Author(s): John Roberts
With the theme of the conference being Crossroads in Chemistry the organizing committee, in their infinite wisdom, decided to place my article “Is there a role for the Periodic Table as Chemistry embraces Multidisciplinary Science and Quantum Field Theory?” in the last section of the History of Science Division on Wednesday 29th March. In one sense it was most appropriate; when at a crossroads one is looking back at the way you have travelled and looking forward to the way ahead with all its challenges using the experience and knowledge acquired on the way - a curious and open mind being an essential prerequisite. Many presentations described in forensic detail the work of individuals, relatively unknown, who have made crucial contributions to the development of science going back some three hundred years or more. Yet the above article seeks to make history by looking forward some one hundred and fifty years or more to a place where the periodic table and its cousins begin to describe nature as a complementary family of tables incorporating two fundamental cycles within the Universe. Will they ever be testable I hear you ask?
With the theme of the conference being Crossroads in Chemistry the organizing committee, in their infinite wisdom, decided to place my article “Is there a role for the Periodic Table as Chemistry embraces Multidisciplinary Science and Quantum Field Theory?” in the last section of the History of Science Division on Wednesday 29th March. In one sense it was most appropriate; when at a crossroads one is looking back at the way you have travelled and looking forward to the way ahead with all its challenges using the experience and knowledge acquired on the way - a curious and open mind being an essential prerequisite. Many presentations described in forensic detail the work of individuals, relatively unknown, who have made crucial contributions to the development of science going back some three hundred years or more. Yet the above article seeks to make history by looking forward some one hundred and fifty years or more to a place where the periodic table and its cousins begin to describe nature as a complementary family of tables incorporating two fundamental cycles within the Universe. Will they ever be testable I hear you ask?
There were three days before the presentation so I explored the labyrinth of ideas, concepts and mechanisms being presented in the rooms of the conference. Broadly, there were three groups: mechanisms of catalysis, modelling of molecules using AI and History of Science.
In the first group over a period of a day and a half speakers grappled with the conventional ideas and models to explain current phenomena but were left still hypothesising and agreeing with each other that a solution could soon be found. One speaker in questions to other presenters in this group at one point contemplated the idea that the electron was a wave function but the enormity of this thought rendered him speechless as he retreated into silence preferring the status quo of the here and now within the group. Did Schrodinger ever experience such doubts as he became a biologist in later life? After a day’s observation I was able to interject - no whisper - mechanisms of quantum tunnelling or superposition? To which the most revealing part of the answer was “Yes that’s the fear.” The obvious conclusion from this exchange being; tread carefully you might frighten the horses
The second group produced some spectacular models of molecules rotating, spinning and vibrating beginning with the premise that an electron is like a cloud that can be in many superpositions of energy. This immediately triggered in my mind vibrational mixing, self-assembly and photosynthesis with which biology and nature are quite familiar. Maybe in the future with the aid of artificial intelligence the human brain can visualize and understand such processes. One immediate application is using artificial intelligence to prescribe appropriate strength of drugs to patients by matching symptoms identified in blood tests with available drugs. This would have to be overseen by doctors, regulatory authorities and clinical trials.
As to my own presentation, so as not to frighten the horses once more, there is an introduction to walk the reader through the concepts. Here it is in every excruciating detail.
“In 1869 Mendeleev published what we now call the periodic table. It has subsequently been added to and extended within as more elements have been discovered. It has become a Rosetta stone - a clear reference point for chemical and physical properties.
With recent developments in Particle Physics, Gauge Theory, Clifford Algebra and symmetries U (1) x SU (2) x SU (3) electrons are no longer perceived as particles stacked in shelves within a box but as oscillations within quantum fields that operate at both nano and macro scales- quarks to galaxies- independent of frames of reference
I present to you today an evolution of the periodic table embracing multidisciplinary science and quantum field theory - the RobertsJanet Nuclear Periodic Table and the Quantum Mechanical Table. The first is empirical the second theoretical which has been hiding in plain sight since 1934 courtesy of De Broglie’s formula
There is no conflict between the periodic table in its current form and these other two tables. They are simply underlying mechanisms that led to the periodic table in the first place via quantum tunnelling, superposition, entanglement and decoherence. The Universe is non-local.
I hope that, after due consideration, you may find such tables a complement to the fundamental understanding of Chemistry within science. The immediate consequence is the appearance of numerous periodic tables within the Universe as mass number is no longer a fundamental property - Mendeleev’s dilemma in the construction of the original periodic table.
Such tables would be suitable for 1st, 2nd, year undergraduate and post doc students after the building blocks of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, physiology and neuroscience have been established in the student’s mind.”
Looking forward, the one-to-one mapping between the Quantum Mechanical Table and the Roberts-Janet Table implies that the Quantum Mechanical Table is proof of concept for the RobertsJanet Table following attendance at conferences in Boston, New York, Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other parts of the world. The challenges at San Diego and the insights at San Antonio have been particularly useful.
Day 4 morning of the meeting was in part devoted to Quantum Mechanics, an increasingly important development, in the current state of chemistry. This leads to a plea for quantum physicists to diversify into applications in chemistry, biology and biochemistry to apply quantum mechanisms in these fields even if this requires challenging the established approximations known at present. Could the American Chemical Society establish a Quantum field/ mechanics group to disseminate knowledge by raising awareness within the chemistry community and the global public of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory?
Let us now perform a thought experiment by placing the RobertsJanet table so that it overlays the Quantum Mechanical Table what then? We pass through the rabbit hole into Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. Beyond the rose garden leads to John Roberts’s hidden garden in Anglesey in the 2021 Alice and Bob in Quantum land and finally for now John von Neuman’s 1932 Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Julian Swinger’s quantum fields as referenced by John Clauser’s Nobel Lecture 2022 on entanglement.
