Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021: A scent of Feynman

One of the most famous speech by Richard Feynman is There's plenty of room at the bottom:

Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can’t handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the “hands” there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.

The idea is to manipulate molecules to build, for example, an electric engine, or a book, or something else. The most curious fact about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 is that Johan Jarnestad has illustrated the work of Benjamin List and David MacMillan using a couple of workers, an image that, in a particular way, is very similar to Feynman's idea.

Building molecules is a difficult art. Benjamin List and David MacMillan are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction: organocatalysis. This has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research, and has made chemistry greener.

I hope to write soon an article about Feynman and miniaturization obviously from the physics point of view.
Stay tuned!

Perpetual motion

Popular Science's cover by Norman Rockwell, October 1920 - via commons

Like the research on the philosopher's stone, the mysterious alchemical material which should allow the transmutation of the elements, particularly of base metals into precious gold, there is the search for a tool that can generate perpetual motion, or a gear capable to move indefinitely without any need of power supply from the outside.
As we will see this research has well over a thousand years and continues today among people who genuinely (and a little naively!) looking to get what would be a considerable technological leap and scammers themselves. The best way to deal with all of these is to remember what Richard Feynman said some students who invited him to a demonstration for an engine running unless perpetual but rather long:

You have to ask yourself, 'Where is the power supply?'⁽¹⁾

The magic wheel

Bhaskara's wheel

The first tool would have to create the perpetual motion was the so called magic wheel, a wheel that turns on its axis the movement of which would have to be powered by a lot of magnets. This instrument made its first appearance in the eighth century in Bavaria: designed to rotate in perpetuity was defeated in the long run, by friction, so that the magic wheel was overcome by the inevitable thermodynamic end. Although the times don't match, someone say around that this magic wheel from Bavaria is based on an earlier project proposed by the Indian mathematician and astronomer Bhaskara II, wholived in 12th century.
His most important work is the Siddhanta-Shiromani, the Crown of treatises, a poem where, among others results, he comes to approximate the derivative for the sine function: \[\frac{\text{d}}{\text{d} y} \sin y = \cos y\] He also made a demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem, and his path is crossed, as it can only in the tortuous paths of mathematics, with Pierre de Fermat, the amateur mathematician known to throw challenges to more titles colleagues, as in the case the best known Fermat's last theorem or for the following Diophantine equation: \[61 x^2 + 1 = y^2\] The latter, proposed in 1657, was resolved in 18th century by Euler, unless we consider the solution discovery by Bhaskara II already 6 centuries before.
As astronomer most of his contributions are contained in the aforementioned Siddhanta-Shiromani, where, as we have seen, he has developed some concepts about trigonometry, a branch of mathematics important, if not necessary to make observations as accurate as possible.
Bhaskara II, astronomically speaking, was heir of Aryabhata (fourth century) and Brahmagupta (seventh century) who they developed, about a thousand years in advance on European astronomers, a heliocentric model. Drawing on these theoretical and observational basis, Bhaskara II made a series of observations on celestial bodies, first of all on moon and sun.
As an engineer, however, it is best known for Bhaskara's wheel, a wheel whose spokes were partially filled with mercury. According Bhaskara it would be just that mercury to ensure the perpetual motion of the wheel⁽²⁾.

JMP #58, 4: path integrals and friends

The path integral formulation of quantum mechanics replaces the single, classical trajectory of a system with the sum over an infinity of quantum possible trajectories. To compute this sum is used a functional integral. The most famous interpretation is dued by Richard Feynman. In an Euclidean spacetime we speak about Euclidean path integral:

Bernardo, R. C. S., & Esguerra, J. P. H. (2017). Euclidean path integral formalism in deformed space with minimum measurable length. Journal of Mathematical Physics, 58(4), 042103. doi:10.1063/1.4979797

We study time-evolution at the quantum level by developing the Euclidean path-integral approach for the general case where there exists a minimum measurable length. We derive an expression for the momentum-space propagator which turns out to be consistent with recently developed $\beta$-canonical transformation. We also construct the propagator for maximal localization which corresponds to the amplitude that a state which is maximally localized at location $\xi'$ propagates to a state which is maximally localized at location $\xi"$ in a given time. Our expression for the momentum-space propagator and the propagator for maximal localization is valid for any form of time-independent Hamiltonian. The nonrelativistic free particle, particle in a linear potential, and the harmonic oscillator are discussed as examples.

