The Interesting Physics of Robert Oppenheimer (not the bomb) - Sixty Symbols
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- čas přidán 12. 06. 2024
- Robert Oppenheimer did a lot of interesting physics before the Manhattan Project and atomic bombs. More links and info below ↓ ↓ ↓
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If every paper in which Born-Oppenheimer approximation is used cited the original paper it would have well over a milion citations. Literally, over 99% of people who calculate anything in quantum physics/chemistry use it.
Legacy papers tend to get superseded in citations by more recent developments, for better or worse. Imagine if every single physics paper had to cite Newton, for example.
@@frankjohnson123that would be amazing. You would have to like cite Euclids elements when you work with the euclidean geometry and the guy whose name was used to name algebra when you solve even trivial equations.
Density Functional Theory introductions always starts with the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation.
@@user-nm5ge9ht3cthat’s called bureaucracy. It’s not amazing. It’s boring. Just like every audio book, spoken and interpreted by sheep.
After all we like to game the citation numbers for the current scientists. I remember I wanted to cite some of the foundational stuff in my work, my advisor said that it was absurd. I disagree, still. We could come up with an abbreviated way of doing that, but still doing that.
I always enjoy Tony's enthusiasm for all the subjects he talks about on here
Yep, another truly fascinating video. Just what we've come to expect, no pressure lads! 😂
Tony’s positive energy is infectious. Love that guy
He loves his job
It cannot be stressed enough just how important the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is in chemistry
Would love a video on renormalization as mentioned!
It's crazy how many genius physicists were alive at the same time during the early 20th century. They were pretty much celebrities back then.
Radioactivity was discovered in 1896, quantum mechanics in 1900, and relativity in 1905. These discoveries opened up huge new fields of physics that nobody had been looking into before. Europe and North America had the institutional infrastructure and the funding to unleash an army of very well educated physicists to look into these new fields.
I think the ones who became famous because their names got attached to the phenomenons they described were mostly just lucky to be first with their breakthroughs. Even if none of them had gone into physics research, there would have been still enough just as capable people to make all those discoveries maybe just weeks or months later, and they would have gotten just as famous today.
And yeah, when a completely new field opens up to research, the "easier" problems will all get solved pretty quickly first, which is why you have this initial burst of amazing discoveries. And 30-40 years later, it's only the much harder ones that are still left, so the pace of discovery becomes much slower.
Dirac is underrated among the public. Many have heard of Heisenberg and Schrödinger but should have heard of Dirac too. He might be comparable to Einstein. Also, he was Feynman’s hero, when Feynman was a young physicist. I think Feynman might have even learned quantum mechanics from Dirac’s book.
@@Yora21I was thinking about that for a while now and I always wondered why there was such a phenomenon of the creation of geniuses in the early 20th century? There must have been a different educational system back then.
Thanks. Paul Dirac's work was very important, and it still has important ramifications. It's odd that he is glossed over so nonchalantly by 'popular science'.@@topdog5252
@@mendax7125 New fields are, broadly, easier to make discoveries in. Because they're new, you know. Also having the luxury to sit around and just _do_ Physics. We don't have a lot of time these days to just sit around having a think about things on account of so many folks working 2+ jobs trying to just stay alive. Also higher education wasn't life-breakingly expensive.
There's actually a reference (and a joke) in the film regarding the publication date of that last article, when an assistant or grad-student tells Oppenheimer that the world will remember the day when it came out (because of his breakthrough prediction of black holes), only for someone else to barge into the room moments later to say that Germany invaded Poland, which was the opening salvo for WW2, of course.
The Born-Oppenheimer approximation is so important that it's nearly ubiquitous, and when you're just using a potential energy function and didn't derive it yourself, it's very easy to forget that it's there. It's great for systems with large nuclei, still not bad when deriving potential energy surfaces for systems with low mass atoms (helium, hydrogen, muonium...). But in terms of the dynamical behaviour, small differences can sometimes lead to pretty wonky behaviour because of nonlinearity.
In grad school, I did molecular dynamics mostly on low mass systems. For one study, I set up calculations both with and without the B.O. approximation, took the time to quantify just how poorly the results matched, did all the figures and citations and so on, and on the morning of April 1st left on my advisor's desk both a draft of the real paper and a companion paper titled The B.O. Sometimes Stinks.
