not understanding quantum mechanics

As a chemist, I have of course used quantum mechanics in various ways and learned the essential textbook equations, but like everybody else on the planet I don't really understand it. I find comfort in the wise words of Richard Feynman that went something like "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

After a few decades of not using my non-understanding of quantum mechanics on a regular basis any more, I found the book Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics by Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert a welcome refreshment of nearly lost memories.

My review of the book is now out in the February issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Quantum understanding

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 2, February 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

To sell books about quantum mechanics, you have to have Schrödinger's cat on the cover. It's the law.

quantum mechanics in the snow

some thoughts on

The Universal Theory
(Die Theorie von Allem)
Timm Kröger
Germany 2023

This film had a grand total of three screenings at Oxford's Ultimate Picture Palace, and I was lucky to catch the last one. IMDB doesn't even list a UK release for it, although the Observer had a review.

So a quantum mechanics meeting in the Swiss Alps gets derailed when the multiple universes theory gets a bit too real and weird things start to happen. I loved the black and white cinematography - films set in the 1960s should be in black and white really! - and the portrayal of the 1960s physicists, and also the underlying romance thread. Not everything made sense, but that's very fitting for a film about quantum mechanics, and I tend to like things I don't understand completely. Also, to be taken as evidence on how weird a European movie must be to have a chance of even a fleeting appearance in UK cinemas.

I am sure that people more knowledgeable in sci fi and classic American cinema will find lots of references to all sorts of things (as some reviewers have pointed out), but I'm more of a naive viewer in that respect and can enjoy the film on its own merits.

A good one to see on the big screen with the glorious Alpine views if you can, but I might also be tempted to rewatch it in a smaller format at a later point. Also, I'm a bit tempted to watch Drei Männer im Schnee to compare and contrast - also black and white Alpine scenery, I expect, but no quantum mechanics, as far as I remember from reading the book multiple times when I was growing up.

Not adding this to my films not shown list as it was obviously shown, if ever so fleetingly, but will add the tag regardless.

high capacity

When the limitations of current battery technology is discussed, super capacitors always come up as an alternative with potential. In my latest feature for Chemistry & Industry I have had a closer look at that potential and the important question whether super capacitors can also be produced super sustainably:

Super-power capacitors

Chemistry & Industry Volume 84, Issue 12 December 2020 Pages 22-26

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI - appears to be on open access right now

The same issue (page 35) also contains my review of Paul Halpern's new book, Synchronicity, which is about acausal connections in physics, especially quantum physics, represented by Wolfgang Pauli, and in psychology, represented by Pauli's therapist, a certain C. G. Jung.

access via:

Wiley Online Library

SCI (premium content)

weird science

You might say my articles about science are all weird, but now I have one that actually appeared under the title Weird science, and that's a first. It is about quantum biology, a new(ish) interdisciplinary field that looks at some of the more surprising aspects of quantum mechanics and their role in biology.

The feature appears in Chemistry & Industry Volume 80, Issue 6, pages 22–25, July 2016
free access to full text in HTML format via SCI website
abstract, first page, and restricted access to PDF files via Wiley Online Library

Oh, and it made the cover, too, see below.

(Unfortunately, the magazine has been reduced to 10 issues a year, which is why issue no. 6 is out in July. Very confusing.)

In the same issue, on page 38, you'll also find my review of Alan Heeger's memoir "Never lose your nerve!"

the unbearable lightness of party balloons

As befits the two months covering both carnival and April Fools day, the roundup of German pieces published in March/April includes an equal mix of serious and not so serious pieces. We find the unbearable lightness of party balloons, the equally unbearable inability of humans to handle antibiotics responsibly, quantum cubism, and the Microfluidic Electrochemical Detector for In vivo Continuous monitoring, or MEDIC, for short.

Aptamerensoren für kontinuierliche Bluttests
Chemie in unserer Zeit 2014,48, 88 DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201400659 [abstract and limited access to full text]

See also my story in Chemistry World on the same topic: Free Access

Ausgeforscht: Die Leichtigkeit der Partyballons
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2014, 62, 395

Ausgeforscht: Quanten-Kubismus
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2014, 62, 495

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Auf Resistenzen besser reagieren
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2014, 62, 445-447

oxidation and procrastination

Ooops, now it's March and I haven't done the roundup of the German pieces published in February yet. Time, you're moving too fast.

So in Feb, we had quantum procrastination, reduction and oxidation at the sea floor, and cycloaddition with triple bonds:

Organische Synthese: Drei mal drei
Chemie in unserer Zeit 47, 6
FREE ACCESS (PDF file)

Neuartige Redox-Biochemie im Meeresboden
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 61, 134-135

Proquastination
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 61, 111

And talking of which, a late arrival: a short piece on addiction biochemistry that is nominally in the issue for the 4th quarter of 2012 of the magazine:

Trillium Report 10, 200-201
Die Biochemie der Sucht

latest spin on interdisciplinary research

One of the things that Oxford does well is interdisciplinary research - apparently to do with all that time that dons spend in their colleges hanging out with colleagues randomly assorted from other disciplines.

