A Moon Struck Awakening in India.
On Sabbatical in 1997 I visited the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Madras) to do research with my former student who is a prof at IIT, Mangala Sunder Krishnan. Strange things happened to me in India.
At that time I was winding down research into NMR and was thinking about new areas that involved spin. As an undergrad, I had read, but not digested, the 1966 paper of Bell that showed von Neumann had been wrong on an important theorem about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists had been misled for 30 years. I returned to those papers again, and then went on to read about the Aspect experiments and the Bennett et al paper on quantum teleportation. I also found especially intriguing was a letter to Nature letter by my former squash partner at York University, Tony Sudbery, which summarized the Bennett paper–Instant Teleportation! Nothing was making sense and the more I read the more confused I got. I could see no physical basis. It couldn’t be the math which had been scrutinized by many. Something must have been missed.
It was the evening of March 24th when Sunder suggested we go down to the Bay of Bengal to have a drink on the beach. As I looked over the Bay, I saw what I initially thought was the sun setting. It was large, gold and full, half hidden by the sea’s horizon. I was struck for a few seconds by its beauty and felt a surge of good energy flow through me. I suddenly realized that it was not the sun setting but the full moon rising. After a night of vivid dreams, I started to see through things and muddles became clear. As this continued, and with the newness and intrigue of India around me, I started to think this feeling must be what Nirvana is like: brief glimpses of the simple truth, not just in science but also in life.
It was at that time I decided a few things, and one was that Bell’s theorem must be wrong. I did not know why, but that is what I wanted to find out. It has played a major part in my research ever since.
Mahabalipuram, India
I took a long weekend at Mahabalipuram, a resort village with ancient statues, an active trade of granite carvers, and a 1960’s hippy-like atmosphere along the beach. I helped fishermen pull in their catch; had a fish and rice meal in the hut of the village head man; and found an old woman who told me about the auspicious significance of saffron. I got up at dawn as the crows crowed, had a swim in the pounding 25 C (77 F) surf, walked to the temple, where the priest asked,
“What is your good name?”
He poured water on my head, put flowers around my neck, and placed a spot of red on my brow, and said,
“For Brahma the creator.”
“The creator of ideas too!” I thought.
I passed him a few rupees and I went for breakfast. I wondered how long this spiritual state would last.
No, I wasn’t smoking anything. But a few months after returning home, I found out that the anti-malaria pills I was taking, Mefloquine, had interesting side effects.
Connecting with Felix Bloch and the Golden age of Physics
Kamerlingh Onnes Lab, Leiden Holland
The Lorentz Institute in Leiden, Holland was on the top floor of the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. At that time I was a post doc and in 1972, Professor Felix Bloch was Lorentz Professor for six months. It was a great experience for me to meet and talk to the person credited, along with Purcell and Pound, with the discovery of NMR. His thesis supervisor was Werner Heisenberg. Bloch left for Stanford in 1933 at age 28 after the Nazi rise to power. For his discovery of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952.
My post doc work was in the large experimental Molecular Physics group of Jan Beenakker. I was the sole theoretician trying to interpret their experiments. Essentially the group studied the effects of electric and magnetic fields on the transport properties of gases (the Sentfleben-Beenakker effect). I had studied the gas phase NMR experiments of Myer Bloom and his student, Ronald Dong for my PhD under the direction of Robert Snider (University of British Columbia). I was therefore somewhat awed at the prospect of learning how Bloch discovered NMR.
He gave a Colloquium Erenfestii in which he recalled the post war research at Stanford and where the first NMR experiment was done. He said something like:
We were not under a lot of pressure. We did not work weekends nor late at night and took our coffee breaks.
None-the-less, they were successful in seeing the first absorption of energy between the two levels of the spin of ½ magnitude which are split in the presence of a magnetic field—the Zeeman Effect.
The experiment consisted of an electromagnet, a resonance coil and an oscilloscope that could detect the absorption of energy between the two Zeeman levels. They calculated the frequency needed to cause the transition and tuned the magnetic field to that strength: actually the frequency was fixed, and they chose the field strength to give the right splitting.
There was a big toggle switch which was used to turn the magnetic field on and off. When everything was set up, they turned on the field and looked at the oscilloscope. The line was flat, so no absorption.
Let’s go for coffee.
Bloch apparently said.
So someone closed the big toggle switch to turn off the field. The person sitting at the oscilloscope said,
There’s a blip!
They had calculated the magnetic field strength too high, and when the field dropped, it scanned past the correct strength and the absorption was observed.
Turn it on again.
and as the field grew and passed the resonance, the blip was again observed.
Apparently they did this several times, so the first NMR experiment consisted of Felix Bloch and his students watching a blip come and go as someone toggled the electromagnet on and off.
The Bloch Equations express the relaxation in terms of T1 and T2, well known to all NMR users. Bloch did a lot more for physics than I can touch on here. As he spoke, however, I knew he had known and studied with many of those from that Golden Age of Pre-War physics.
It was this link to the past that he gave me, something I think everyone treasures.
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by Laidler, Meiser, Sanctuary
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Bryan Sanctuary, a Professor of Chemistry at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), is the primary author of this blog as well as president of MCH Multimedia. | www.mchmultimedia.com | and co- author of Physical Chemistry - Laidler, Meiser, Sanctuary
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