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Physicists Do What Einstein Thought Impossible
An anonymous reader writes "Einstein worked on Brownian motion (the movement of small particles in a fluid as they collide with the fluid's molecules) in 1905, but said it would be 'impossible' to determine the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance. Now researchers have gone and done it, by suspending a dust-sized glass sphere in air (which slowed down its dance moves, since it had fewer collisions with spaced-out air molecules than it would have had with water molecules). The researchers held the sphere in place with 'laser chopsticks,' and then watched how the glass bead bounced around to determine its direction and speed (abstract)."
Laser chopsticks were invented to keep chow mein hot until the end of the meal.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
When people say "impossible" they generally mean "not possible given what I currently understand about XYZ"
Unless Einstein explicitly said "this will not be possible, ever"
I mean, heck the article demonstrates this itself:
"In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam “optical tweezers.”"
I'm sorry but: No freaking shit. In 1907 I doubt many people would have foreseen that
Einstein only said it was impossible from a tecnical point of view. Given he used brownian motion as direct evidence for the atomic/molecular nature of matter I am pretty sure he appreciated that with future technology it may be possible to do this kind of experiment...
If the glass bead were moving in such a way that was too subtle for them to measure, would they even know they couldn't measure it? What if Einstein was right and was simply implying that the movements eventually broke down so far that they were unobservable (similar to Planck's work)?
Exactly - they went and spouted "Oh, look at us, we disproved (Great Person X)'s work!" when all they really did was use selective reading and ignore the other half the book about the Uncertainty Principle
If you read the PhysicsWorld article, you'll see it actually says:
But he believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place
Ahhh... still don't have the original source quotation from Einstein here, but it sounds like Einstein believed it was "impossible in practice" - in other words, that the technology didn't exist at that time to measure rapid fluctuations over microsecond or even nanosecond time scales, and maybe he couldn't even imagine such technology existing.
So he never actually said he thought it was beyond the physical limits of the universe. There was no proof or physical law involved.
Now call me up when somebody figures out how to move matter or information faster than the speed of light (i.e. group velocity greater than c). Einstein really did believe that was *impossible*.
So are you suggesting that the infinite probability drive is improbable? Maybe it can run off of it's own improbability.