MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser, who heads KSJ’s home department (the Program in Science, Technology, and Society), is someone who appreciates the power of mass communication. Last week, essays by Kaiser turned up in both the Huffington Post and The New York Times.
The first piece, “Of Black Holes and Glittering Stars: The Theory of Everything and Hollywood Physics”, recounts Kaiser’s experiences at the recent Washington, D.C., premiere of The Theory of Everything, the new film about the early career of cosmologist Stephen Hawking. At the event, which was sponsored by the American Physical Society, Kaiser talked with English actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays Hawking in the film, and even posed with him on the red carpet.
Kaiser says he liked the film for its sensitive portrayal of the relationship between Hawking and his wife Jane (played by Felicity Jones) across the tumultous years in the early 1960s when Hawking was beginning his forays into theoretical physics, even as he began to battle amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a devastating motor neuron disease.
New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye has criticized the film for what he calls teeth-gnashing inaccuracies in its dramatization of Hawking’s first insight into the the nature of radiation leakage from black holes. To Overbye, the film’s portrayal of the moment as a classic “Eureka”-style flash of inspiration, while Hawking is staring at coals in a fireplace, discounts both the months of lonely calculations that set the ground for the discovery and the contributions of colleagues who prodded and supported Hawking through this period.
But Kaiser’s take is that the film—which closely follows Jane Hawking’s memoir Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen—accurately captures the thrill of the final, euphoric moment in a hunt for scientific truth. He’s also grateful for the increased attention Hollywood filmmakers have been paying to science as a human endeavor. He writes:
In the end, it’s not clear to me that the goal of films like The Theory of Everything is or should be didactic. In fact, the film strikes me as a beautifully crafted, feature-length example of a larger efflorescence in recent years of creative, engaging projects about science that focus more on artistic expression than on learning outcomes—emblematic, in other words, of the evolving culture of science engagement.
On that theme, see our September blog post linking to an MIT News conversation with Kaiser and MIT Museum director John Durant on their Evolving Culture of Science Engagement project.
Kaiser’s second piece, for the Times’ SundayReview section, is a look at experiments designed to eliminate uncertainties in physicists’ understanding of quantum entanglement, the strange fact that two or more particles linked by some interaction in the past can exhibit simultaneous changes in behavior, even if they’re now light years apart. The theory of quantum entanglement has been around since the 1930s, and the effect has been confirmed in numerous experiments. But Kaiser explains that pesky loopholes in the experiments have left room for alternative explanations that might validate Albert Einstein’s intuition that quantum entanglement is hogwash—he called it “spooky action at a distance.”
Now Kaiser is working with Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger, MIT physicist Alan Guth, and others to design an experiment that would eliminate one stubborn objection to entanglement: the possibility that the settings of the detectors used to observe the quantum states of supposedly entangled particles might be coordinated in some unexpected way. The plan is to choose settings for the detectors using inputs that are so ancient they couldn’t be coordinated. Kaiser explains:
In our proposed experiment, the detector setting that is selected (say, measuring a particle’s spin along this direction rather than that one) would be determined not by us—but by an observed property of some of the oldest light in the universe (say, whether light from distant quasars arrives at Earth at an even- or odd-numbered microsecond). These sources of light are so far away from us and from one another that they would not have been able to receive a single light signal from one another, or from the position of the Earth, before the moment, billions of years ago, when they emitted the light that we detect here on Earth today.
If the proposed experiment succeeds and entangled particles stay entangled the way the researchers expect, Kaiser says, “we will have constrained various alternative theories as much as physically possible in our universe.” And that could be another euphoric moment.
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