Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You probably know that our show's most frequent guest is
See You physics professor Paul Beal, and we almost always
have him on a Friday when he's on. And it
occurred to me when I was thinking about having Paul
on today, actually as a request based on a subject
that came from Marty of Colorado's Morning News, but it
(00:20):
occurred to me that I normally have Paul in the
eleven o'clock hour, and there are lots of folks who
listen in the nine o'clock hour, not the eleven o'clock hour,
and I thought, why not give everybody a chance to
get to get to hear from Paul.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
So Paul joins us now a little bit earlier in.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
The show then usual, good morning Paul, Thanks thanks for
doing this.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
As always, Yeah, good morning Ross.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So my colleague Marty sent me an article that I
then sent to you, and the headline is this, this
massive damn in China is slowing down the Earth's rotation
by zero point zero six micro seconds. So I have
a lot of questions about this, but let me let
me start with two, and then you can just take
(01:05):
it wherever you want to go. Based on my two questions, uh. One, uh,
is it possible that the dam is actually doing that?
And two, if it is possible, is is there a
device sensitive and sensitive enough a measuring device to be
able to say that the Earth's rotation is slowing down
(01:29):
by zero point zero six micro seconds? Not zero point
zero six seconds, but zero point zero six micro seconds.
So what's a micro is a millionth of a second?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Right, that's correct, So this.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Would be six one hundredths of a millionth of a second.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
All right, go ahead, Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So the answers are yes and yes.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
So this the largest dam in the world is the
three Gorgeous Dam in China, and it's slowly up with water,
and so that's rain water that's falling and not going
back straight to the ocean. So it's staying up farther
from the center of the Earth.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
And just like a.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Skater in the Olympics, when they're spinning, they can change
their spin rate by putting their arms out. They slow
down when they put their arms out, and they speed
up when they bring their arms in. And so if
the mass is a little bit farther from the center
of the Earth, that means the Earth's rotation rate will
slow down by a conservation of angular momentum.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Okay, so angular momentum is something I haven't studied since college.
So can you in Plaine English explain that to us?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (02:45):
So, yeah, if you have a really good wheel on
a really good axle and you spin it, it will
spin at a constant rate, and in order to change
the rate of the spin, you have to.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Apply what's known as a torque.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
You have to apply a force somewhere off center on
the on the wheel.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
So that's what a break does.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Provides a force that's off center, and therefore that can
slow down the rotation rate. So that changes the angular momentum.
But the Earth, there's no break acting on the Earth.
So the Earth's angular momentum is more or less constant.
And so if the mass is farther from the center,
that means the rotation rate has to be a little
bit slower.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Why does why does it have to be slower?
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Oh, because the angular minum is is proportional to the
rotation rate and how far away the mass is from
the center of the rotation.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Wow, does that Does that have anything to do with gravity,
like in the sense of the force of gravity being
proportional to the square of the distance or is it
a completely unrelated thing.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Well, gravity also conserves angular momentum, So the Earth's orbit
around the Sun is also conserving angular momentum because the
force between the Sun and the Earth is directly along
the line between the centers, so that that's a force
that doesn't provide a torque. And so the angle momentum
of all the planets each or have the same angle
(04:12):
momentum at every point in their orbit. That was first
discovered by Kepler in the sixteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Okay, so my second question, I'll.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Slightly reword it.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
How is it possible to measure a change of six
one hundredth of a millionth of a second? And I
is this over the course of a day, since we're
talking about rotation or what.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
That's what I interpreted, that the figure that the Earth's
rotation rate in one day would be differed by six
of one hundredthser point zero six microseconds. Yeah, and that's
actually easily measurable. The clocks at NIST, which helped define
coordinated universal time, can measure things much much, much mo
(05:00):
more accurately than that. In fact, this rotation rate I
looked up, there's plenty of other rotation rate changes in
the Earth's spin that are much bigger in fact than
this effect that's described for the DAM. So even year
to year, the Earth's rotation period of rotation can change
by a milliseconds a thousand times more than this amount
(05:22):
that's predicted for the DAM.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Okay, last question for you, and I'm going to see
if this question implies that I'm a reasonably good physics
student or a moron. So based on what you said before,
I'm I'm thinking that if you if you, even though
the Earth isn't exactly straight up and down, just for
the purposes of our model, imagine imagine the Earth with
(05:48):
the access of axis of rotation straight up and down.
