
from one orbit to another, it emits a photon of energy that has a color
characteristic to that transition. And every atom has its own fingerprint so that
there's a series of possible wavelength that is are observed for hydrogen and a
different series for sodium. This also explains why sodium street lamps have a
yellow tinge.
Helium looks a lot like hydrogen, but there's a line that hydrogen doesn't have.
Helium was actually discovered by looking at the spectrum of light emitted from
atoms in the sun. That's why it's called helium, after Helios, the Sun God. And
so for a long time scientists thought that maybe this is an element that only
existed in stars until it was discovered on Earth. Before it was discovered on
Earth, you know, there was no helium. People didn't know about it. So they
would just like drag the deflated balloons in the Macy's parade up Broadway.
[laughter]. It was kind of a pointless exercise, but anyway.
Neon has a bit of a red tinge. Mercury. Every element has a unique fingerprint
of different wavelengths. And this was known for at least 30 years prior to being
understood with the introduction of quantum mechanics. This was one of the
main pushes to under -- to develop quantum mechanics, to explain this and
whenever people say well, you know, some aspect of biology is too complicated
to -- you can't explain it, right. Not being able to explain something, you know, is
a feature, not a bug. It's -- it's -- if we understood everything, I'd be out of a job.
So this is -- but eventually it was understood. If you want another example of
these line spectra back in the 1950s, you take out the DC Comic Strange
Adventures where a scientist here is amazed to discover that his spectrogram
plate shows colored lines are caused by various elements, and this line reveals
the presence nearby of a radioactive metallic element hitherto undiscovered in
the entire solar system.
I love this for two reasons. One, this is, in fact, what a line spectra looks like.
This is, in fact, how you would, like the discovery of helium discover a new
element. And why doesn't anyone use hitherto anymore in everyday
conversation? And he's thinking it to himself in complete sentences. [laughter].
You could maybe say that the comic books back in the '50s were corrupting kids'
minds, right, because isn't that what literature's supposed to do? But you can't
say it wasn't improving their vocabulary.
Now, this picture of these orbits and the transitions is so appealing that it's a pity
that it's not right. This was the motivation for Schrodinger to develop the
Schrodinger equation. Because basically if the electrons were orbiting a
positively charged nucleus, they should emit energy continuously in a continuous
spectrum of light. And since light carries energy they should lose energy, slow
down, and eventually within actually a trillionth of a second, all electrons should
just spiral into the nucleus. That would be a bad thing.
So to understand why that doesn't happen, Schrodinger basically developed
what is -- it certainly doesn't look like it, but it is, in essence, force equals mass
times acceleration for electrons in atoms. It says you tell me the forces acting on
the electron, and I'll get this function here psi and if I square psi it tells me the
probability of finding the electron at some point in space and time.
And what you find is that there's actually a series of different wave probability
distributions. Each one has its own energy. And the electron can be only be in
one possible wave at a time, one different wave function at a time. But each one
has a different energy and you can then calculate things like what's the average
radius, the energy, the angle of momentum of these electrons and the calculated
values and the measured values exactly.
So basically Schrodinger says that for an electron in an atom, these different
possible wave patterns are analogous to a series of chairs in an auditorium. The
positively charged nucleus is the front of the room and there's a seat and then at
a higher energy, a little bit further back in the next row there's another seat. And
then there's another row that's got three seats. Why? Doesn't matter. Another
seat, three, one, five, three, and so on.
And the electron can only sit in the seats, can't stand between rows. And so
when you have hydrogen say it can move -- if I give it some energy, it can move
from one row to another and then emit energy as it moves down. You put in the
nature of the forces acting on the electron with the positively charged nucleus,
the proton, the force is known. It's electrostatics. And you get exact agreement
with the measured line spectrum. Okay?
So we understand hydrogen. Now I need my third principle in order to
understand something a lot more complicated like two electrons. What happens
if I have two electrons? Then I make use of the fact that everything light and
matter has an intrinsic spin. If the electrons have an intrinsic spin, how does that
influence when the two electrons are so close that their waves overlap, like in say
helium?
Well, the Pauli Exclusion Principle states that if two electrons are in the same
quantum state they have to have opposite spins. Basically the magnetic fields
have to be opposite. That's the lowest energy configuration. Not even the lowest
energy. That's the only allowed configuration. Anything else cannot happen.
