Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw, The Quantum Universe

This was an incredibly ambitious idea. The by book itself was pretty bonkers. They aim to explain Quantum Mechanics in a form we could all understand including all the maths.

Jeff and Brian have been collaborating together for most of their careers. One of their first joint publications was a paper exploring the possibilities of Higgs-less physics.

This is public lectures like you’ve not quite seen before. The Royal Festival Hall seats 2,500 people and it’s packed. Not with students who are obliged to attend for the sake of their course or attendance record, but with members of the general public who have paid to be here. People who have an active interest in understanding quantum mechanics.

Brian Cox strides onto the stage with a mancunian swagger. He’s probably used to adulating crowds by now. Jeff Forshaw seems a little less used to this level of limelight but his ability as a physicist stands him in good stead.

Jeff Forshaw effuses about his subject. It’s thrilling to see this many people joining with him in this.

I love physics because it explains the way the world works… quantum mechanics is comprehensible. It’s not easy, but you can understand it if you want to. Jeff Forshaw

The dynamic duo go on to explain — in tag-fight style — the general concepts of Quantum Mechanics. How a particle moving from one point to another passes through every point in the Universe instantaneously before arriving. In my mind I am imagining how this is somewhat like the Infinite Improbability Drive in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

If could you take out all the space in an atom you could fit the human race into the volume of a sugar cube… Brian Cox

They also describe Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) by way of a Feynman diagram on a flipchart. The image projected on a large display above them, interspersed with close-ups of Jeff and Brian. In spite of rough felt pen doodles, this is pretty slick stuff. QED. is all about how matter and light interact. Richard Feynman who was one of its founders, called it “the jewel of physics” because of the extremely accurate predictions that it could make.

It is inevitable that at this point the double slit experiment comes into play. This now classic experiment demonstrates the bizarre particle-wave duality of energy. It’s a tricky thing to really grasp but they do a splendid job of explaining it.

The set-up is photons are fired at a screen with two slits and a detector the other side. You might expect the photons to behave as particles or objects, and collect on the other side in two areas corresponding to the two slits in the screen. However, experiments show that the particles actually behave like points in a wave and interfere with each other to form a pattern on the detector. In does get weirder than that but we won’t go into that here.

This lecture was a great success for several reasons. Firstly because it brought a complex subject to a non-professional audience in a format that was entertaining and engaging. It also gave me an enormous sense of well being to feel part of a greater movement to a more scientific society. Let’s not forget that it was of course a book promotion event, but I look forward to more promotional events if they can tackle their subject and content with as much energy and vigour as Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw do.

The Quantum Universe: Everything that can happen does happen is available from Amazon and other good stores.