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The American Physical Society has honored Chad Orzel, associate professor of physics and astronomy, as a member of the Societys 2021 Fellows.

The APS Fellowship Program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise in physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.

Each year, no more than one-half of one percent of the Society membership is recognized by their peers for election to the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society. This year, 155 Fellows were selected for their contributions to science in an announcement Wednesday.

Orzel was nominated through the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public, which focuses on improving the public's knowledge of and appreciation for physics.

In addition to teaching and research, Orzel writes books about science for non-scientists. His first book, "How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog," explains modern physics through imaginary conversations with his German shepherd, Emmy. His most recent book, "Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects," explains how quantum physics shows up in the course of ordinary morning activities. "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which covers 5,000 years of the science and technology of marking time, is due out in January. It is based in part on a sophomore research seminar he has taught at Union.

Orzel also maintains a steady online presence, which started with the launch of a blog, Uncertain Principles, in 2002. He is a regular contributor to Forbes and Substack.

I use those platforms to try to show people a bit about life as a scientist and some of the wonders of physics, particularly quantum mechanics, said Orzel. This goes hand in hand with my work teaching at Union. Much of what's in the books and on the blogs is drawn from courses I teach, and I've used materials I developed for the books in some of my courses.

Orzel said it is a great honor to have his work recognized by his peers.

It really means a lot to know that other members of the physics community appreciate the time and effort I've put into trying to share physics with the broader public, he said. It would not have been possible without support from the Union community, both directly providing me the time and space to research and write (and access to library books and journals), and more indirectly through having colleagues to ask questions and bounce ideas off.

Orzel joined Union in 2001.

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Chad Orzel, associate professor of physics and astronomy, honored as APS Fellow - Union College

Richard Feynman with Yang Chen Ning, American physicists, circa 1950s.

Quantum particles exist and don't exist. Space is likely a moldable fabric. Dark matter is invisible, yet it binds the entire universe. And our universe, created from an explosion 13.8 billion years ago, is infinitely expanding into something. Or, maybe nothing.

Unless you're a trained physicist, at least one of those statements probably hurts your brain.

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We experience a sort of cognitive dissonance when attempting to comprehend the vastness of such unimaginable, complex concepts. But theoretical physicists think about, and even conjure, these ideas all day, every day.

How do they do it?

According to new research, published Monday in the journal npj Science of Learning, physicists' brains grapple with counterintuitive theories by automatically categorizing things as either "measurable" or "immeasurable."

"Most of the things we encounter every day, like a rock, a lake, a flower, you can say, 'Well it's about the size of my fist... but the concepts that physicists think about don't have that property," said Marcel Just, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and first author of the study.

To study exactly how physicists' brains work, Just and fellow researchers gave 10 Carnegie Mellon physics faculty members -- with differing specialties and language backgrounds -- a ledger of physics concepts. Then, they used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans to examine the subjects' brain activity as the individuals went down the list.

In contrast to normal MRIs, which help with anatomical studies, functional MRIs can detect brain activity based on fluctuations in blood flow, glucose and oxygen.

Turns out, each physicist's brain organizes concepts within the field into two groups. The researchers were just left to figure out how to label each group.

"I looked at the list, and said well, 'What do concepts like potential energy, torque, acceleration, wavelength, frequency ... have in common? At the other end of the same scale, there are things like dark matter; duality; cosmology; multiverse," explained co-author Reinhard A. Schumacher, a particle physicist at Carnegie Mellon University.

The average person might lump Schumacher's descriptions on the latter end of the spectrum as mind-bending and inexplicable, but the most important connecting factor, he realized, is that they're immeasurable.

In the brain scans, these concepts didn't indicate activity of what he calls "extent," loosely referring to placing tangible restrictions on something.

Physicists' brains, the team concluded, automatically discern between abstract items, like quantum physics, and comprehensible, measurable items like velocity and frequency.

Basically, the stuff that provokes a sense of perplexity in us non-physicists doesn't elicit thoughts of "extent" for them. That's probably why they can think about those things with relative ease, whereas we begin worrying about scale.

Speaking from experience, Schumacher says considering abstract physics ideas as a student can be very different from conceiving them as a longtime physicist.

"I think there's a sense that as physicists grow older, the concepts kind of crystallize in the mind, and you end up using them in a more efficient way," Schumacher said.

"The more you use these ideas, the more they become like old friends."