At present, the current most appropriate summary appears as a
poem quoted at the Indianapolis meeting.
Ode to Science
With eternal thanks to Rudyard Kipling
Written by John Owen Roberts
Dedicated to my father David Idwal Roberts
Ynysybwl Morgannwg South Wales
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait but not be tired by waiting
Yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise.
If you can embrace the subtle ways
That Nature constantly displays
If you can explore distant galaxies in every detail
And analyse their content as blind men read braille.
If you can dream and invert the Periodic Table,
If you can think and extend it as far as you are able.
If you can put two and two together
And place Hydrogen and Helium by each other
If you can force fields and energy to serve you
And locally reverse time and entropy aplenty
Wilczek’s asymptotic freedoms to enjoy.
If you can picture how patterns within the table
Allow neutrons and protons to intertwine and coalesce
All manner of fusion, nucleosynthesis and elements possess
To produce Wigner’s magic numbers in excess.
If you can explain how radioactive decays
Occur by such varied pathways
In so many mysterious times and byways.
If you can entangle every quantum state
Then in an instant allow them to consolidate
And all matter known to man create.
If you can meet with gravity and quantum theory
And treat those two imposters just the same.
If you can apply mathematics stochastically yet with serendipity
To show how Nature develops empirical yet orderly tranquility
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to trap men’s minds and create indifference.
If you can talk to chemists and keep your virtue
Or walk with astrophysicists nor lose the common touch.
If all scientists count with you but none too much.
If you can follow quantum pathways
Familiar to bacteria, plants; all manner of beings
That photosynthesize and thrive
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run
Ladies and Gentlemen - yours is the Universe
And all that’s in it
And - which is more - you’ll be enlightened and inspired.
And yet and yet
Nature’s mysteries still conspire like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
To tunnel, superpose, entangle and decohere
Within its very own quantum world so near
To cloak its dynamic evolution
Allowing only to reveal at any one instant
What humans can observe by thought, action or experiment
Maybe masquerading as fermionic bosonic phase transitions.
Two unfamiliar beasts - lepto-genesis and abiogenesis
Emerge from the mists of Quantum Field’s fuzziness.
Will they produce future mellow fruitfulness?
For what is a solitary Universe?
Merely a glimpse of time
Settled in the vast ocean of accompanying multiverses
Connected by wormholes, black holes and higher dimensions?
Spawned as matter is released once more in mergers and collisions
Relentlessly recreating the paradox of beginning and end.
Harken ye sceptical scientists old and new
Behold a conjecture so bold
That may well become a story to be told
Uniting philosophers and researchers as one
Nature’s vacuum, contrary to human thought, oscillates
Between many quantum states, distinguishing singularities.
Enter entropy coupled with its cousin least action
Helping energy to assemble enigmatically in boundless phase
transitions
Converging physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience
With nucleosynthesis, particle physics and cosmology
Within the fuzziness of quantum field theory.
To be understood by a partnership of artificial intelligence and
the human mind
When they have learned, if ever they will, to talk, listen
And interact as two minds in harmony.
A tentative step, dear reader,
Of all the electron interactions of atoms, molecules or elements
throughout the Universe
Can by artificial intelligence
Be reduced to four fundamental equations
Merging thousands of years of empirical work
By alchemists, chemists and scientists alike
Denoted by the letters n, l, m, s of quantum field theory
Namely Principal Quantum Number, Angular Momentum,
Magnetic Moment and Spin Orbital.”
And now to a five-minute footnote - a fleeting conversation with a Princeton professor on Tuesday 28 March in room 122 following his presentation on the History of Science in which he talked about magic numbers and heavy elements. He described how research centres Darmstadt, Dubna, Oak Ridge and Riken (in alphabetical apolitical order) persuade isotopes of different elements to merge, neutrons to decay to protons so that elements beyond 118 could be produced. I pointed out to him that this technique would probably put an upper limit of atomic number 126 on the periodic table. Did he want to see the next 150 years and beyond of the periodic table at tomorrow’s presentation? This at least grabbed his attention. The lower reaches of the Quantum Mechanical Table theoretically produce in the n(n-1) column the magic numbers of neutrons within stars whilst the n(n+1) column generate the identical set of magic numbers for protons independently. With the aid of gravity, quantum mechanics conspires to extinguish radioactivity as white dwarfs with sufficient mass collapse to neutron stars, black holes and supermassive black holes as order increases and entropy decreases. By mergers or collisions of these objects, nuclei with low atomic numbers and very high mass number are released. These decay as radioactivity is reignited to nuclei of very large atomic number which decay by alpha, beta and gamma processes to heavy elements at the upper reaches of the Roberts-Janet Table before decaying further to elements familiar to the periodic table itself. He instantly intuitively understood this concept when I talked about sets of magic numbers 126, 184, 258, 350 and beyond. At the mention of De Broglie who originally suggested such a formula, he made a note of the Roberts-Janet Nuclear Periodic Table on his phone and was gone on a plane narrowly avoiding the tornadoes sweeping the United States both before and after the conference. How does entropy talk to decoherence and decoherence talk to entropy? What about chaos and self-assembly?
Roll on, roll on, ACS 2223 and ACS 2523, climate change, virus mutation and Nature permitting, when by then we may have telescopes throughout the Solar System and computing power to observe the Universe as the laboratory it truly is. We may then be able to distinguish signatures of these very heavy elements from the background noise.
Now that’s Crossroads in Chemistry and then some!
