Built on Facts

Grab a hydrogen atom, hit it with a photon of the appropriate energy, and bump it up to its first excited state. After a while it will spontaneously release a photon and resume its quiescence in the ground state. Simple enough, and the general idea of atoms absorbing and spontaneously releasing photons is the basis of more physics than I can count.

It’s a surprisingly complicated process, and the standard quantum mechanics we start off learning can’t explain it. An energy eigenstate that’s not being disturbed by outside forces will stay in that eigenstate without bothering to decay. But atoms do spontaneously emit, and the reason our introductory treatments can’t explain this is that they only treat the quantization of the atomic electrons. They don’t treat the quantization of the electromagnetic field itself. This is the realm of quantum field theory - in this particular case the theory in question is quantum electrodynamics. Instead of just considering the atom by itself, we consider its interaction with the surrounding vacuum modes. Sure enough, it turns out that the atom sitting in an excited state has some finite expected lifetime before the system finds itself as an atom in the ground state and a photon propagating outward in the surrounding vacuum.

I think maybe the same kind of decay happens with TV networks. They all end up in a featureless ground state. Famously MTV and VH1 haven’t has much in the way of music programming in years, but that’s cliche at this point. Consider some others: TLC was The Learning Channel, and is now the home of several shows about babies, several shows about fashion, and several shows about wedding dresses. American Movie Classics is now AMC, which as of the day I write this is broadcasting Missing in Action 2 and Deathwish 3, which feature Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson respectively. The History Channel is now just calling itself History and while it does try gamely to more-or-less stay related to its putative subject, some shows like Ice Road Truckers are a stretch at best. Even TV Land has taken to broadcasting reality shows.

What does that have to do with physics? Not much, but it does give me the opportunity to point out the Discovery Channel as a notable exception. Originally a pretty standard nature show network, it developed into to something more like the unfortunate examples above before amazingly transitioning back into something which managed to combine modern entertainment tastes with its former goal of interesting programming about the real world in which we live. Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, Survivorman and others aren’t exactly traditional educational material but if they don’t show science in all its messy real-world glory while making it incredibly fun to watch I don’t know what does. Good job guys. You ain’t perfect, but considering what else is out there on the airwaves I give it a solid A.