Well, anything else the Schrodinger equation says the probability is zero. Not
small, but zero. And if the probability of something happening is zero, it never
happens. It's forbidden. So I have hydrogen and I want to add another electron
to helium, and it can sit in the front -- these seats it turns out are actually love
seats. Okay. And actually like the old curvy kind, so they fit facing away from
each other.
But now if I have something more complicated like three electrons and Lithium,
it's got to go sit in another seat because this can either be spin up or spin down,
but I -- then it would be the same as this one here and that the probability is zero.
Carbon has six, aluminum has 13. And so now we start to see why chemistry.
These arrangement of the rows come out of the Schrodinger equation, which the
force acting on the electrons, electrostatics. It tells me the arrangement of the
seats. If I change this positive charge, the spacing between those will change
slightly, which is why each atom has its own unique spectrum of light that's given
off.
And then we can understand why some atoms interact chemically with other
atoms. We can go back to carbon. And these two electrons and these two
electrons frequently can remix. And then if I have one of these electrons and one
carbon atom and another electron with another carbon atom, they can actually
form their own little love seat in a chemical bond. And we have here if they form
four chemical bonds in the same direction, we have diamond.
I can make use of quantum mechanics also I just want to show this. I can make
use of quantum mechanics to actually see where the carbon atoms are by
bringing a metal tint very close to an atom and when it's very near some of the
electrons can actually have a probability of being in the tip and being recorded as
a current. And when there's no atom, there's no electron, so there's no current.
So I can use this to image where the atoms are.
So this is carbon again, only the stronger form of carbon. This is graphite. If you
had it one atom thick, you would have a Nobel Prize, and you would have
graphene. And graphene is extremely strong. Actually the bonds in graphite in
the plane are stronger than diamond bonds.
Between the plane, they're extremely weak, which is why you can use it for a
pencil. You can just push the pencil and you unroll the graphite layer by layer. It
is held on to the paper by electrostatics which is why you can erase it easily.
But you could take graph -- you could take graphene, roll it up into a carbon
nanotube. If you had enough of these tubes that you could braid them together
into a little fiber then if the fiber is no larger the diameter than the period at the
end of a sentence, it could still hold up two SUVs.
So if you could make mass produce this in large quantities, that's your cable for
your space elevator right there. I gave you that idea free. [laughter]. Nobel
Prize.
Here's a better image that shows this nice hexagonal pattern of the carbon atoms
here. Of course we'd like to eventually get something a little bit larger than a
single electron to go through a barrier, even if the barrier's just the vacuum of
empty space. Of course if we ever get something larger than electrons, we know
that comic books will have been there first. Here's a nice example from the 2000
movie X-Men. Not this one. That one. Oh, and they put it into mute. That's too
bad. Oh, well. That's a pity.
Here's Kitty Pride who can adjust her quantum mechanical tunnelling probability
at will. And I swear to God if you go back and watch that scene at the very end
he holds up the textbook and says physics. [laughter].
Getting back to physics, let's look at comparing either, you know, carbon or
aluminum, and let's look at those last rows. And whether the last rows are
completely filled with electrons or have the seats have only one electron in them.
I bring a trillion trillion atoms together and I form a solid. And they're all
chemically bonded to each other, because otherwise it's a gas. So they all are
forming chemical bonds. And the question is do all those seats that then
broaden into an auditorium, is every seat in the auditorium occupied? Or is it like
aluminum, where only -- there's still a lot of empty spaces? So every seat -- so
every seat in the auditorium, only half of them are occupied. This is what I'd call
a metal. And this is what I'd call an insulator. Because if I applied an electric
field, here the electrons want to move, they want to gain energy. They get
accelerated by the electric field. And there's a space for them to go. There's a
high energy space.
I shine light, the electron can go up here and then it drops down, or it can go up
to here and drop down. Doesn't matter what -- what color light I shine, I get the
same light back. Metals are shiny for that reason they're good conductors of
electricity and heat.
An insulator, remember there was lots of other rows that just didn't have
electrons in them. The next row up brought us into a balcony that's ordinarily
empty. I have to provide energy to push an electron up here. Now it can carry
electricity. Remember you can only absorb light if there's a place for you to go.
So that's why I can look through a window because the gap between the last
filled state and the first empty state is in the ultra via lot. So the visible light
passes right through. So we understand why we can see through things.
You add magnesium or chromium and you can stain the glass because you put a
little seat right in the middle that some light can be absorbed by. So we
understand materials, thanks to quantum mechanics. So here again is showing
that if I actually promote an electron up into the balcony I leave an empty seat
behind and these empty seats can also carry electricity. Because then if an
electron hops into the empty seat, I can think of it as the empty seat moving
around. So I can conduct electricity two ways here.
