Beethoven, drunks and isotopic decay

Fricka went off to the sea yesterday. Another week agonising about whether she'll make it back. Oh well, you kind of get used to it and writing this blog takes my mind off the thought of.........

I was reminded yesterday of something which I read a few years back (it was actually written in the 1970s). It was a paper in the Journal of Alcoholism (I think) about Beethoven's liver. Now the JoA is a learned journal written by doctors/scientists not a manual about how to get drunk written by to be members of AA. It described Ludwig's liver as being shrunken and covered with bean sized nodules, ie Beethoven liked to hit the sauce...... A lot! However the thrust of the article was really saying how much might Beethoven have achieved if he wasn't always hitting the bottle. (Actually LvB was once picked up at night by the police for being drunk and disorderly in the street and it was only the following day when they realised that they had picked up the [now seriously hungover] maestro!)

So what might he have achieved if he'd been teetotal? So, 9 symphonies, 1 opera, 5 piano concertos, a couple of suitcases full of quartets and quintets and enough piano pieces to fill your loft are not enough for one man? You want more? Didn't the author realise he was asking the wrong question? The real question is how little would he have produced if he'd laid off the milk of amnesia? He probably wouldn't have written a note! Genius needs something to insulate itself from the mundane world of shopping, cleaning, laundry, feeding the cat, otherwise it atrophies! Beethoven only wrote what he did because he was a drunk. (Ask Dylan Thomas!) How else would he have coped? "Sorry, Ludwig, the baker's here and he wants paying." " Sorry Ludwig, the cat's just done number twos in the your shoes." "Sorry Ludwig, I need to dust that piano." And all Ludwig's trying to do is write the current European Union anthem. Why would you not hit the vino collapso? How could you not? How else would you cope? And still produce the most sublime music since Bach! Drunk or no drunk, if Beethoven only ever wrote just the 9th symphony, he would still be ranked in the top 5, or 2, or 1 (I like LvB, you can tell, ay?)

(And a big thank you to Alan Coren for making me see things in this light. It has helped me enormously! And the booze profits of my local Sainsbury's = Walmart if you're American)

So what has this got to do with isotopic decay? On the surface, not a lot but........I posted an answer on someone else's blog a while back and for some reason, the moderator didn't like it. So I'll repost it here (sort of) because I do like it! It's probably wrong but so is everything else on blogs, so why not?

Now isotopic decay is about neutrons decaying into protons by releasing a beta 'particle', so called beta decay. Somebody was having a problem with the concept of half-lives. Surely if half decays in 8 seconds, the other half will too? 16 seconds later all will have decayed. But that isn't what happens. After 16 seconds only half of the remaining half will have decayed (ie a quarter). So what's going on? Well, in essence, it's all about probabilities and very large numbers.

A neutron, say, will have a 50/50 chance of decaying in, say, 8 seconds. After 8 seconds, you peek at the neutron and it hasn't decayed. OK, let's look again in another 8 seconds. Crucially the chance (probability) of the neutron decaying in the next 8 seconds is still 50/50. It hasn't got an increased chance of decaying, say 70/30 in the second time period just because it failed to do so in the first time period. You lot often have difficulty with that! We have to deal with orcas, seals, the cold. We know that just because you got away the first time, that doesn't increase or decrease your chances next time. It's why we're always 'on our toes'.

So that neutron could 'live' almost forever, never decaying, after all one of them must. But with the vast numbers of neutrons we're looking at, it always ends up with half 'flipping' in any given 8 seconds. It's like coin tossing. If you flip a coin 10 times, it's unlikely you will end up with an exact 50/50 split. Toss the coin a million times or 100 million times and you will get a 50/50 split. Try it! Once you get to the last few neutrons, this all breaks down, but it all happens so fast it doesn't materially affect the result!

That, at root, is why you lot find quantum physic so hard to handle. All you can say is that in a proton/proton collision, say, 70% of the time you'll get 2 kaons of energy level x (a) and 1 pion of energy level y (b). What you can't say is this collision will produce a and b. Feynman's explanation of quantum electrodynamics "QED. The strange theory of light and matter" is a really good place to start if you want to grasp the fuzziness of QM and relate it to the world we perceive, which isn't fuzzy at all!

Havelock has come back too and there is now one more chick that the bonxies won't get! Bertie's gone back for more food and Havelock is looking, as usual, very pleased with himself. 'Charlie' he's called, well I suppose if you were named after 'Burlington' then naming your chick after 'Champagne' is no bad thing. I must go chat later.

I still have a funny kind of warmth from Cyrano. I just hope I do not have to die before someone tells me that they love me!