Other papers from JMP #58, 4, follows:

Feynman in comics

with @estuan about #Feynman #Ottaviani #Myrick #comics #physics

Italian version written with Maria-Angela Silleni.

Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick, reported by Maria Popova as one of the top 11 scientific popular books of 2012, is a splendid example of how to make interesting science. Even with the comics.

Telling a man’s life is always an arduous and difficult task. So it is necessary to make choices, often focusing on successes and leaving aside failures, especially if you talk about a physicist who has been interested in the most disparate fields within his specialization.
This is the some idea that Lawrence Krauss has dealt with the life of Richard Feynman in Quantum Man and the same spirit seems to animate Feynman, the graphic novel by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick.

Introducing Feynman?

After the series of Introducing, a hybrid of illustrated and comic books about science, one of the most effective comics dedicated to science, brings the signature of Ottaviani, which, on the pages of Suspended In Language, with the contribution of the comic artist Leland Purvis, told the life of Niels Bohr, the master of the Copenhagen School, whose interpretation of quantum mechanics dominated during the first steps of this new approach of physics to nature.
Ottaviani knows very well the risks in comic book science genre: in particular, falling into teaching and slamming the reader into boredom is always around the corner; so thanks to an episode narrative (which is also a limit, as we shall see below), accompanied by synthetic drawings, the volume reaches the disclosure purpose without betraying the aspect of entertainment.
A great role in the success of the graphic novel is dued by the subject: Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, was an eccentric character with a strong sense of humor and impatient with social conventions. Thanks to these features he often found himself in embarrassing situations with unexpected consequences. A passionate bongo player and amateur sketcher of naked women, picked up his two-volume adventures, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, which wrote to seem not overly serious: and most of the episodes narrated in the comic are getting from his autobiographical stories.

Idiosyncratic Thinking: a computer heuristics lecture

http://t.co/7JB3CPaQt9 #Feynman

Richard Feynman, Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, gives us an insightful lecture about computer heuristics: how computers work, how they file information, how they handle data, how they use their information in allocated processing in a finite amount of time to solve problems and how they actually compute values of interest to human beings. These topics are essential in the study of what processes reduce the amount of work done in solving a particular problem in computers, giving them speeds of solving problems that can outmatch humans in certain fields but which have not yet reached the complexity of human driven intelligence. The question if human thought is a series of fixed processes that could be, in principle, imitated by a computer is a major theme of this lecture and, in Feynman's trademark style of teaching, gives us clear and yet very powerful answers for this field which has gone on to consume so much of our lives today.

Orange Juice

about #RichardFeynman playing #bongo

Here, after a lecture, Richard Feynman plays his signature "Orange Juice" theme with his friend and fellow drum player, Ralph Leighton.

The Universe in a glass of wine

by @ulaulaman about #RichardFeynman #physics #universe #wine

Once upon a time, Richard Feynman telled a story about the universe and a glass of wine:

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.
There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it!
If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

You can find the text and the audio on the site of Efthymios Kallos, but... The Universe in a glass of wine is also an artist exposition: see, for example, the Life cycle of a star by Natalie Kay Thatcher. And it is interesting that Natalie realized two comics about Feynman: How to start a Feynman (preview), and the Feynman zine (review by Pete Willis) about the universe and the glass of wine:

There are the rushing waves

via @amedeo_balbi

A scientific poetry by Richard Feynman from The value of science (pdf):

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.
Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

(via Amedeo Balbi)