So in the next 10 minutes I'll tell you about how lasers work and how that leads to
CDs and Blu-Rays.
So armed with this understanding scientists working very hard in the late '50s,
early '60s, developed the laser. As soon as it was developed, they held press
conferences. First question, is this a death ray? [laughter]. This is serious. Bell
Labs press department would brief the scientists don't say death ray, don't
mention death ray, right. Good luck with that.
First thing in the papers, scientists invent death ray. This is not a death ray. This
is a death ray. [laughter]. This is an interesting showing how science goes over
to pulp culture. This is Ted Maiman, and this is the first laser that he conducted
in 1960.
Four years later there's a practical application of lasers in Goldfinger, right? '64.
The first laser is built in 1960. That shows you how primed everyone was to
believe that it was a death ray that it shows up instantly in bisecting 007.
Obviously I just -- I just learned this a couple of months ago. This obviously was
just like, you know, colored in on the film. But remember in the scene the metal
thing is melting. Apparently there was a guy underneath it with a blow torch that
was [laughter] blooming up there. I assume they had like this little with masking
tape this X that said don't go past here. [laughter]. Oh, you want to renegotiate
your contract, Mr. Bond.
Again, I want to point out. This is going back to the old presuperhero comic
books. You know, I know there's competition between different research labs.
There certainly was back in the late '50s. Here's Charles Townes and Maiman at
Hughes Research Lab. There was a big race and a big competition to discover
the laser, to build the first laser.
But, you know, comic books show that sometimes this competition can be quite
nasty. In particular if you're looking at Tales of Suspense number 22, it tells
about this giant monster Bruttu who actually was a mutated transformed young
scientist. He was smaller and skinnier than all the other fellows. And here in
college he's being picked on by bigger fellows.
But, you know, he studies, he works hard and he eventually becomes a scientist
in a research lab. You think his life is any better? Here he is. But even when I
was a scientist working in a laboratory my skinny frame provided others with
amusement. Howard ought to work on vitamin pills. He might discover one that
will help him grow into a man. [laughter].
Careful, he's liable to hear you. Then he'll start another fight and you'll have to
beat him up again. [laughter]. So I don't know what goes on here in Microsoft
[laughter] but things used to be pretty tough.
These -- this Bruttu, this was out of Marvel Comics before they started publishing
Fantastic 4 and Spider-Man. And they put out a series of comic books that every
month Earth was being attacked by some giant monster from another planet,
another dimension, lost in time. You have Journey Into Mystery. And always
first person, I battled Rorgg, king of the spider monsters.
Here, Tales to Astonish, I challenged Groot, the monster from planet X. And in
all of these stories [laughter] the location law enforcement was useful, the military
couldn't stop them. Earth was traditionally saved only by the efforts of a lone
scientist. And we see at the ends of the Groot story in particular, here we have
the sheriff and he's chagrined. Well, I'll be. I never even thought of that. That's
why Evans is a scientist and you're only a sheriff. [laughter]. And I love this
here. His wife embraces him. Oh, darling, forgive me. I've been such a fool. I'll
never complain about you again. Never. [laughter].
Personally I can't item you how many times I've heard that [laughter] from my
own wife. Primarily because it involves imaginary numbers.
But it's a good thing that scientists were on the case. Because it wasn't just
Rorgg and Groot. Every month brought a challenge, whether it was Lo-Karr,
Orrgo, Moomba, Rommbu, Gruto, Grogg, Googam, son of Goom and Fin Fang
Foom [laughter], and the scariest monster of all, the Tax Collector from Outer
Space. [laughter].
But back to the laser. We have -- we take a material that ordinarily would be an
insulator. It has a filled orchestra and a completely empty balcony. And we're
going to add a row of seats, either by adding a chemical impurity such as some
phosphorus atom or because it's natural in the spectrum of the helium or neon
atoms. We add a row of seats right below the balcony, a mezzanine.
And then we're going to fill that mezzanine up with electrons, but of course the
electrons can only come from the orchestra. That's the only place that I can
bring them. So if I shine light on the material -- now, the mezzanine, the trick is
it's hard to fill -- put electrons here, but then it means that it's hard for them to
drop back down, so it's hard to get in, but hard to get out. So I've -- most of the
light gets associated up to the balcony. Some of them fall down into the
mezzanine where they stay for a while. And then even once you've turned the
light off, there's still these electrons in the mezzanine, and eventually they fall
down into the open seats in the orchestra, they emit light when they do, and you
know what I've described here, a glow in the dark toy. [laughter]. Which I'm sure
there was a point in your life where this was the greatest technological
achievement in the universe.
