Joey, Three Chords and Physics

by Devon Hamilton PhD - Senior Scientist / Physics
02/05/01

It seems as if everyone has a Joey Ramone story, or at least that is what Jerry, one of our designers, says. My wife worked in the gift shop of a large downtown Toronto hotel in the late 1980s when she was an undergraduate, and she still remembers the day that Joey came in and bought a comb. Joey Ramone and a comb-that's not a combination easy to picture. Ken, another of our designers, tells me that Joey threw up all over a friend of his at a record signing. Daryl, one of our writers, reminisced about her days in university when the choices were between punk and disco-as if that was ever really a choice. So by now, you're probably wondering why this "science" column is about Joey Ramone? Well, it isn't-and it is.

I don't recall which Ramone's song I first heard as a child, but the odds are pretty good that it was Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio? from their 1980 End of the Century album. I do remember being about 11 or 12 years old and bouncing around my bedroom playing air guitar and singing along to Joey as he lamented the absence of real rock and roll from the airwaves. In many ways, this song symbolised all that the Ramones stood for-a return to the basics, the fundamentals of rock and roll. When the Ramones stormed the stage of New York's CBGB's in 1974, pop music was dominated by arena and art rock bands. In many ways, the Ramones were a throwback to the early days of rock and roll, the songs they played were short, fast and loud. They were the complete opposite of the dominant music of the day, and so punk rock was born. Joey and his cohorts blazed the musical path-back towards the fundamentals of what rock and roll was truly about.

That brings us to the point of this column: getting back to the fundamentals. Quite often, when people refer to "fundamental physics", they are actually referring to subatomic or particle physics, the stuff that the universe is made of. However, when physics is taught, we usually don't teach those "fundamentals" until a student has a fair amount of experience with physics. Why? Well, it might be fundamental, but gaining an understanding of it that goes beyond the superficial can be extremely difficult, not to mention non-intuitive. It requires that you have a strong grounding in the "basics" of physics (or the "other" fundamental physics). And this is where the problem arises. The basics of physics were actually laid down by Newton and his rivals in the 17th century, and were expanded upon in the 18th and 19th century by scientists and philosophers like Lagrange and Euler. Physicists often refer to these basics as "Classical Physics" or Mechanics. The other basic branches of physics were also laid down over these periods: optics, classical electro-magnetism, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. These "branches" of physics all overlap in many respects, and all have common roots, but they also describe on the macroscopic level how the natural world behaves in a physical sense.

Modern physics really began when Rutherford started bouncing helium nuclei off of gold atoms over 100 years ago. Practically all of the "everyday" physics we encounter in our daily routine are described by the basic physics of the 19th century. The path of the baseball you throw to your daughter, the light you turn off at night, the way the water drains when you flush your toilet-with the possible exception of everything that uses semiconductors, all of these things ascribe to the old laws. But all of this basic physics breaks down when you get to the extremes-at the smallest scales we have to take quantum mechanics into account, and at the largest scales Einstein's General Relativity rules the day. It is at these extremes where the research in modern physics is done-but to really understand what modern physics is telling us about the macroscopic world, we need to understand the "classical" component. General relativity is not necessary to engineer a suspension bridge, but Newton's Law of Gravitation certainly is. We can compute and determine most planetary and celestial orbits without invoking Einstein-Newtonian mechanics do just fine.

Unfortunately, most of the exciting stuff that people hear about is being done in modern physics-fusion, condensed matter, femtosecond pulse lasers and string theory all come to mind. That is where a lot of high-profile research is done and that's often what students want to learn about. When I started as an undergraduate (lo, those many years ago), I began with the thought of becoming a high-energy astrophysicist or perhaps a cosmologist. The undergraduate program was chock full of quantum mechanics courses (I had a friend who wound up taking about 7 or 8 single-semester courses in quantum mechanics and particle physics), largely because the faculty was dominated by people working in those areas. I had no idea that geophysics, atmospheric physics, optics and most of astronomy did not require intimate knowledge of the Schrödinger equation in three dimensions. So I struggled on through quantum mechanics and largely ignored the few "classical" courses that were offered-not realising the danger of my missing the basics. Eventually I wound up in graduate school, doing observational stellar astrophysics and discovered that I knew very little of the basic physics (like thermo and fluid dynamics) that I needed to understand stellar atmospheres. Doh! I had to go back and review areas of physics that I should have covered years earlier; I had forgotten the lesson that Joey had taught me.

Even though my research dealt closely with those subjects, I still feel that my understanding of them is inadequate and superficial. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a course on Newtonian celestial mechanics-essentially a course on Newtonian Mechanics using planetary orbits and rockets-but largely involving basic classical mechanics. One of my students was fairly bright, a better mathematician than myself. However, this student was not particularly interested in the "basics", and neglected them. The course midterm came around, and the student's performance was disappointing. One of the questions required the use of conservation of angular momentum-one of the most fundamental (and "basic") principles in physics. The student couldn't remember what it was, and felt it was unfair to be asked-apparently an understanding of angular momentum was not important for doing physics. This student didn't understand that these "basics" are fundamental to understanding physics-all physics. Angular momentum is important in celestial mechanics and in quantum mechanics.

There comes a point in the study of physics where you must be able to pull those basics out of the recesses of your mind. One example of this came during my own dissertation defence, when one of my examiners asked me to derive a "basic" relation for stellar atmospheres. I struggled my way through, largely suffering from brain-lock due to nerves, but I still feel that it was a lack of a truly solid grounding in some of these "basic" physics that contributed to my ineptitude. All in all, I think I'd rather have a root canal than go through the defence again-and in no way does that reflect upon my examining committee, who were extremely fair; the stress was entirely my own doing.

Which brings us back to Joey Ramone. He and his bandmates launched a rock and roll revolution by returning to the three chord fundamentals. The bands and movements that followed built their foundations on the chords that the Ramones reminded us about. In some ways, we can think of Newtonian mechanics, electro-magnetism and thermodynamics as the basic three chords for physics. Gluons and super-symmetry are great, but are difficult to understand or teach if we don't know the basics; and they certainly aren't all there is to physics. In the rush of the new and the neat we often forget what it's all based upon. Some incredible, innovative and beautiful physics can be developed from those "classical" branches. Joey died of lymphoma this past March in New York City at the age of 49, and while I don't know if he ever paid much attention to physics, I know a number of physicists paid attention to him.

You will be missed Joey. Hey! Ho! Let's go!