Are you saying that if the Three Gorges dam movede
it's in the northern hemisphere now right, if it moved
further north, closer to the North pole, are you saying
that it would then have less of an effect slowing
(06:10):
down the Earth's rotation.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
That's correct, because it would be closer to the axis
of rotation, so it would be a bigger effect near
the equator in a smaller effect near the poles.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, I'm a good physics student. Okay, let's switch Doe
here next semester. There you go, I bet you will.
So you told me that twenty twenty five is the
International Year of Quantum, and why wouldn't it be I
should get a T shirt to that effect rather than
my abolish Everything T shirt that I'm wearing today. And
(06:41):
I'm not sure how many listeners know that there's a
lot of really great work in theoretical physics, quantum physics,
anything related to time, atomic clocks and all this at
Boulder and at CU Boulder, And so I'm guessing you
know this guy Shalm, and I wonder if you can
(07:02):
tell me a little bit about what he's doing and
maybe entanglement that you and I talked out talked about before.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Sure. So the twenty.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Twenty five celebrates one hundred years since Heisenberg's paper on
what became known as matrix mechanics, and the following year
Schreddinger and a year after that di Iraq putting quantum
mechanics and relativity together. So there was an enormous burst
of research in the development of quantum mechanics about one
(07:33):
hundred years ago. So Christer Salm is a staff scientist
at NIST. He came to NIST some years ago and
he joined what was known as the CU PREP program,
So that's the Professional Research Experience Program. It's a program
that John Cumulot and I in physics run and we
have about one hundred CU employees working at NIST with
(07:53):
the top scientists at NIST doing cutting edge science and engineering.
Christ came and the thing he started working on is
quantum entanglement of photons.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
So he has a.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Device which can produce puts the an atom in a
specific quantum state so that when it decays, it gives
off two photons, one going in one direction and one in.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
The opposite direction.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
So those photons travel along and they have various properties
you can measure, and one of the properties is called polarization.
So if you have polarized sunglasses, the more ordinary ones
you buy in the in the Walmart. They what they
do is they filter out the polarization that where the
electric field is going horizontally and they let through the
(08:42):
electric field that goes vertical. So if you had two observers,
one at either end of a long optical fiber, which
is what he has in the lab, and they each
have on polarizing sunglasses, and if they're both standing straight up,
if one sees one photon, the other one will see
the other photon because they will both have the same polarizations.
(09:04):
They're in an entangled state. And if one person turns
their head in ninety degrees, one person will see the
photon and the other person will definitely not see the photon.
And they can do those measurements with the electronics there.
They can do the measurements nanoseconds apart, so that one
measurement will affect the other measurement instantaneously across hundreds of meters,
(09:28):
much faster than the speed of light. And so these
experiments are testing what's known as Bell's inequality. So it
was a theorem written down by John Bell the nineteen
sixties that said quantum mechanics is really spooky, and in fact,
it is what Einstein calls spooky action at a distance.
So a measurement of one photon can instantaneously affect the
(09:52):
measurement of another photon, even if it's very very far away.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I just want to tell listeners, I realized, like this
is pretty intense stuff, and it is, as I said
yesterday on another topic, a little bit too early in
the day for us to be drinking bourbon. So Paul
and I have been talking about this for a long time,
but I was actually texting with Mandy today this morning
because she.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Wants to be involved too.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
And sometime pretty soon here we are gonna put together
a listener event with me and Mandy and Paul Beale,
and we're all gonna get together somewhere and we're mostly
gonna listen to Paul. Maybe Mandy and I'll say a
thing or two, and then maybe we'll all hang out
and Mandy and I will answer questions and Paula'll answered questions,
and I'm gonna want him to talk about entanglement a
(10:38):
little more because it's just such an such an incredible thing.