Or you can have -- so there's basically only two ways the electrons can fall down
from the mezzanine to the orchestra. They can fall on their own one at a time,
like a glow in the dark toy, or they can be pushed, like a laser. And a laser the -one photon in stimulates the emission of many photons, and it basically causes
one to fall which then triggers the next one and they all start falling and it goes at
the speed of light so you don't see any time delay. They all come down at the
same time. They all emit light at exactly the same energy so it all has the same
color. They all do it at the same time so they're all coherent. All the waves add
up coherently. You arrange it so that they all go in one direction. And you get a
laser.
Here we see from a page from Dr. Solar, man of the atom. Light amplification of
the stimulated emission of radiation, or a laser. Birth of a death ray. [laughter].
But really one of the most practical applications is in storing information on these
small little shiny disks. They're actually quite compact.
On the disk are a series of scratches or pits. And this is how the ones and zeros
are encoded. Now, this is an oversimplification of what goes on inside the CD
but it has -- it has the basic element of it. When a laser bounces off one of the
shiny parts, it's deflected to a sensor and that can be interpreted defined as a
zero. But if it strikes one of the edges of the pits it's deflected away, and that's
recorded as a zero -- a one. Excuse me. So you can encode ones and zeros
from the spacing of the pits.
By changing the color of the light you can change the wave length. But in the
1980s you could only mass produce efficiently infrared lasers, solid state infrared
lasers. The wavelength is quite large, so the size of the pits has to be big. And
the size of the disk was chosen back in the '80s to be large enough to encode the
information for Beethoven's 9th Symphony. That was what the engineers set up
so that you could do it all on one disk.
You could encode the information for movies -- for images and sound. But then
you needed a bigger disk. And so you had these laser disks, these 12 inch disks
back in the '80s.
But by the '90s red light lasers were a -- the materials issues. I mean, the
physics was known, it's a question of just the technology, which is non trivial of
course. Have a smaller wavelength. So now you can have the pit smaller that
you can pack them closer together. So now you can have both images and
sound.
And now we have blue light lasers, which is what the blu in Blu-Ray stands for.
And so we can have both -- we can have high def. And so we can replace 10 of
these with one of these thanks to quantum mechanics.
So I leave you with this challenge because another aspect that we were
promised aside from the Dick Tracy comic strips aside from flying garbage cans
was the two-way wrist TV. Tracy actually was also in the vanguard of
technology. In 1944, the 2-way wrist radio was introduced. And actually if you
pop the top on this, you find a series of tiny tubes. Which is kind of fair because
the transistor wasn't invented until '47. You can't blame Chester Gould for not
anticipating that you wouldn't need vacuum tubes, just really tiny ones.
And then by 1964, the two-way wrist TV. And this is a bit of a challenge for you
guys here, right? He's got the wrist TV and he also shows all the schematics.
Here's some of the features of it. The range has not yet been established but we
believe it to be nearly limitless. [laughter]. He's also managed the battery
problem. Because it uses a powerful atomic bullet to feed the power.
I don't know about the side effects. I do know that when you first put this on, this
guy had no hair on his wrist. [laughter]. But this has been -- '64. 1964, where's
the two-way wrist TV? Okay. But in December of 2008 there was good news.
There was announcement that LG was bringing out the Dick Tracy watch, an
LCD screen, four lines of data here, right? So finally we have beaten Dick Tracy.
1986, right? Oh, well. With the liquid crystal display, the conclusion it's Dick
Tracy's world, we're just living in it. Remember, the nation that controls
magnetism will control the universe. [laughter].
Thank you very much.
[applause].
>> James Kakalios: I just want to point out that both Physics of Superheroes
and Amazing Stories are available for sale, and they have them in the back.
That's why I have one last slide. Please concentrate on this message from the
Ringmaster of the Circus of Crime. [laughter]. Thank you all very much.
[applause].
>> James Kakalios: And I'll be happy to take any questions. Yes, sir?
>>: You mentioned that the electrons perform at this [inaudible] but you didn't
say why.
>> James Kakalios: Right. Because it's not actually strictly speaking true to
describe it as an orbit. The solar system picture of a nucleus that's like the sun
and the electrons like the planets is actually not correct. It's a useful image to
hold in your head. But really what happens is all you can actually say is that
there's a probability of finding the electron in some wave pattern. And there's a
characteristic energy associated with it. And if you give the electron energy and
if it's and loud transition it can go into another wave pattern that has a different
energy. And when it goes from one wave pattern down to another wave pattern,
it can emit energy in the form of a photon.
