For the Love of Physics (3 page)

From the Nucleus to Deep Space

I
t’s amazing, really. My mother’s father was illiterate, a custodian. Two generations later I’m a full professor at MIT. I owe a lot to the Dutch educational system. I went to graduate school at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and killed three birds with one stone.

Right from the start, I began teaching physics. To pay for school I had to take out a loan from the Dutch government, and if I taught full time, at least twenty hours a week, each year the government would forgive one-fifth of my loan. Another advantage of teaching was that I wouldn’t have to serve in the army. The military would have been the worst, an absolute
disaster
for me. I’m allergic to all forms of authority—it’s just in my personality—and I knew I would have ended up mouthing off and scrubbing floors. So I taught math and physics full time, twenty-two contact hours per week, at the Libanon Lyceum in Rotterdam, to sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds. I avoided the army, did not have to pay back my loan, and was getting my PhD, all at the same time.

I also learned to teach. For me, teaching high school students, being able to change the minds of young people in a positive way, that was thrilling. I always tried to make classes interesting but also fun for the
students, even though the school itself was quite strict. The classroom doors had transom windows at the top, and one of the headmasters would sometimes climb up on a chair and spy on teachers through the transom. Can you believe it?

I wasn’t caught up in the school culture, and being in graduate school, I was boiling over with enthusiasm. My goal was to impart that enthusiasm to my students, to help them see the beauty of the world all around them in a new way, to change them so that they would see the world of physics as beautiful, and would understand that physics is everywhere, that it permeates our lives. What counts, I found, is not what you
cover
, but what you
uncover.
Covering subjects in a class can be a boring exercise, and students feel it. Uncovering the laws of physics and making them see through the equations, on the other hand, demonstrates the process of discovery, with all its newness and excitement, and students love being part of it.

I got to do this also in a different way far outside the classroom. Every year the school sponsored a week-long vacation when a teacher would take the kids on a trip to a fairly remote and primitive campsite. My wife, Huibertha, and I did it once and loved it. We all cooked together and slept in tents. Then, since we were so far from city lights, we woke all the kids up in the middle of one night, gave them hot chocolate, and took them out to look at the stars. We identified constellations and planets and they got to see the Milky Way in its full glory.

I wasn’t studying or even teaching astrophysics—in fact, I was designing experiments to detect some of the smallest particles in the universe—but I’d always been fascinated by astronomy. The truth is that just about every physicist who walks the Earth has a love for astronomy. Many physicists I know built their own telescopes when they were in high school. My longtime friend and MIT colleague George Clark ground and polished a 6-inch mirror for a telescope when he was in high school. Why do physicists love astronomy so much? For one thing, many advances in physics—theories of orbital motion, for instance—have resulted from astronomical questions, observations, and theories. But
also, astronomy
is
physics, writ large across the night sky: eclipses, comets, shooting stars, globular clusters, neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, jets, planetary nebulae, supernovae, clusters of galaxies, black holes.

Just look up in the sky and ask yourself some obvious questions: Why is the sky blue, why are sunsets red, why are clouds white? Physics has the answers! The light of the Sun is composed of all the colors of the rainbow. But as it makes its way through the atmosphere it scatters in all directions off air molecules and very tiny dust particles (much smaller than a micron, which is 1/250,000 of an inch). This is called Rayleigh scattering. Blue light scatters the most of all colors, about five times more than red light. Thus when you look at the sky during the day in any direction
*
, blue dominates, which is why the sky is blue. If you look at the sky from the surface of the Moon (you may have seen pictures), the sky is not blue—it’s black, like our sky at night. Why? Because the Moon has no atmosphere.

Why are sunsets red? For exactly the same reason that the sky is blue. When the Sun is at the horizon, its rays have to travel through more atmosphere, and the green, blue, and violet light get scattered the most—filtered out of the light, basically. By the time the light reaches our eyes—and the clouds above us—it’s made up largely of yellow, orange, and especially red. That’s why the sky sometimes almost appears to be on fire at sunset and sunrise.

