It will not be a wild guess to assume that the Swedish Nobel Prize Committees should have suffered a serious headache, while realizing that they have on their list three "solid" candidates for the Nobel Prize in 2009 from Israel, a country of the size (population-wise) of Sweden. The three were Amos Oz in Literature, Yakir Aharonov in Physics and Ada Yonath in Chemistry. Such event was probably unprecedented during the long history of the Nobel Prize award, since 1901. Although in principle, each committee acts independently, following strict rules of candidates screening, some consideration of "political correctness" is almost unavoidable. This may well be a good reason why the phone with the country code of Sweden did not ring twice in Israel…Amos Oz and Yakir Aharonov will have to wait for another opportunity.
Many important discoveries have to "ripen" tens of years until there is enough well recognized proof that it was really a cutting edge discovery, one deserving the Nobel Prize. This was certainly the case with Aharonov-Bohm Effect published 59 years ago, in 1959 by Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm.
In October 2009, in anticipation of Nobel Prize awards in Physics for 2009, Prof. Yakir Aharonov has given some relatively rare interviews to the Israeli Press. It was shortly after the New York Times made worldwide public the idea, proposed as early as in 2008 by two prominent physicists, Holger Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya, of Kyoto University, that the Higgs boson — the “God particle” that the CERN LHC collider is trying to discover, is in some sense abhorrent to nature, or as NYT put it bluntly "the LHC is being sabotaged by its own future”. That could explain the magnet accident, and perhaps also the cancellation of an American collider that would likewise have hunted the Higgs.
It is therefore not surprising that the million dollar question was whether the future can alter the present. Prof. Aharonov did not elaborate on the surprising claim of the two physicists with regard to the LHC failures, but rather on the more general relationship and interaction between the past, present and future.
"Does the future affect the present? Isn't intuition a basic human experience? These questions have absorbed me from the very beginning. The basic question is how we perceive the time. We exist in present, the past is gone away, and we have to decide about something which will affect or create our future. But, if this not the case?
Let's assume that there is a different physics by which the present is determined not only by the past but also by the future. What if the future affects our decisions exactly the way it is being done by the past? If this is true the whole definition of freedom and decision will have to be changed, including the meaning of consciousness.
In consciousness we mean that we are conscious to ourselves. In Physics we deal with an observer and an object of observation. If you wish to observe something by yourself you have to split yourself into two parts: the physics of the observer and the object under observation, and observing the observer, in which case you come up with an infinity of observers.
Following the above logic, our brain enabling self-consciousness, should be the most complex system in nature. Physics has to adjust itself to this brain and the human experience, as it is far more complex than the atoms, and there are thus systems capable of seeing and feeling a much wider picture than just physics can explain. We have to work with much more complex systems to understand the real nature of the Universe.
I would generalize, based on quantum theory, that the World has a certain purpose, and not just an historical background, as he would strive towards a given end-purpose. The basic idea is not new. There were some philosophers that thought one cannot explain everything in nature only by the laws of nature and some initial state. One has to add the end-state nature tends to reach in the future.
Some scientists claim that the time elapsed from the formation of planet Earth may have not be enough for the evolutionary process leading to the development of life forms in accordance to Darwin's theory. The natural selection process requires a large number of conditions and steps to achieve evolutionary progress. Let's assume that one day we will discover that indeed there was not enough time for life to evolve. We will then be able to reason that conditions leading to life formation are not determined by the initial conditions and their evolvement only, but also by their ultimate goal, the end state determining the fact that life has evolved during a period shorter than required by theory"
Prof. Yakir Aharonov was not awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, which did not change the fact that 2009 has marked 50 years of AB50: the historical achievement by Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm. To this important event was designated the International Conference held at the Tel Aviv University during October 11 – 14, 2009, noting 50 years of the historical discovery in the field of quantum Physics.
50 years of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect: Concepts and Application
Tel Aviv University Conference, Oct 11-14, 2009
Convener: Prof. Lev Vaidman
- The meeting has marked 50 years of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect - a scientific achievement that has changed our perception of the foundation of physics, and has crucially influenced the evelopment of various branches of physics.
- In 1959, Yakir Aharonov and the late David Bohm discovered a quantum effect which revolutionized our understanding of the role of potentials in physics. For the first time, it was shown that a particle moving in a field-free region could be affected by a field in a disjoint region. Such an effect is alien to classical physics; indeed, it is a defining property of the quantum world.
- Numerous experiments have verified the effect, and recent novel techniques allow precise measurements of the shifts in electron interference patterns that demonstrate the phase (the AB phase) picked up by a charged particle moving around a solenoi
- The AB phase is ubiquitous in modern physics -- including cosmology, particle physics, non-abelian gauge theories, condensed matter chemical and molecular physics, and laser dynamics. Generalizations of the AB phase to non-abelian gauge theories, such as the Wilson and t'Hooft loops, are important tools for studying the issues of confinement and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The topological quantum phase explains charge quantization, the quantum Hall effect, the Josephson junction and many effects in the new field of mesoscopic physics where tiny electronic circuits exhibit quantum behavior. The AB phase plays a crucial role in electron microscope holography.
- The AB effect appears in textbooks and encyclopedias but it is still a topic of current research in numerous fields of physics. The major part of the activity related to the AB effect today is in the field of mesoscopic physics. So this will be one of the main themes of the conference. But we will cover, at least in part, the other aspects as well, especially those that have had significant progress recently such as experiments on the scalar Aharonov-Bohm effect.