But at no point do we actually know where the electron -- quantum mechanics
gives -- the thing is it's like a perfect theory, physics theory because it gives
accurate correct predictions for anything we can measure and for anything that
we can't measure it gifts nonsense. It says -- it's like but I want to know where
the electron is really. But you can't measure where it is really, so the answer is
shut up. [laughter]. No. Because if I wanted to measure where it is really, how
would I do that? Right? I want to see where you guys are really. I will find this
out by shining light off of you. It will reflect from your body. I will see it in my eye,
and I will see where you are. But I need to have the wavelength of the light has
to be smaller than you are. Okay. That's not a problem. But to get the
wavelength of the light smaller than an electron inside the atom means that I
need very small wavelengths, which means very high energies. Remember the
photons that's now coming in with a very high energy electron and it scatters the
electron. I could tell you where the electron used to be. But not where it is.
And that's the whole notion of the role of the observer. Right? Say you have a
vibrating string and I can't hear it but I've got my dare-devil on, I've got super
sensitive touch. So I can -- if you turn the string, I can tell you exactly the
frequency vibration. But of course now I've touched the string. I've changed the
vibration. So I can bring myself closer and closer and I can feel the air vibrating
and I can get a determination of the frequency but of course the wave is now
bouncing off my fingertips and is interfering with the string, so the more accurate
my measurement, the more I'm disturbing the system and changing it. And so
that's the whole motion of role of the observer and that type of stuff that enters
into it. But at the end of the day, we actually don't -- for most device work we
don't have to worry about that.
Yes, sir?
>>: So Feynmen had tried to introduce quantum mechanics over physics for
freshmen back in '59 and '60 I believe it was at Cal State Poly. Are you using
any -- it didn't work out so well for him, but he did have a lot of grad students I
understand stay with the course. And I'm sure you're familiar with it. Have you
looked at that? I mean, is there a different approach that you're going at or
what?
>> James Kakalios: Well, this is -- this is -- yes. I mean, so Feynman, Feynman
did in a series of lectures that are collected in three, the Feynman lectures of
physics, he basically re-imagines physics. Feynman is a real, a true genius in -you know, in the sense like a genius like you go into a darkened room that you've
never been there and he describes where all the furniture is. You turn the light
on and it makes perfect sense what he said, but, you know, how would you know
it before the light was turned on. But Feynman knew these things.
And the way he understood physics was very insightful but not very practical if
you're learning it for the very first time. That was the problem he found. You
know, if you've already good a degree in physics, reading the Feynman lectures
is a great thing to do. Oh, I can do everything else 90 degrees rotated.
What I've done -- these are -- I've been teaching quantum mechanics to
sophomores and undergraduates for many years and a lot of these analogies like
auditoriums and stuff like that are things that I've kind of [inaudible] together over
the years. But this book is not meant as a textbook. It's meant for general
readership that would like to understand, say, how magnetic resonance imaging
works. How does a jump drive work. Because I explained how a transistor
works. And then once you have that you can explain floating gate transistors,
you can explain jump drives.
How does the television remote control work? As it is not meant for scientists
and engineers, and I take some shortcuts at some point and I have asked, you
know, little footnote saying -- telling what the correct answer is and saying if you
understood this, this book is not for you. [laughter]. It's not meant for scientists
and engineers but rather for anyone who's going to be a citizen and a voter.
Someone -- because we are all called upon more and more now to have opinions
on scientific and technological issues. Whether it's climate change or alternative
energy or nanotechnology, and so I try to couch this in comic books and signs
fiction pulps because there's a great deal of insecurity on the part of
non-scientists in their ability to understand this.
If I describe my research to one of my colleagues and I do a crummy job, they'll
say, wait, what? And they'll -- say that again? Or are you saying this? And they
will challenge me, and they will ask questions.
If I do the same crummy job explaining my work to my next door neighbor, he
thinks he doesn't understand it not because I did a bad job but because he's not
quote, quote, smart enough. And he won't ask questions. He won't interrupt.
But if you take about Spider-Man or Superman, they don't get the same shields
up. And if you could tie it into a narrative like the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend,
Gwen Stacy, and showing how the same physics that operated there works -explains how air bags can save your lives in an automobile crash by tying it into a
narrative people -- some people have a better time understanding it.