Tony's gonna be finding electrons around the floor for weeks
Technically, always true.
I hope so. Otherwise, he'd fall straight through.
Great to see Dr. Padilla again. He has been consistently one of the best contributors on Numberphile. His video on TREE(g64) vs. G(TREE(3)) was a real eye opener.
People often forget that this was the reason physicists like Oppenheimer were recruited to be on the Manhattan Project, these were the cream of the crop.
5:15 Strictly speaking the result you get is not just an approximation of the energy spectrum, but also the electronic and/or vibronic wavefunctions of the system, from which you can predict all sorts of useful physical and chemical properties.
Olivia neutron bomb!
Oppenheimer (movie) is like the physicists version of the avengers
"Here's a model."
*_*casually dumps $200 of competition footballs on the floor_*
Very interesting video. Love it when experts "translate" papers of famous scientists.
What a great video. One of the best I´v have seen.
Thanks - glad you liked it!
the incineration of so many civilians is actually minimized in the film, but yeah, no point in talking about that now, is there... @@sixtysymbols
@@BobBob-nr1zt weak troll
you're a bit weak yourself there@@frankjohnson123
awesome, could you do one about your favorite papers of all time? I would love to read some nice paper
Oppenheimer’s success would hopefully make the world be more appreciative and in awe of the work done by real physicists. I’m glad that the movie is getting so much attention!
hopefully, most folks on social media will still continue to "make their own research" and come up with every sort of nonsense 😂
@@_ilsegugio_ "do your own research" is exactly what these 20s century physicists did. They were even bitching each other like on social media today. There are lots of funny letters in the archives. Difference is they got proper science education and knew how to be critical and evaluate info. What I am trying to say: Not bashing "do your own research" but teaching scientific methodology is the way.
@@bluesmanshoesI kinda doubt they did the sort of "do your own research" that modern people are saying. Modern people just look up the first thing that pops up on google that aligns with their pre-existing belief. If a person has enough overconfidence in themselves and if they didnt find what aligned with their view, then they will scavenge the internet for quite literally anything that aligns with their view to satisfy their ego. I had a previous coworker tell me that he "did his own research" to say that smoking pot doesn't affect your lungs when 1. logically that is nonsense and 2. this is proven untrue. I was flabbergasted then, but it fits the bill for that man's sad life.
In stark contrast, i believe people like Oppenheimer probably stuck to trusting academic circles and what was popularly accepted as breakthrough info at the time. You see this in the movie with how he goes to parties full of experts and so fourth while talking about the newest and/or popularly accepted theories. I mean, the idea of "following the experts" goes back to Plato. Einstein was a patent clerk or whatever it is called, he was quite literally working with the freshest new ideas in physics constantly. If you have the courage to take in new information/beliefs that goes against "common sense" (which is usually nonsense), the wisdom to gain this info from the correct sources, and the creativity to take 2+ bits of information to make a whole new logically great conclusion... well you get Oppenheimer. At least that is how I see it, but I'm a simple fool so I am likely wrong
Oppenheimer’s gift and curse was that he would open new doors so that others could walk through them.
Great video thank you.
I listened to this without seeing the speakers face.
I thought it was Brian Cox for a while!
Not sure what Tony will think of that! :)
I haven’t got a Manchester accent!!!!
@@apadila1975 The final paper also links to Nolan's previous film with his collaboration with Kip Thorne. Oppenheimer sowing the seeds of the (continued) career of the movie maker who would end up doing his Biopic.
As always, a treat for the brain!. Would love a video on renormalization as mentioned!.
I always wondered what would happen if a Physicist, Chemist, and Mathematician walked into a bar...
They have a few beers, and complain ENDLESSLY about the university administration and a lot of trivia about work. And every week it's the same discussion. ;-)
An architect, an astronomer, and a physicist (natural philosopher in those days) did walk into a pub. Imbibed a few ales, wondered about how Kepler's law worked and made a bet. Whoever could figure out how Kepler's laws worked would get a few pounds.
Christopher Wren did not bother, Robert Hooke pretended to have found out but wouldn't tell the others so that they could figure it out for themselves. Edmund Halley worked on the problem but then sought help from a math professor. Isaac Newton told Halley that he had solved that issue some twenty years before. Halley asked him to publish but Newton wouldn't do it unless someone else paid for the publishing. Halley agreed to pay and the Principia gave us modern physics.
