Today I enjoyed a great lunch at Panera Bread, and after, came home to read 20 minutes of The Quantum Moment. In this section, which ended up being pages 73-75 , I read about the transition of the classic Newtonian view on physics to the new age Quantum ideas, and more about the confusing topic of probability and randomness, and it's validity as the quantum science is improved.

Ernest Rutherford

         The first transition is the coining of the term Thermodynamics. This is a science of heat, "conceived not as a single substance, as it had been, but as a phenomenon arising from motions of numerous particles." (73) I think as we begun to name these sciences and understand them better, we began to be able to find more out about them, faster. Science has grown so fast in the past few hundred years.
         Many sciences, especially mathematically based ones, can assist in the understand of other sciences. Scientists studying thermodynamics could use statistics to understand the processes better. The authors go on to use radiation as an example.
They say that because radiation seemed so spontaneous, so random, that a scientist named Ernest Rutherford studied a specific element, called  thorium oxide, and came up with one of the first quantitative laws.

Radiation spreads out as a it travels from it's Gamma or X-ray source.

       
       "The intensity of radiation, he said, fell off with time. (Now what we call it's 'half-life')." (74)
         The idea that randomness lay at the very core of nature was proposed by philosopher Charles S. Peirce in the late 19th century, "this, he felt, would prevent scientists from coming up with one final set of law valid for all scales and disciplines, and require them to keep producing new laws." (74) meaning, the spontaneity of quantum ideas and the randomness of it all should be refreshed and re-thought constantly.
          Albert Einstein had a large impact on statistics and probability when he publish his papers on quantum theory in 1916-1917. The began to talk about thermodynamics in a new light, (get it) and he tried to put some sort of probability into something that we know as improbable; the behavior of particles inside an atom. "The moment Einstein made this connection, he regretted it." (75).
           So, like last weeks reading, I am encouraging the reader to think about something... how probable is probability? How constant is constant? How likely is likely? How random is random?



          -Griffin Carlson