One snowy day last year, I left Vienna, Austria, and meandered to one of the city’s cemeteries to visit the final resting place of a 19th-century giant of physics. On Ludwig Boltzmann’s tombstone is an imposing bust of a man with a stern expression and a frown. And above him, written in golden letters, is his entropy formula. It is probably one of the few tombstones in the world with an equation engraved on it.
I’m here to reflect because I think Boltzmann’s 100-year-old ideas can help solve one of the most difficult problems in physics today. The question is how quantum particles existing in an ambiguous cloud of possible states create solid matter. – A world defined by snow, leaves, tombstones, and everything else around us.
There have been many attempts to explain this over the years, including the far-fetched idea that other quantum possibilities unfold in many other parallel universes, or that they simply disappear. But my colleagues and I suspect that the answer lies with Boltzmann.
The theory he worked on, called thermodynamics, centered on entropy, a measure of how disordered something is. It explains how things are cooled, powered up, and how the mixing is done, which is very important for our purposes. He covers everyday events, such as mixing milk in coffee. But if we’re right, that power extends to the quantum realm as well. We believe those quantum possibilities will never be lost. Rather, they are just completely blended into the interstices of reality, invisible to us. it is…