Why are clouds white? The water drops in clouds are much larger than the tiny particles that make our sky blue, and when light scatters off these much larger particles, all the colors in it scatter equally. This causes the light to stay white. But if a cloud is very thick with moisture, or if it is in the shadow of another cloud, then not much light will get through, and the cloud will turn dark.

One of the demonstrations I love to do is to create a patch of “blue sky” in my classes. I turn all the lights off and aim a very bright spotlight of white light at the ceiling of the classroom near my blackboard. The
spotlight is carefully shielded. Then I light a few cigarettes and hold them in the light beam. The smoke particles are small enough to produce Rayleigh scattering, and because blue light scatters the most, the students see blue smoke. I then carry this demonstration one step further. I inhale the smoke and keep it in my lungs for a minute or so—this is not always easy, but science occasionally requires sacrifices. I then let go and exhale the smoke into the light beam. The students now see white smoke—I have created a white cloud! The tiny smoke particles have grown in my lungs, as there is a lot of water vapor there. So now all the colors scatter equally, and the scattered light is white. The color change from blue light to white light is truly amazing!

With this demonstration, I’m able to answer two questions at once: Why is the sky blue, and why are clouds white? Actually, there is also a third very interesting question, having to do with the polarization of light. I’ll get to this in
chapter 5
.

Out in the country with my students I could show them the Andromeda galaxy, the only one you can see with the naked eye, around 2.5 million light-years away (15 million trillion miles), which is next door as far as astronomical distances go. It’s made up of about 200 billion stars. Imagine that—200 billion stars, and we could just make it out as a faint fuzzy patch. We also spotted lots of meteorites—most people call them shooting stars. If you were patient, you’d see one about every four or five minutes. In those days there were no satellites, but now you’d see a host of those as well. There are more than two thousand now orbiting Earth, and if you can hold your gaze for five minutes you’ll almost surely see one, especially within a few hours after sunset or before sunrise, when the Sun hasn’t yet set or risen on the satellite itself and sunlight still reflects off it to your eyes. The more distant the satellite, and therefore the greater the difference in time between sunset on Earth and at the satellite, the later you can see it at night. You recognize satellites because they move faster than anything else in the sky (except meteors); if it blinks, believe me, it’s an airplane.

I have always especially liked to point out Mercury to people when
we’re stargazing. As the planet closest to the Sun, it’s very difficult to see it with the naked eye. The conditions are best only about two dozen evenings and mornings a year. Mercury orbits the Sun in just eighty-eight days, which is why it was named for the fleet-footed Roman messenger god; and the reason it’s so hard to see is that its orbit is so close to the Sun. It’s never more than about 25 degrees away from the Sun when we look at it from Earth—that’s smaller than the angle between the two hands of a watch at eleven o’clock. You can only see it shortly after sunset and before sunrise, and when it’s farthest from the Sun as seen from Earth. In the United States it’s always close to the horizon; you almost have to be in the countryside to see it. How wonderful it is when you actually find it!

Stargazing connects us to the vastness of the universe. If we keep staring up at the night sky, and let our eyes adjust long enough, we can see the superstructure of the farther reaches of our own Milky Way galaxy quite beautifully—some 100 billion to 200 billion stars, clustered as if woven into a diaphanous fabric, so delightfully delicate. The size of the universe is incomprehensible, but you can begin to grasp it by first considering the Milky Way.

Our current estimate is that there may be as many galaxies in the universe as there are stars in our own galaxy. In fact, whenever a telescope observes deep space, what it sees is mostly galaxies—it’s impossible to distinguish single stars at truly great distances—and each contains billions of stars. Or consider the recent discovery of the single largest structure in the known universe, the Great Wall of galaxies, mapped by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a major project that has combined the efforts of more than three hundred astronomers and engineers and twenty-five universities and research institutions. The dedicated Sloan telescope is observing every night; it went into operation in the year 2000 and will continue till at least the year 2014. The Great Wall is more than a billion light-years long. Is your head spinning? If not, then consider that the observable universe (not the entire universe, just the part we can observe) is roughly 90
billion light-years
across.

