A toast with history: the spark of quantum physics
Imagine at the beginning of the 20th century, when the world of physics broke its traditional schemes in an abrupt way and surprised everyone with an idea that seemed taken from a futuristic novel: energy does not flow in continuous flows, but in small discrete blocks. It all started in 1900, when Max Planck ran into a mysterious formula to describe the radiation of a black body, but what really revolutionized was what this formula suggested: that vibrant energy was not continuous but divided into ‘how many’.
What does this story look like in a beer jug?
To understand the magnitude of this finding, we are going to push the beer metaphor a little further. Imagine a barrel of those giants, but instead of beer, we are talking about energy. And instead of filling everything at once, we can only get small portions, each with a fixed amount of energy or, in our case, beer. This means that we cannot serve beer in random quantities, but in predetermined portions, equal in size, such as small ‘how many’.
And what do Einstein and his barrel have to do in this story?
This is where history becomes interesting and a little more fun. To illustrate his radical vision, Einstein devised an analogy: instead of thinking of energy in terms of continuous waves, he considered that light and radiation were composed of tiny particles, which we would later call photons. Einstein’s famous idea that each photon was a kind of tiny ‘energy’ barrel, which could only contain an exact amount, completely changed the game of physics. The beer analogy that helps us understand this reality is that, in its vision, beer would not be a fluid and uniform fluid, but small indivisible portions of liquid food, which could only be delivered in defined packages.
Towards the present: the search for understanding the nature of energy
What began as an bold hypothesis of Einstein in 1905, to explain the photoelectric effect (which, by the way, would be worth the Physics Nobel year old later), laid the foundations for a revolution in the way we perceive the universe. The quantum not only changed the laws of light, but also promoted technological advances ranging from the lasers to quantum computing. History is not written in stone, and many of these concepts are still being perfected and challenged in laboratories and in our digital lives.
The great beer challenge: two friends, a 2 -liter barrel and a mission
To test these concepts and give them a practical touch, imagine Einstein and Planck with a giant barrel full of ‘quantum energy’. They have in their hands some specific sizes – one half a liter and two of three quarters – and their mission is to distribute that energy in equal portions, exactly the same amount, without wasting an apex. Only here the trick is that they can return beer to the barrel and play with the amounts to achieve their goal: a perfect quantum toast!
Do you dare to solve the riddle?
Here it is not only about having a good time, but about understanding how the ideas of the most great physicists of the last century still challenge our intuition and thought. The key is how to manipulate those small portions of energy – or beer – to achieve a precise balance. He only imagines the calculations, but also the fun in the process, and remembers: in the quantum world, everything is possible, even divide a barrel into perfect dosses!
