Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

The wavy nature of Nature

Dr Benito A Juárez Aubry, EPSRC Fellow, University of York

Abstract:

In this talk, I explain how scientists have come to describe the universe fundamentally in terms of waves. The microscopic world can be thought of as a bunch of interacting ‘probabilistic’ waves obeying quantum mechanical rules. Even further, the nature of space and time, unified as ‘spacetime’, is wavy too, and this gives rise to gravity. Will the final description of the universe tell us that everything’s just wavy?

We are holding this free Cafe Scientifique session on Wednesday 18 March 2026 with doors open from 7pm, talk starting at 7.30pm at City Screen Basement, Coney Street, YO1 9QL   Lift access available. No Booking necessary.

Please buy a drink in the basement bar, take your seats and be ready for a presentation and Q and A.

Member’s report:

Dr Aubry gave a much-simplified but thought-provoking overview of the radical changes in scientific thinking over the last 350 years, brought about by Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger, and many others. Many phenomena previously believed to be driven by particles are now attributed to waves, at least in part, and vice versa. Waves are everywhere!

The lecture started with the contributions of the polymath Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). As well as his laws of motion and the development of calculus, Newton contributed his law of universal gravitation and his experiments on light and its spectrum. Both of the latter were critical to the later work by others, as summarised in the lecture. Interestingly, Newton concluded that light consists of tiny corpuscles rather than waves – he published this work in 1704.  This was much earlier than the wave-particle duality was discovered by Thomas Youngs’s double slit experiment in 1801).

James Clerk Maxwell (1831- 1879) unified electricity, magnetism and light in his theory of electromagnetism. This later underpinned both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Michael Faraday (1791 -1867) developed the concept of lines of force (eg around a magnet) which led to modern field theory. There were many links between Faraday’s experimental work and Maxwell’s theoretical explanations, and led to future major advances.

Albert Einstein (1879 –1955) later concluded that as the speed of light is a constant for different observers, however fast and in whatever direction they themselves were travelling- therefore, observers must pass time at different rates. This leads to the concept of spacetime, where time is a fourth dimension.  Also, the presence of masses causes the framework of space to curve, and gives rise to gravity which is itself wave-like. This analysis led to the non-linear theory of General Relativity.

In the early 20th Century there was a revolutionary development, in the form of Quantum Theory (major contributors included Heisenberg, Planck, Curie, Bohr, Schroedinger, Einstein etc etc). It was concluded that light is in ‘packets’ not waves. This led to Schroedinger’s Wave Equation, the birth of quantum mechanics, and the concept of probability laws and probability clouds. This in turn led to Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model, which are both still being developed and do not cover everything. The current view is that light and most normal matter exhibit particle/wave duality and that this is particularly evident on the sub-atomic scale. Again, waves are everywhere!

Rod Leonard