The physicist would be trying to work out the thermodynamic system of vodka on the rocks until they're too wasted to write legibly.
The chemist would ask for separate pitchers of gin and vodka and several empty shot glasses, conducting a number of experiments using measuring tools from the lab to find their preferred vodka martini.
The mathematician would try to abstract the concept of a cocktail into something more general described by category theory. Never orders a drink and drives the other two home.
"Ouch" they said - it was an iron bar!
that's how quantum chemistry was born.
I'd happily watch "Padilla: A man talks about TREE(3) for 3 hours"
I just like the fact that the great names Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy can drag a lot of people to watch a movie based on ATOMIC BOMB who in real life just hate studying chemistry and physics :))
They're still learning jack shit about chemistry and physics. It's typical, cheap Hollywood entertainment with no real educational value
Ikr
I always love Tony's videos.
As someone who did a PhD in theoretical chemistry on non-Born-Oppenheimer effects, thanks for highlighting this! There would be no quantum chemistry without the BO approximation.
*Also, in addition to the 2013 Nobel Prize, the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was also directly from the BO approximation, this time for methods of solving the electronic structure problem. Basically, the 1998 prize was for methods of solving the first part of the problem (electrons with fixed nuclei) and the 2013 prize was largely for methods of solving the second part (nuclei moving the potential created by the electrons).
Fantastic video. THANKS!
The last time I was this early I had to get remarried.
Top Shelf Video this one! Fascinating and informative.
Thanks for the mention of the significance of the date.
really really cool video. Awesome to watch this after the film and see how it fits in
Thank you for the amazing perspective on doctor Oppenheimer's physics!
A weird thing about black holes, that an observer far away doesn't really see objects crossing the event horizon:
If so, in the case of a black hole accreting matter, wouldn't we see the sum total of all matter that have crossed and is crossing the event horizon, stacked right there on the black hole surface? because we can't see them passing through
from what I've heard, observers will see the objects stuck on the event horizon slowly fade until they disappear
According to our reference frame objects never finish falling in. However we will eventually stop seeing them because the light they emit redshifts to infinity.
@seekr99 @KurtBlanken
oh that makes sense! but still, I think this effect would result in a form of "accumulation of images" on the surface of the black hole (because yes the images of matter are redshifted until its gone, but matter keeps falling in while that happens... I don't really know the rate of redshift vs the rate of accretion) making it brighter than if matter appeared to just pass straight through
Loved this thank you!
The trees in the window are so blown out that it looks like the CMB. Great video, per usual.
The calander in the background is 2012. Wonder what the story is about that?
Why sound is so quiet on these videos?
It's the spooky Nolan action at a distance. Thankfully, @sixtysymbols doesn't have action sequences.
I’ve noticed this across loads of CZcams videos recently
and youtube shorts seems to have their volume boosted to almost meme levels
@@mushroomsamba82 YES!!
I’m so glad it’s not just me going insane.
When the video is uploaded to YT, the audio needs to be normalised, otherwise the outro at the end around 19:40 has a loud volume level which dominates the main interview.
It always seemed to me that positrons and electrons are the same particle just with opposite sign of "time".
Fantastic video
Sir, could you create more kinds of videos like that? I'm really excited
Me discovering that Max Born is Olivia Newton John grandfather: "Tell me more, tell me more..."
Like, did he have a car?
I wonder how many papers were written relevant to the Manhattan Project that may still be classified.
Most likely none before.
But, most likely several as a part of the Manhatten project !
I believe there are many, one equation that remains classified came from Feynman according to a colleague who’s clearance would place him in a position to know.
CZcams auto-captions physics highlights:
Max Born -> Max Bourne
Dirac -> The rack 🤓
Dirac's -> The Rex
Blackett -> Black it
Pauli Exclusion -> power exclusion
Schwarzschild -> Schwartzel
As always, a treat for the brain!
Very interesting and inspiring video
This video is a blast! :D
Would be cool if nolan's oppenheimer showed more of the science, seeing how dense the political intrigue is already in that movie
This was the biggest let down of the whole film.
1:16 Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi! 🇦🇺 😂
Great content, had to listen with eyes closed to avoid getting seasick from the bobbing and weaving shakycam though :(
Maybe it is a chemist thing because I didn't realized it was the same Oppenheimer of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation until you mentioned and I have been aware of its existence for years.
