Sunday, June 14, 2009

Statistical Mechanics

Most people these days have heard of quantum mechanics, and how it somehow brings chance and probability into physics on a basic level. This is a misleading truth, because actually quantum mechanics is perfectly deterministic, and not probabilistic at all, until we come to measure anything. Then the probabilities come in, and only then. The problem is that quantum measurement is a very subtle thing that is far from fully understood. And one thing we do know is that inferring how things really are, from how things look, is uniquely tricky in quantum mechanics.

To appreciate the subtlety of quantum mechanics, it helps to know about the older and less tricky place that probability has in physics: statistical mechanics. I doubt that most non-physicists have ever heard of statistical mechanics. In many places one can even earn a Bachelor's degree in physics without ever taking a course in it. This is unfortunate, because statistical mechanics is so important, that a physicist who doesn't know about it is like a Scout who doesn't know that fire needs air. Statistical mechanics is a sort of post-processing stage that has to be performed on virtually all the rest of physics — even including quantum mechanics — in order to make sense of anything but the very simplest and most controlled experiments.

Mechanics without statistics is the physics we learn in school. A rock flies through the air, falling under gravity. Ignore air friction, and model the rock as a point with a given mass — a particle. Apply Newton's Laws to particles: that's mechanics.

'In principle,' we may be told, 'the universe is a large number of particles, governed by Newton's Laws.' In practice, of course, most of these particles are beyond our control, beyond our observation, or at least beneath our notice. We do not see the vast swarms of air molecules that surround us and fill our lungs. And even if we could mark their paths, solving Newton's equations for so many interacting particles is far beyond our computational power. Thus do we see the vast gap between the pristine principles of physics, and the practical real world.

Bah. Physics doesn't care about pristine. Sure, part of physics is about trying to reduce everything, 'in principle', to some elegant little Theory of Everything. We're writing one big long footnote to Plato, who wanted everything to boil down to the five regular polyhedra. But that whole grand unified simplicity thing is really the hood ornament of physics, not the engine. The thing that drives physics is putting principles into practice, and codifying practice into principle. So no, the fact that we can't follow every atom does not make a huge gap between physics and reality. There is a whole huge branch of physics which is all about the principles and the practice of dealing with huge numbers of particles that cannot be individually observed, predicted, or controlled.

And that is the branch of physics called statistical mechanics. It uses probability theory to get the best results we can from what we do know, in spite of what we don't. Whether or not God plays dice with the universe, physicists do, to make up for the fact that we're not God.