So it's not saying that the way that we traditionally teach is wrong, right, they
work for me. But, you know, there are other people who are interested in this
stuff and this provides a low barrier entry point is the idea.
>>: So [inaudible] like this for relativity. [laughter].
>> James Kakalios: I just got done with this one. Relativity. Actually there is in
the expanded second edition of the physics of superheroes there is actually a
chapter on relativity as it deals with The Flash, who obviously has the ability to
run at super speeds. So he deals with relativistic corrections all the time.
>>: [inaudible].
>>: How big is your comic book collection?
>> James Kakalios: How big is my comic book collection. Did my wife put you
up to that. [laughter] or as my wife refers to it, the fire hazard. [laughter].
>>: Investment in reading all of these comics.
>> James Kakalios: Yeah. It's a sacrifice that I've made for you guys.
[laughter]. You know, I read comic books as a kid. I gave it up in high school
upon discovering girls. A discovery I've not given enough credit for in the
scientific literature. [laughter]. That's for another time.
And then in graduate school, actually, I was waiting for the results of my
comprehensive qualifying exam and I saw a spinner rack saying hey, kids
comics, and I just picked up a handful and some were terrible and some were
really good, much better than I remembered. And I just kind of went back into
the hobby.
I have thousands. I don't think of it as a guilty pleasure because I don't believe in
guilty pleasures. Right. You like what you like. Snobbery is the public face of
insecurity. So yes?
>>: So do you ever talk about consciousness and how that ->> James Kakalios: Do I ever talk about consciousness?
>>: How that comes into, you know, physics [inaudible].
>> James Kakalios: No. The question is do I ever talk about consciousness.
And I work with -- it's part of my research I work with neuroscientists. And that's
obviously the big enchilada. Actually it's kind of interesting because one of my
colleagues said at a neuroscience conference they were discussing this and they
were unsure of where the break through would come from, whether it would be
from mathematics or physics or electrical engineering, a lot of signal processing
work is being done, chemistry. And they said one thing is for sure, whoever
figures this out, we're going to call them a neuroscientist.
He's in our tribe or she's in our tribe. Consciousness gets to my very issue of
faith. Faith, at least the way I define it, is belief in something without evidence.
Because if I could show you the evidence, if I could show you the proof, then it's
science or reason. It's not -- I don't have to believe it on faith. My faith is that
everything has a reason, that reason can discern. And I can't prove that that's
true because there's a lot of things that we don't know the reason for yet. But I
believe that they can be understood.
One of the things that I could conceive it's possible could not be understood is
consciousness because it's difficult to see say Seattle when you're standing here
in Microsoft. We're inside the consciousness so it's kind of hard for us to fully get
a handle. But I don't believe it. I believe that we will figure this out that somehow
through these electrochemical reactions we'll understand what goes on and
consciousness. I'm not a hundred percent sure that it will have anything deeper
to do with quantum mechanics than simply the fact that, you know, it involves
atoms.
So I think Penrose is barking up the wrong tree on that one. But that's me, right?
This one and then that person and then that person.
>>: So is it correct to say that you don't buy the Copenhagen explanation of
quantum mechanics?
>> James Kakalios: You know, it's kind of funny. The ->>: [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible]. [laughter].
[brief talking over].
>>: [inaudible] explain [laughter] Copenhagen [inaudible] a physicist. [laughter].
>> James Kakalios: You started it. You started it. [laughter]. No, no, please
continue. [laughter]. I'm just fascinated. [laughter].
>> James Kakalios: Hey, one thing I learned from reading comic books, you're
not scientists unless you got a pipe [laughter].
>>: Okay. So here -- so maybe this isn't a good experiment then, you know, a
layperson's understanding of what the Copenhagen explanation of quantum
mechanics. My understanding of the Copenhagen explanation of how it is that
the probabilities collapse into why you can't both determine whether the electron
is in one place or another until you make the observation, I mean, the fact that
you can demonstrate, you know, experimentally that this -- that this electron has
to have been in both places at once before you make the observation, so you
can prove that experimentally, but how do you explain it? You can't explain it.
>> James Kakalios: Okay. So here's -- here's -- let me take a stab at this,
because there have been some experiments on this recently. This gets to this
very notion of quantum entanglement that people are dealing with trying to
develop quantum computers. I said an electron condition only have spin-up or
spin-down, right? So say I bring two electrons together and I arrange it so that
the net magnetic field is zero. So one has to be spin-up and one has to be
spin-down. But they're so close together electrons are called fermions because
they obey Fermi-Dirac Statistics. But electrons all look alike, okay? That's not
the prejudice statement of an anti-fermite but it really is true that they're
indistinguishable, so it doesn't matter which one is on the left and which one is
the right. So I don't know which one is up and which one is down.