The brain scans also support that assertion. Not only did the team test faculty brain activity, they also looked at physics students' brains.

"In the old physicists who have been doing it for years," Schumacher said, "it's like the brain is more efficient. It doesn't have to light up as much, because you're going right for the thing right away."

Additionally, Just noted the professors "had more right hemisphere activation, suggesting that they had a greater number of sort of distantly associated concepts."

While a physics student might relate velocity to acceleration, it seems the professors were relating velocity to much more niche subjects activated by remote locations of the brain. Velocity of the universe's expansion, perhaps?

Just emphasizes how evolution of the brain to accommodate new, abstract ideas happens to all of us. Perhaps only theoretical physicists can easily comprehend duality or a multiverse, but people working in other fields, of course, ponder complex ideas of their own.

Chemists, for instance, have to visualize unseen orbital structures of atoms and bond configurations only drawn in textbooks. And the general public, over time, has adapted to inventions like iPhones and the cloud. Think about it. We can comprehend the cloud, which is pretty bizarre.

Imagine traveling back in time to the 1700s and explaining to someone the workings of an invisible data storage mine. They'd probably feel the way we do when we picture the quantum domain -- we'd be the "physicists" to them.

"We have this understanding now," explained Schumacher. "Even if you develop some new scientific concept, we can more or less predict what the brain is going to do with it."

For instance, during the exercise, when asked to think about oscillations, Just said some subject's brains activated sections relating to rhythmic activity. The organ had basically repurposed areas used in ancient times for general rhythms, like maybe music, to allow for modern physics concepts.

"The idea of sine waves is just a couple hundred years old," Just said. "But people have been looking at ripples on a pond forever."

Just also suggests it could become possible to actively help the brain repurpose itself, harnessing its ability to adapt. If we allow children to expand their minds through education by introducing abstract concepts sooner and more rigorously, he says, maybe one day they can readily imagine things the way scientists do.

Even further down the road, he says the findings could inform studies of mental health -- how does the brain's organizational and adaptation capabilities operate while in distress?

"I think it's the most fascinating question in the world," Just remarked. "'What is the essence of human brains? How can we make them healthier; think better?"

Read more:

Black holes and the multiverse: Decoding how physicists' brains work - CNET

Mysterious forces may be a reliable trope in science fiction, but in reality, physicists have long agreed that all interactions between objects evidently arise from just four fundamental forces. Yet that has not stopped them from ardently searching for an additional, as-yet-unknown fifth fundamental force. The discovery of such a force could potentially resolve some of the biggest open questions in physics today, from the nature of dark energy to the seemingly irreconcilable differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Now, a recent experiment carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is offering fresh hints about a fifth forces possible character. An international collaboration of researchers used neutrons and a silicon crystal to set new limits on the strength of a potential fifth fundamental force at atomic scales. Published in Science in September, the study also includes measurements of the precise structure of both silicon crystals and neutrons themselves.

This work of fifth force searches actually goes on over the entire length scale of human observation, says NIST physicist Benjamin Heacock, the studys lead author. Because different theories predict different fifth force properties, he says, physicists have looked for its subtle effects in everything from surveys of astronomical objects like galaxies to the miniscule motions of custom-built microscopic instruments. So far, however, all searches have come up empty.

Theres a reason to think we're missing something, notes Eric Adelberger, a physicist at the University of Washington who was not involved with the study. His own team has previously looked for some of the proposed new forces and, with great experimental certainty, found nothing at all. In work recognized in 2021 with a Breakthrough Prize, they concluded that the fifth force must be much weaker than some theories predicted, or that it simply does not exist. The NIST experiment follows a similar idea but uses a novel experimental technique. The goal from the experimentalist perspective is to make strides forward in limiting [the strength of] new forces, wherever the experiment can do it, and for us that happens to be on the atomic scale, Heacock says.

Gauging relevant interactions at such scales is uniquely challenging, according to Adelberger, in part because in the atomic realm a typical object is about a million times smaller than the width of an average human hair. You have to ask, how much matter can you get within a little volume associated with that length scale? It's absolutely tiny, he says. And even the barest influence from other, known forces such as electromagnetism can easily scuttle the delicate measurements. To solve that problem, the NIST team relied on neutrons, the neutrally charged subatomic particles usually found in atomic nuclei, as neutrons are barely swayed by electromagnetic effects.

Further, the even smaller particles that make up neutrons, called quarks, are glued together so intensely by the strong interaction (one of the four known fundamental forces) that it is exceedingly difficult to physically disturb them. The strong interaction that holds quarks together in a neutron is insanely strong, so the neutron gets almost no distortion when it gets close to [other] matter, explains W. Michael Snow, a physicist at Indiana University who was also uninvolved with the new experiment. Studying the behavior of neutrons is consequently well-suited for seeking out new forces because there are not many easily measurable effects influencing these subatomic particles to begin with. One of the new studys co-authors, Albert Young, a physicist at North Carolina State University, puts it simply: At present, at our [atomic] length scale, neutrons kind of rule.

In their experiment, researchers observed neutrons that had traveled through a specially machined, nearly perfect silicon crystal made by collaborators at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics in Japan. Silicon is a common material, but precision machining of silicon is a super difficult thing, underlines Michael Huber, a NIST physicist and another of the studys co-authors. Inside this perfect crystalshielded from light, heat, vibrations and other sources of external noise thanks to special NIST facilitiessilicon atoms are arranged in predictable grid-like patterns.

Neutrons traveling through that grid collided with some silicon atoms and evaded others. However, as the neutrons journey took place at the atomic scale where laws of quantum mechanics dictate that all particles behave like waves, their collisions with silicon atoms were similar to breakers crashing into a shore dotted with large, evenly spaced rocks. When a neutron bumped into a silicon atom then, this interaction created something like a neutron wave ripple. This ripple overlapped with other neutron wave ripples originating near adjacent silicon atoms, resulting in a wave interference pattern not unlike rough, choppy water along a rocky coast.

Most crucially, through clever experimental design, the researchers ensured that some of the neutron waves lapping on the silicon atom shores overlapped in a very specific way that resulted in so-called Pendellsung oscillations. These oscillations are roughly analogous to beats, and are best thought of as pulsing, alternating low-then-loud auditory effects that happen when two nearly identical sound waves are played simultaneously. In the case of this new experiment, they are akin to a distinctive but difficult to detect ripple pattern within the neutron waves breaking along the silicon seashore. Although Pendellsung interference was discovered and demonstrated a long time ago, in the 1960s at MIT, it's rarely used and most experiments are not sensitive to it, Huber explains.

His team carefully analyzed these special ripples, looking for key details about the silicon rocks and the neutron waves that crashed into them. It was as if they could tell how much water each wave carried, whether any rocks moved in the collision and more. Importantly, had an atomic-scale fifth-force interaction been at play, the details of the neutron wave interference pattern would have revealed its presence, much like how ripples in surf can follow the outline of a submerged sea wall. Although the researchers found no signs of a fifth force, they did determine a new limit, 10 times stricter than before, on how strong such a force could be.

The NIST team believes that their innovative experimental setup will allow them to make even more precise measurements in the future. They already managed, for instance, to infer details of the arrangement of quarks inside a neutron, as well as some precise motions of silicon atoms, which could prove useful for the manufacture of fine-tuned electronics. However, their quest to constrain the strength of the fifth force, a task they accomplish by combining multiple separate neutron-property measurements under certain assumptions, remains the most promising and the most difficult part of their work. We can keep and should keep searching [for the fifth force], says Yoshio Kamiya, a physicist at Tokyo University who was uninvolved with the new study. This is just one step.

Adelberger agrees, and he is eager see new results from the next phase of experimentation. There's a lot of stuff that has to go into getting this kind of a result, he says. Its a tiny effect, and researchers have to keep accounting for all other tiny effects. Both Kamiya and Adelberger think that there is room for debate on how strongly the new work should make physicists reconsider their theories about the strength of a possible fifth force. Based on the current study, Adelberger says, too many potential sources of error remain; even if the NIST team had found positive evidence of a new force, he says, it could not be considered truly definitive.

Heacock notes that his team already has ideas for advancing their work, for instance by using germanium crystals instead of silicon, in which atoms are arranged in different structures that could be even more advantageous for precise observations of neutron interference. Another goal is to seriously expand the available catalog of precise atomic scale measurements for any and all fifth forcehunting physicists to consult in their own independent work. Ideally, Heacock notes, the measurements in the new study are just a first few opening the door for the dozens more to come. I think any experiment will eventually hit a wall, but I also think we're pretty far from it, he says.

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New Universal Force Tested by Blasting Neutrons through Crystal - Scientific American