Please make a video on renormalization. 😮
very interesting video!
Had so much more to contribute.
video is too quiet
It's a Nolan reference
Other than the Def, Ive never seen someone communicate more with their hands than with their voice!
1:20 So you mean we're not here to get... Physical??
2:14 ⚽️🏐⚽️🎶
”How can I save my little boy
“From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”
I thought this will be some weird physics about oppenheimer himself :D
I'm pretty sure that last paper is aknowledged in the movie, precisely in relation to the date it was published.
turn the sound up
Do a video on renormalization!! I've yet to find a solid breakdown of that!
Audio on this channel has been soo quiet the last month or two
How does that work? Seeing something fall into a black hole that takes forever?
For an outside observer, that something would fall in slower and slower until is stopped at the event horizon. An outside observer cannot see something go past the event horizon. It would also get dimmer and dimmer (and redder and redder due to red shift) until it eventually disappeared too though (since that thing would no longer be emitting photos that can escape the black hole), so you wouldn't see a black hole with a bunch of things hanging out at the event horizon.
Seem to have a few mesons amongst those electrons? Anomalous G2?
Nice point ❤
ooo make a video on renormalization since he mentioned it
Would there be any magnetic poles? Perhaps not without interior convection. If there are poles would they be circular at the extreme top(north) and bottom(south) of the torus, or perhaps a circular monopole at the extreme minimum radius of the torus?
Always enjoy watching these videos!
OT: It's shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but that's not at all how you pronounce Schwarzschild. The two words are schwarz (black) and Schild (shield). Schild sounds definitely closer to shield than to child. Sorry, it shouldn't bother me. 😄
At least I'm not the only one noticing that :)
It seems pretty rare, on CZcams, for Schwarzschild to be pronounced as two German words (schwarz + Schild) rather than a confused mix of German and English (schwarz + child). The only channels I've heard pronouncing it as schwarz+Schild are _PBS Space Time_ and _Minute Physics._
(I've still read comments complaining about the pronunciation on PBS Space Time, but I'd argue it's close enough. Isn't Matt an Australian living in the USA … saying a German name? Minor pronunciation issues can probably be blamed on his accent ;))
Also, "black shield" is a much better surname than "black child" lol
"There's a big movie out now.... that we're all going to see..." Swore you were going to say "Barbie".
Renormalisation = i-reflection orthogonality in Superspin-spiral Superposition Totality of vertices in vortices implied by Singularity-point reciprocation-recirculation coherence-cohesion sync-duration, resonance quantization in/of QM-TIME Completeness, cause-effect holography.. Correspondence in Principle. And so on again..
Hmm, that approximation sounds a lot like self description via recursion.
Opje was a pretty smart dude
Turn your sound up.
Where can i read those paper?
they were going to have micheal bay do the movie, but that would actually ignite the atmosphere.
Stars just fall through space if their scale is smaller than their space time displacement?
Is space time porous?
@6:40 is it just me or does Oppenheimer really look like a 1940s Adam Neely?
Thank you for providing this free information to the public. The atomic bomb was probably one of Oppenheimer's darkest times.
I had no idea how important the Born-Oppenheimer was to chemistry. I'm glad that you're shedding light on this topic.
@ 0:12 it would have been hilarious if he said Barbie instead
I can’t ppl they used to do these calculations on a chalkboard. That would take me weeks and I’d still get it wrong.
They didn't, necessarily. Mechanical calculators were a thing and I believe universities employed people whose job was just to do calculations for scientists.
I look forward to re-normalization video :) Reduction of infinities is mind bending. I only hope (some) mathematicians will not feel offended again ;)
Ironically, re-normalization feels extremely abnormal.
if we can never see something falling into a black hole, how can we see a black hole gaining mass or consuming mass?
I could be completely wrong about this, but theoretically, I think we could tell due to changes in the apparent gravitational field the black hole exerts around it.
Picture this: you have a black hole that one of more bodies orbit that you can observe (like stars or planets). These bodies would orbit around the black hole in such a way as to tell you how much mass the black hole itself has. Now, imagine the black hole swallows a significant amount of matter, enough to significantly change its gravitational field.