But I get them so close that they're now entangled. Now I bring along -- I stretch
my infinitely stretchy ribbon and I bring them across to two ends of the country,
and no one breathes, no one disturbs them because the stretchier it gets, the
easier it would be to break the ribbon. Once the ribbon is broken, what's done on
one end has no communication with the other.
Now, it's not the fact that once I measure and see that this one is up I instantly
know the other one's down. Because that's just logic, right? I knew that the total
had to be zero.
The thing is I pulled a fast one on you through the whole talk up or down
compared to what? We're in a room, so we think of up and down this way. But it
has a magnetic field, and it's up and down relative to the magnetic field that I put
on. If my magnetic field's pointing this way, this is going to be the up and down
direction.
If the magnetic field is pointing this way, this will be the up and down direction.
That's the information that gets transferred. Because it's not just that one is
pointing in one direction and the other is in the other, but once I do the
measurement, it then creates a direction and that information is instantly
transformed -- transferred, transferred to the other end of the ribbon because it's
basically the same wave pattern. It's just the same ribbon. So that get -- that's
the part that Einstein called the spooky action at a distance. That -- and because
it opens up the possibility of faster than light communication. Because it's the
same wave. And so what I do to one suddenly -- and that's where these
collapsing wave functions and all of the stuff comes in. The real disturbing part,
experiments seem to show that that's right.
There's this nice book out on Quantum Entanglement, Zeilinger, I'm butchering
his name. I apologize. But by the guy who actually does ->>: [inaudible] the liveness of being.
>> James Kakalios: No.
>>: [inaudible].
>> James Kakalios: Yeah. But this is a popular book on quantum entanglement
that just came out. After you buy my book, you can buy that one. [laughter].
>>: [inaudible].
>> James Kakalios: But that gets -- but that's in these issues. But it's been only
recently that we've been able to experimentally probe this. So up until then, it's
been in the realm of more philosophy. Once you start interacting with the outside
world and you jiggle, you break the ribbon, then measuring one end doesn't do
anything to the other end, that's called decoherence. That's the world that we
live in. That's why I don't believe this coherence entanglement has anything to
do with consciousness because your brain is at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The
atoms are jiggling so much that any coherent wave pattern gets destroyed.
There was a -- in the back?
>>: Sort of segue into consciousness ->> James Kakalios: Could you speak up, please?
>>: Sure. So sort of segueing the consciousness, and I don't want to get too
much philosophy, but what implications does that have on the discussion of
freewill?
>> James Kakalios: [inaudible] has a question. [laughter]. There's a lot -- I'm
just like a humble guy in a lab [laughter] making -- putting -- I'm happy if I can get
nano particles in my semiconductor because the NSF has a rule that every grant
proposal has to have nano in the title. [laughter].
>> Kim Ricketts: Two more questions.
>> James Kakalios: Sure. I can answer questions as long as people want. But
there was someone back there, and then I'll get to you. In the blue sweater. Did
you have a question?
>>: Yeah. I'm sorry. Has anybody been able to modulate anything that was
quantumly impactful to measure it?
>> James Kakalios: Yes and no. Yes. I mean, based -- yes. I'm really upset
with myself for not remembering exactly how to pronounce this guy's name.
Zeilinger, the guy who wrote this book that I just mentioned, has entangled pairs
of photons, sent them through fiberoptic cables so that they're equivalent of 17
miles apart, measured the polarization of one -- at one end and it determines the
direction of polarization of the other.
>>: [inaudible].
>> James Kakalios: Oh, no, no, no, it's absolutely. The only thing that's getting
teleported is information. That's exactly right. It's information -- but it is, it's real
information. Right? I mean in terms of that we know that it's circularly polarized
and the other is circularly polarized in the other direction. But relative to what
axis is not determined until you do the measurement and then the other one gets
instantaneously determined.
But it's real information, though. It's not just logic. It's not just saying spin up or
spin down. It's like the electrons case. It's up or down relative to what. Yes, sir?
>>: So when they did that, how did they actually change it to see the changes on
the other side?
>> James Kakalios: They prepared the states in different ways. They pass it.
