TTC Impossible Physics beyond the Edge Impossible Physics beyond the Edge (Guidebook).pdf

Impossible: Physics beyond the Edge

Parts I & II

Benjamin Schumacher, Ph.D.

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Benjamin Schumacher, Ph.D.

Professor of Physics, Kenyon College

Benjamin Schumacher is Professor of Physics at Kenyon College,

where he has taught for 20 years. He received his B.A. from Hendrix

College and received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The University

of Texas at Austin in 1990, where he was the last doctoral student of John

Archibald Wheeler.

Professor Schumacher is the author of numerous scientiﬁ c papers and

books, including Physics in Spacetime: An Introduction to Special

Relativity (Rinton Press, 2005), and is the coauthor of Quantum Processes,

Systems, and Information (Cambridge, 2010). As one of the founders of

quantum information theory, Professor Schumacher introduced the term

“qubit,” invented quantum data compression (also known as Schumacher

compression), and established several fundamental results about the

information capacity of quantum systems. For his contributions, he won the

2002 Quantum Communication Award, the premier international prize in the

ﬁ eld, and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Besides

quantum information theory, he has done physics research on black holes,

thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics.

Professor Schumacher has spent sabbaticals working at Los Alamos

National Laboratory and at the Institute for Quantum Information at the

California Institute of Technology, where he was a Moore Distinguished

Scholar. He has also done research at the Isaac Newton Institute of the

University of Cambridge, the Santa Fe Institute, the Perimeter Institute, the

University of New Mexico, the University of Montreal, the University of

Innsbruck, and the University of Queensland.

At Kenyon College, Professor Schumacher mostly teaches physics, but he

also regularly ventures into astronomy, mathematics, scientiﬁ c computing,

and the humanities.

Table of Contents

Impossible: Physics beyond the Edge

Professor Biography .....................................................................................i

Course Scope ................................................................................................ 1

Lecture One From Principles to Paradoxes

and Back Again................................................... 4

Lecture Two Almost Impossible .............................................. 6

Lecture Three Perpetual Motion ................................................ 8

Lecture Four On Sunshine and Invisible Particles ................. 10

Lecture Five Reﬂ ections on the Motive Power of Fire .......... 13

Lecture Six Maxwell’s Demon............................................. 16

Lecture Seven Absolute Zero ................................................... 19

Lecture Eight Predicting the Future......................................... 22

Lecture Nine Visiting the Past ................................................ 25

Lecture Ten Thinking in Space-Time ................................... 27

Lecture Eleven Faster than Light ............................................... 31

Lecture Twelve Black Holes and Curved Space-Time ............... 34

Lecture Thirteen A Spinning Universe,

Wormholes, and Such ....................................... 38

Lecture Fourteen What Is Symmetry? .......................................... 41

Lecture Fifteen Mirror Worlds ................................................... 43

Lecture Sixteen Invasion of the Giant Insects ............................ 46

Lecture Seventeen The Curious Quantum World............................ 48

Lecture Eighteen Impossible Exactness........................................ 51

Lecture Nineteen Quantum Tunneling .......................................... 54

Lecture Twenty Whatever Is Not Forbidden

Is Compulsory................................................... 58

Lecture Twenty-One Entanglement and Quantum Cloning................ 62

Lecture Twenty-Two Geometry and Conservation ............................. 65

Lecture Twenty-Three Symmetry, Information, and Probability .......... 69

Lecture Twenty-Four The Future of the Impossible ............................ 72

Table of Contents

Impossible: Physics beyond the Edge

Glossary ...................................................................................................... 75

Biographical Notes ..................................................................................... 88

Bibliography ............................................................................................. 108

iii

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