But we will be doing that, so I just wanted
you to be aware, Paul. I also think, just as
a matter of history, I think it's pretty amazing that
the scientist who came up with this quantum stuff named
himself after a character in the TV series Breaking Bad,
(10:59):
which is it's a pretty amazing thing.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Heisenberg.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I mean Heisenberg.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Yes, Eisenberg was my favorite character in Breaking Bead.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, And how amazing that one of the great Physicists
of All Times named himself after the show, right, I mean,
you know, get that every day see you. Physics Professor
Paul Beil is a guy who makes me wish I
were still in college.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Not kidding, not kidding about that.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I just love these conversations and how Paul can make
most things.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
At least understandable, even for me. Thank you, Paul. Have
a wonderful weekend, and we'll be in touch soon. I
promise to schedulity.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I would really like to do that. So let's be
in touch and make this happens.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Thanks again, Paul, have a great weekend.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Thank you all right,
You probably know that our show's most frequent guest is
See You physics professor Paul Beal, and we almost always
have him on a Friday when he's on. And it
occurred to me when I was thinking about having Paul
on today, actually as a request based on a subject
that came from Marty of Colorado's Morning News, but it
(00:20):
occurred to me that I normally have Paul in the
eleven o'clock hour, and there are lots of folks who
listen in the nine o'clock hour, not the eleven o'clock hour,
and I thought, why not give everybody a chance to
get to get to hear from Paul.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
So Paul joins us now a little bit earlier in.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
The show then usual, good morning Paul, Thanks thanks for
doing this.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
As always, Yeah, good morning Ross.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So my colleague Marty sent me an article that I
then sent to you, and the headline is this, this
massive damn in China is slowing down the Earth's rotation
by zero point zero six micro seconds. So I have
a lot of questions about this, but let me let
me start with two, and then you can just take
(01:05):
it wherever you want to go. Based on my two questions, uh. One, uh,
is it possible that the dam is actually doing that?
And two, if it is possible, is is there a
device sensitive and sensitive enough a measuring device to be
able to say that the Earth's rotation is slowing down
(01:29):
by zero point zero six micro seconds? Not zero point
zero six seconds, but zero point zero six micro seconds.
So what's a micro is a millionth of a second?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Right, that's correct, So this.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Would be six one hundredths of a millionth of a second.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
All right, go ahead, Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So the answers are yes and yes.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
So this the largest dam in the world is the
three Gorgeous Dam in China, and it's slowly up with water,
and so that's rain water that's falling and not going
back straight to the ocean. So it's staying up farther
from the center of the Earth.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
And just like a.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Skater in the Olympics, when they're spinning, they can change
their spin rate by putting their arms out. They slow
down when they put their arms out, and they speed
up when they bring their arms in. And so if
the mass is a little bit farther from the center
of the Earth, that means the Earth's rotation rate will
slow down by a conservation of angular momentum.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Okay, so angular momentum is something I haven't studied since college.
So can you in Plaine English explain that to us?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (02:45):
So, yeah, if you have a really good wheel on
a really good axle and you spin it, it will
spin at a constant rate, and in order to change
the rate of the spin, you have to.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Apply what's known as a torque.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
You have to apply a force somewhere off center on
the on the wheel.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
So that's what a break does.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Provides a force that's off center, and therefore that can
slow down the rotation rate. So that changes the angular momentum.
But the Earth, there's no break acting on the Earth.
So the Earth's angular momentum is more or less constant.
And so if the mass is farther from the center,
that means the rotation rate has to be a little
bit slower.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Why does why does it have to be slower?
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Oh, because the angular minum is is proportional to the
rotation rate and how far away the mass is from
the center of the rotation.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Wow, does that Does that have anything to do with gravity,
like in the sense of the force of gravity being
proportional to the square of the distance or is it
a completely unrelated thing.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Well, gravity also conserves angular momentum, So the Earth's orbit
around the Sun is also conserving angular momentum because the
force between the Sun and the Earth is directly along
the line between the centers, so that that's a force
that doesn't provide a torque. And so the angle momentum
of all the planets each or have the same angle
(04:12):
momentum at every point in their orbit. That was first
discovered by Kepler in the sixteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Okay, so my second question, I'll.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Slightly reword it.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
How is it possible to measure a change of six
one hundredth of a millionth of a second? And I
is this over the course of a day, since we're
talking about rotation or what.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
That's what I interpreted, that the figure that the Earth's
rotation rate in one day would be differed by six
of one hundredthser point zero six microseconds. Yeah, and that's
actually easily measurable. The clocks at NIST, which helped define
coordinated universal time, can measure things much much, much mo
(05:00):
more accurately than that. In fact, this rotation rate I
looked up, there's plenty of other rotation rate changes in
the Earth's spin that are much bigger in fact than
this effect that's described for the DAM. So even year
to year, the Earth's rotation period of rotation can change
by a milliseconds a thousand times more than this amount
(05:22):
that's predicted for the DAM.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Okay, last question for you, and I'm going to see
if this question implies that I'm a reasonably good physics
student or a moron. So based on what you said before,
I'm I'm thinking that if you if you, even though
the Earth isn't exactly straight up and down, just for
the purposes of our model, imagine imagine the Earth with
(05:48):
the access of axis of rotation straight up and down.