They can pass it through magnetic fields that rotate the polarization. There's a
lot of clever experiments. I'm not an expert on all of that that I can tell you up off
the top of my head. But they -- there are ways of actually getting at that.
>>: Are you saying that you can flip one and the other one will flip?
>> James Kakalios: Well, not only that, but again, the point is if I -- if I measure it
and find that this electron is pointing this way because this is the magnetic field
that I put it on, then the other one is pointing in the same direction. That's not
trivial, right? Because I could have done it -- if I did it this way, then it would be
down this way.
>>: Can't do anything with the other proton ->> James Kakalios: No, they're physically, they're spatially separated.
>>: Once you've measured it, then they're not entangled anymore?
>> James Kakalios: Oh, absolutely, yes, that is correct.
>>: And change the direction of this one and know that this one is
instantaneously changed in an opposite way?
>> James Kakalios: No, no, once you've measured one, that determines what
the other one is doing. Yes. Right.
>>: [inaudible] knowledge, not information is [inaudible].
>>: Information ->> James Kakalios: No, I think it is information because I can say -- I can set a
binary code magnetic field this way is a one, magnetic field this way is a zero.
And so I could then transfer a one or a zero across the country, whether it's
faster than the speed of light or not experts disagree, but I can transfer
information one or zero -- well, yeah, you -- the process of doing that collapses
all the different -- because it has an finite possibly of which direction it points in.
As soon as I do the measurement, it's now pointing in the direction I measured.
But so is the other one, even though I -- I can come back the next day and
measure it and find that it's still pointing in that direction. That's the thing.
>>: [inaudible] I'm going to talk about graphite.
>> James Kakalios: Graphene?
>>: Yes, reading from the [inaudible] we are reading this news about [inaudible] I
think the news suggests that he was using some [inaudible] something, some
material to manipulated all this graphite with [inaudible] layer, scotch tape or
something.
>> James Kakalios: Scotch -- yes.
>>: With one layer of the atom, it's just [inaudible] does your book say anything
about that?
>> James Kakalios: It talks a little bit about graphite. I think the graphene -- I
think the graphene was a little bit of a premature Nobel Prize but this is coming
from a little bit of sour grapes [laughter]. I thought for sure this was going to be
my year. [laughter]. I gave 50 bucks to every member of the committee, a C
note to the chairman, told my wife, better go to sleep early, we're going to get
that 2 a.m. wake-up call. [laughter]. Money down the rat hole.
Anyway, the idea is that you have -- carbon wants to form four chemical bonds,
all right? In diamond it forms four equally strong chemical bonds in a tetrahedron
arrangement.
If you look at these atoms, each one the average number of neighbors closest
neighbors is three. So it's got three very strong chemical bonds. But there's a
layer above it and a layer below. Which means that it's got like enhance half a
bond above and half a bond below. So in the plane, very strong bonds. Out of
the plane, very weak bonds.
So, yes, you can peel it with scotch tape and you peel and you take the piece
that you have and then you peel it again and then you peel it again. You are
peeling the -- you are peeling the material off layer by layer when you just write
with a pencil and here you're just using scotch tape and you're just cleaving the
crystal and you keep doing this until you get lucky and you can get a layer, very
small, that's only one atom thick.
Now, that's not what's so cool about graphene. What's cool about graphene is
that those -- that -- the three electrons that are in the bond, I don't care about
them. They're bonded up. That one electron that's now not attached to anything,
all of those electrons are sitting up, standing up out of the plane like posts in a
field, and all of those can overlap. And for a very technical reason, they act -- the
electrons in this broadened out one seat band move as if they were like
relativistic massless particles. The equation that describes it is the relativistic
version of the Schrodinger equation called the Dirac equation.
And also depending on how it overlaps if you look in one direction it will look like
a metal and in another direction it looks like an insulator. It's got all sorts of cool
electronic properties that, you know, get into the weeds though. And are much
more advanced.
>>: [inaudible].
>> James Kakalios: Well, the idea is that the electron -- yes, if they move as if
they were like massless relativistic particles that they move very fast. So you'd
have very fast transistors.
Since this is so strong and 98 percent of the light passes through it, it would be
great for making an invisible force field. Because you couldn't see it. The light
would pass through it. And you go oh, there's graphene there. [laughter].
>>: So with the scotch tape you take out ->> James Kakalios: Sure. But you take -- you peel it apart. If you wrote very
lightly you might actually be able to get a little layer of graphene [laughter] with
your pencil.
>> Kim Ricketts: I'm going to let you guys all ask him questions as you get your
books signed.
[applause]