What would we see? Well, we would never see the matter itself go into the black hole, as it gets redshifted to infinity as it get closer to the event horizon. However, the matter DOES go through the event horizon, which increases the black hole’s gravitational field. Therefore, we would see a change in how the objects orbiting the black hole change their orbits, making it clear the black hole’s mass has increased, even if we never see the matter cross the horizon; we know it must have.
At least, that is my idea, when gravitation changes, those effects become apparent practically immediately. If this is not correct, please let me know.
10:54 Wolfgang looks like TheReportOfTheWeek.
YAOV - Yet Another Oppenheim Vlog
Where can I read scientific papers?
For old papers like these, googling the title and author name usually fetches the full text for free.
@@Lavabug But for new papers? I've tried many apps out but I don't get it where scientist actually publish their papers. Are these journals they publish it in chargeable?
@@cherry1leiiyes the journals they publish on are subscription based. You will mostly find only the abstract in the open. Nowadays many people post their papers on the open access ArXiv server. You can also sometimes just email the authors for a copy of the paper.
For everything else there is sci hub, since access to these papers should fundamentally be free.
@@cherry1leii Virtually all journals today have websites where you can read the abstracts but you have to pay to get the full papers. If you contact the author, they're usually happy to send you a copy of the paper for free.
So, for the first one that he is talking about, is that what is known as electronegativity in chemistry? My understanding of all of this is very surface level...
WOW
Talks about electronic energy levels and then show IR spectra.
Very interesting, my profs of quantum mechanics never taught us what the normalisation was for, it was just for making sure that the function for a system indeed exists over all the space. Now it's an "infinite correction", are we talking about the same normalisation?
No, I think the normalization you’re referring to is the integral over the squared modulus of a given wave function. It’s normalizing the probability density of measuring a particle in a certain position, or of certain momentum, etc. at a certain time. The integral of the squared modulus over all of the system’s degrees of freedom must be 1. In other words, if you’re measuring position, for example, the total probability of finding the particle SOMEWHERE must be 100%.
Renormalization is a technique first developed in QED to make sense of the divergent integrals that give infinite answers for closed loop Feynman diagrams. The problem extends further than that, however, and can be interpreted as the consequence of phase transformations in scale, likely complicated by perturbation theory.
For instance, at high resolutions, an electron appears to be composed of electron-positron pairs and photons. The electric charge even slightly differs from the dressed electron at larger scales. Renormalization resolves these issues by considering the magnitude of the observable as the length scale goes from small to large. In doing so, the divergent terms end up being cancelled by counter terms. If one only considers a system at very high resolution, the screening effects that take place at larger distance and time scales get neglected, and some terms blow up to infinity.
Pretty sure Dirac also didn't really believe it was the proton.
I’m already lost.
Nice video as always, but I have a quibble: historically, people thought that the Dirac equation was a relativistic version of Schrodinger's, and that renormalization was about (canceling) infinities. Nowadays we know that neither of those is quite correct: Dirac's equation is an equation for a (quantum) field, while Schrodinger's is for a quantum state and is perfectly compatible with relativity (provided the underlying dynamics is, which usually requires quantum fields); and renormalization is about packaging "high-res" microscopic data of a physical system into a(n often simpler) "low-res" effective description and relating quantities probed at different scales, no infinities in sight.
The overexposed windows are bothering me.
But you're not going to talk about the physics of Barbi??? Ken calls this process 'bootstrapping'.
We need the Physicist Barbie to explain.
Calendar from 2012 ???
Audio levels are 15 dB low
Can someone explain to me why knowing energy levels of atom/molecules are useful?
Because it can be used to predict their behaviors in chemical reactions and electromagnetic interactions among other things. It allows you to simulate (calculate) the answers instead of having to try all the possible combinations to determine which ones work.
@@susanyoung6579Thank you for answering. Can you give me an example of needing a specific energy of atom/molecule for those chemical reactions or EM interactions?
@@joeaverage8329 not really, this isn't my field. Sorry.
@@susanyoung6579 No worries. Thank you!
Sixty symbols has great physics, but the audio levels are always wrong! 😅
Man of atom bomb offer molecules to better bomb. A great salute to a big visionary of science and technology . A personality to remember in time less frame.
A salute to you , a bag full. Gen next will carry the three bags. A poem for timeless.
Literature and science entangled .
Video.
You should ask where the scientist is from.