Are you saying that if the Three Gorges dam movede
it's in the northern hemisphere now right, if it moved
further north, closer to the North pole, are you saying
that it would then have less of an effect slowing
(06:10):
down the Earth's rotation.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
That's correct, because it would be closer to the axis
of rotation, so it would be a bigger effect near
the equator in a smaller effect near the poles.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, I'm a good physics student. Okay, let's switch Doe
here next semester. There you go, I bet you will.
So you told me that twenty twenty five is the
International Year of Quantum, and why wouldn't it be I
should get a T shirt to that effect rather than
my abolish Everything T shirt that I'm wearing today. And
(06:41):
I'm not sure how many listeners know that there's a
lot of really great work in theoretical physics, quantum physics,
anything related to time, atomic clocks and all this at
Boulder and at CU Boulder, And so I'm guessing you
know this guy Shalm, and I wonder if you can
(07:02):
tell me a little bit about what he's doing and
maybe entanglement that you and I talked out talked about before.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Sure. So the twenty.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Twenty five celebrates one hundred years since Heisenberg's paper on
what became known as matrix mechanics, and the following year
Schreddinger and a year after that di Iraq putting quantum
mechanics and relativity together. So there was an enormous burst
of research in the development of quantum mechanics about one
(07:33):
hundred years ago. So Christer Salm is a staff scientist
at NIST. He came to NIST some years ago and
he joined what was known as the CU PREP program,
So that's the Professional Research Experience Program. It's a program
that John Cumulot and I in physics run and we
have about one hundred CU employees working at NIST with
(07:53):
the top scientists at NIST doing cutting edge science and engineering.
Christ came and the thing he started working on is
quantum entanglement of photons.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
So he has a.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Device which can produce puts the an atom in a
specific quantum state so that when it decays, it gives
off two photons, one going in one direction and one in.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
The opposite direction.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
So those photons travel along and they have various properties
you can measure, and one of the properties is called polarization.
So if you have polarized sunglasses, the more ordinary ones
you buy in the in the Walmart. They what they
do is they filter out the polarization that where the
electric field is going horizontally and they let through the
(08:42):
electric field that goes vertical. So if you had two observers,
one at either end of a long optical fiber, which
is what he has in the lab, and they each
have on polarizing sunglasses, and if they're both standing straight up,
if one sees one photon, the other one will see
the other photon because they will both have the same polarizations.
(09:04):
They're in an entangled state. And if one person turns
their head in ninety degrees, one person will see the
photon and the other person will definitely not see the photon.
And they can do those measurements with the electronics there.
They can do the measurements nanoseconds apart, so that one
measurement will affect the other measurement instantaneously across hundreds of meters,
(09:28):
much faster than the speed of light. And so these
experiments are testing what's known as Bell's inequality. So it
was a theorem written down by John Bell the nineteen
sixties that said quantum mechanics is really spooky, and in fact,
it is what Einstein calls spooky action at a distance.
So a measurement of one photon can instantaneously affect the
(09:52):
measurement of another photon, even if it's very very far away.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I just want to tell listeners, I realized, like this
is pretty intense stuff, and it is, as I said
yesterday on another topic, a little bit too early in
the day for us to be drinking bourbon. So Paul
and I have been talking about this for a long time,
but I was actually texting with Mandy today this morning
because she.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Wants to be involved too.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
And sometime pretty soon here we are gonna put together
a listener event with me and Mandy and Paul Beale,
and we're all gonna get together somewhere and we're mostly
gonna listen to Paul. Maybe Mandy and I'll say a
thing or two, and then maybe we'll all hang out
and Mandy and I will answer questions and Paula'll answered questions,
and I'm gonna want him to talk about entanglement a
(10:38):
little more because it's just such an such an incredible thing.
But we will be doing that, so I just wanted
you to be aware, Paul. I also think, just as
a matter of history, I think it's pretty amazing that
the scientist who came up with this quantum stuff named
himself after a character in the TV series Breaking Bad,
(10:59):
which is it's a pretty amazing thing.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Heisenberg.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I mean Heisenberg.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Yes, Eisenberg was my favorite character in Breaking Bead.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, And how amazing that one of the great Physicists
of All Times named himself after the show, right, I mean,
you know, get that every day see you. Physics Professor
Paul Beil is a guy who makes me wish I
were still in college.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Not kidding, not kidding about that.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I just love these conversations and how Paul can make
most things.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
At least understandable, even for me. Thank you, Paul. Have
a wonderful weekend, and we'll be in touch soon. I
promise to schedulity.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I would really like to do that. So let's be
in touch and make this happens.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Thanks again, Paul, have a great weekend.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Thank you all right,
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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