This is the power of physics; it can tell us that our observable universe
is made up of some 100 billion galaxies. It can also tell us that of all the matter in our visible universe, only about 4 percent is ordinary matter, of which stars and galaxies (and you and I) are made. About 23 percent is what’s called dark matter (it’s invisible). We know it exists, but we don’t know what it is. The remaining 73 percent, which is the bulk of the energy in our universe, is called dark energy, which is also invisible. No one has a clue what that is either. The bottom line is that we’re ignorant about 96 percent of the mass/energy in our universe. Physics has explained so much, but we still have many mysteries to solve, which I find very inspiring.

Physics explores unimaginable immensity, but at the same time it can dig down into the very smallest realms, to the very bits of matter such as neutrinos, as small as a tiny fraction of a proton. That is where I was spending most of my time in my early days in the field, in the realms of the very small, measuring and mapping the release of particles and radiation from radioactive nuclei. This was nuclear physics, but not the bomb-making variety. I was studying what made matter tick at a really basic level.

You probably know that almost all the matter you can see and touch is made up of elements, such as hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon combined into molecules, and that the smallest unit of an element is an atom, made up of a nucleus and electrons. A nucleus, recall, consists of protons and neutrons. The lightest and most plentiful element in the universe, hydrogen, has one proton and one electron. But there is a form of hydrogen that has a neutron as well as a proton in its nucleus. That is an isotope of hydrogen, a different form of the same element; it’s called deuterium. There’s even a third isotope of hydrogen, with two neutrons joining the proton in the nucleus; that’s called tritium. All isotopes of a given element have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons, and elements have different numbers of isotopes. There are thirteen isotopes of oxygen, for instance, and thirty-six isotopes of gold.

Now, many of these isotopes are stable—that is, they can last more or less forever. But most are unstable, which is another way of saying they’re
radioactive, and radioactive isotopes decay: that is to say, sooner or later they transform themselves into other elements. Some of the elements they transform into are stable, and then the radioactive decay stops, but others are unstable, and then the decay continues until a stable state is reached. Of the three isotopes of hydrogen, only one, tritium, is radioactive—it decays into a stable isotope of helium. Of the thirteen isotopes of oxygen, three are stable; of gold’s thirty-six isotopes, only one is stable.

You will probably remember that we measure how quickly radioactive isotopes decay by their “half-life”—which can range from a microsecond (one-millionth of a second) to billions of years. If we say that tritium has a half-life of about twelve years, we mean that in a given sample of tritium, half of the isotopes will decay in twelve years (only one-quarter will remain after twenty-four years). Nuclear decay is one of the most important processes by which many different elements are transformed and created. It’s not alchemy. In fact, during my PhD research, I was often watching radioactive gold isotopes decay into mercury rather than the other way around, as the medieval alchemists would have liked. There are, however, many isotopes of mercury, and also of platinum, that decay into gold. But only one platinum isotope and only one mercury isotope decay into stable gold, the kind you can wear on your finger.

The work was immensely exciting; I would have radioactive isotopes literally decaying in my hands. And it was very intense. The isotopes I was working with typically had half-lives of only a day or a few days. Gold-198, for instance, has a half-life of a little over two and a half days, so I had to work fast. I would drive from Delft to Amsterdam, where they used a cyclotron to make these isotopes, and rush back to the lab at Delft. There I would dissolve the isotopes in an acid to get them into liquid form, put them on very thin film, and place them into detectors.

I was trying to verify a theory about nuclear decay, one that predicted the ratio of gamma ray to electron emissions from the nuclei, and my work required precise measurements. This work had already been done for many radioactive isotopes, but some recent measurements had come out that were different from what the theory predicted. My supervisor,
Professor Aaldert Wapstra, suggested I try to determine whether it was the theory or the measurements that were at fault. It was enormously satisfying, like working on a fantastically intricate puzzle. The challenge was that my measurements had to be much more precise than the ones those other researchers had come up with before me.