One of the latest interdisciplinary research centres here is CAESR (Centre for Advanced Electron Spin Resonance spectroscpy), which covers an amazing breadth of projects from quantum computing through to biology. I have reported on the work of CAESR a couple of times, but this time round, writing a feature for Chemistry World, I was very lucky in that ESR pioneer Jack Freed from Cornell University came to visit the centre just at the right time, so I also got to interview him and hear his seminars, in addition to the interesting things I found out from the local researchers.

The resulting feature, Spinning around, appears in the May issue of Chemistry World, pp 50-53.

restricted access to full text

PS for my previous reports on ESR click here and here.

collision course

The Large Hadron Collider is up and running now, after year-long repairs, and producing actual collisions and scientific measurements. And just on time, my review of Paul Halpern's book "Collider" has appeared in this week's edition of Chemistry & Industry (issue 23, p27, restricted online access).

Here's a snippet:

What I found most exciting in this book was the story how physicists came to build bigger and bigger accelerators, ending up with the LHC. There is much to be learned about the nature of human endeavours from this side of the book alone. For example, the fate of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was to be built from scratch in a remote part of Texas, until Congress pulled the plug, contrasts with the LHC which is based on using existing CERN infrastructure and recycling as much as possible from previous instruments, and thus could be financed without much pain.

spinning around

What's the connection between bird migration, hydrogen storage materials, membrane protein structure, and quantum computation? Well, all these, and seven other topics are investigated at Oxford University with the help of Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) spectroscopy, thanks to the new(ish) interdisciplinary research centre CAESR. Read my feature in Oxford Today which should be freely accessible to all.

Also, a short piece on the bird migration research has appeared in German, in Chemie in unserer Zeit [PDF]

see how they shake

There is a very clever paper coming out in tomorrow’s issue of Science magazine using Raman [1] scattering (in which light not only changes direction but also its wavelength) to image the distribution of specific molecules such as a fatty acid, or a drug, within living cells. The beauty of it is that one can use the vibrational motion (which is quantized) of the target molecule, rather than having to add some marker or dye. With a pair of lasers and some clever pulse technology, one can detect the presence of the molecule of interest at a given time in a given location, and even quantitatively measure its concentration. And the method is sensitive enough to image physiological concentrations of metabolites in living cells.

Medical applications that Sunney Xie and coworkers have demonstrated include the monitoring of the uptake and distribution of omega-3 fatty acids in living cells, the imaging of skin and brain tissue sections, and the monitoring of drug delivery.

[1] Historical footnotes: Raman scattering was first described by Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970, Nobel prize 1930) 80 years ago, but it had to await the arrival of advanced laser technology before it could become really useful. Raman also studied the vibrations of larger units, such as musical instruments. The authors cite another historic paper that is even older than Raman’s, a 1917 publication on the phenomenon of stimulated emission, by a certain A. Einstein.

Reference: C. W. Freudiger et al., Science 2008, 322, 1857.

a new name for LHC?

The German research ministry refers to the Large Hadron Collider as Weltmaschine (world machine), but the Royal Society of Chemistry now suggested "halo", see their press release below for the runners up. Personally I can cope with LHC, though it does beg the question, voiced by a letter to the guardian, what a small hadron collider might look like.


RSC press release:

After massive, worldwide public response, with its media office deluged by thousands of entries, the RSC has chosen the winner of its competition to suggest a new, inspiring name for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Halo

Fed up with the contrived acronyms that plague the world of science, the RSC picked a suggestion which is simple, memorable, and brings to mind the deserved grandeur of perhaps the most important experiment ever built.

Halo conjures visions of radiant beauty, power and wisdom. The circle of light reflects the collider’s form; it is a crowning achievement of science and engineering. It also gives more than a nod to the experiment’s importance to religious debate.

It was by far the most popular entry, with hundreds of people suggesting the name. The winner of the competition was chosen at random from those who suggested Halo; this was Aaron Borges of Rhode Island , USA , who wins $892 (£500).

The RSC will be formally suggesting the new name to CERN and the Institute of Physics.

Some reports say that the RSC is suffering from “professional jealousy”; far from it. The RSC congratulates the physics community with nothing but admiration for their amazing project – it just has a very boring name.

Several other entries to the competition were popular. Colliderscope garnered many votes, with members of the public revelling in the pun on “kaleidoscope” – and some apparently oblivious to it.

Black Mesa, the name of an ill-fated research facility in the computer game franchise Half-life, was particularly well represented by gamers who Dugg media coverage of the competition on the social bookmarking site Digg.

Lots suggested that to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything, we should name the experiment after the computer designed to do just that in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought.

Other favourites were The Particrasher, E=M25, The Big Banger and Big Bang Two Point Oh.

max at 150

a belated happy 150th birthday to the reluctant founder of quantum mechanics, Max Planck. In fact, his name has been so ubiquitous in the 60 years since his death, that we (or I at least) used to take him for granted and never think much about him. He used to be on the 2DM coins when I grew up (and back then, 2 DM was a lot of money ! :) and there were high schools in his name all over the place, not to mention the Max Planck Society which runs prestigious research institutes, and his prominent role in physics textbooks.

However, looking up his Wikipedia entry today, I realised I knew nothing about his life (and haven't got a biography of him, either). For instance, I didn't know that one of his sons was executed in the context of the 20. July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler (of which, incidentally the "last survivor" died recently).

Anyways, here is the great man, reduced to the size of a postage stamp: