Free The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios Page B

electromagnetism.
    Physicists at the Gila Flats facility in the late 1950s, attempting to investigate the nature of the intrinsic field that governed the inner working of the atom, studied what happened when the intrinsic field was removed. This was essentially a variation on the traditional experimental technique to study subatomic matter—smash the atoms together. Actually these “atom smashers” study collisions not of atoms but of their building blocks, such as protons and electrons. Particle accelerators push protons 20 around a ring at velocities very near the speed of light. When they collide with a fixed target or with another beam of protons traveling in the opposite direction, the large energy of the collision can enable the generation of other, exotic particles, providing a practical application of Einstein’s relation E = mc 2 . It is through such violent reactions that the structure of matter has been elucidated.
    The physicists attempting to explore the intrinsic field took essentially a subtler, though no less destructive, approach. To isolate and remove the intrinsic field, they created another intrinsic field that was completely “out of phase” with the original field. Here they applied the same principle of interference, illustrated in Figure 4b, that certain sound-elimination devices employ—creating sound waves that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ambient sound such that the two wave fronts completely cancel each other, resulting in the removal of the original sound. Similarly, in order to cancel the intrinsic field of matter, one must identify the frequency and phase of the field and create an identical field with the same amplitude but exactly out of phase with the original. Thus, it takes an intrinsic field generator to perform an intrinsic field subtraction.
    Without the electromagnetic, strong, or weak forces, there is nothing to hold atoms or nuclei together, and all matter would rapidly and violently be torn apart. Unfortunately for Dr. Osterman, just such a fate befell him when he was accidentally locked in the intrinsic field chamber during one such test run in 1959. Osterman, along with concrete block no. 15, which was the intended target of that day’s intrinsic field removal experiment, was completely dematerialized once his strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces were negated. Through a process that remains poorly understood to this day, Osterman was able to re-create himself, atom by atom, cell by cell, to become the superpowered being known as Dr. Manhattan.
    Jon Osterman (also known as Dr. Manhattan) was created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in the graphic novel Watchmen (originally published in 1986-87 as a twelve-issue miniseries). Figure 11 shows the scene from Watchmen when Osterman first manifests in his post-intrinsic field extraction form. One of the most striking aspects of the reborn Dr. Manhattan is that his skin is bright blue, while Osterman had been a fairly typical Caucasian male. (Another feature of Dr. Manhattan that is hard to miss is that when he first successfully reintegrated his corporeal existence over the lunch tables in the Gila Flats cafeteria, he was completely naked. This aspect of the story turns out to be accurate—we physicists are extremely secure in our sexuality!)

    Figure 11: Physicist Jon Osterman when he first reassembled himself following the removal of his “intrinsic field” in the graphic novel Watchmen.
    Purely from a practical standpoint, the molecular chemical bonds that link the trillions and trillions of atoms in a person represent a vast amount of stored electrostatic energy. In order to cancel out, the “intrinsic field” for a person would require the energy of a nuclear power plant at full capacity. Even assuming that we could turn off the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, there is no way that any poor scientist subjected to such a procedure would be able to reconstitute himself following this ordeal. But, in