Why is quantum mechanics weird? The bomb experiment.

[This is a transcript of the video embedded below. Some of the explanations may not make sense without the animations in the video.]



I have done quite a few videos in which I have tried to demystify quantum mechanics. Because many things people say are weird about quantum mechanics aren’t weird. Like superpositions or entanglement. Not weird. No, really, they’re not weird, just a little unintuitive. But now I feel like I may accidentally have left you with the impression that quantum mechanics is not weird at all. But of course it is. And that’s what we’ll talk about today.

Before we talk about quantum mechanics, big thanks to our tier four supporters on patreon. Your help is greatly appreciated. And you too can help us, go check out our page on Patreon or click on the join button, right below this video. Now let’s talk about quantum weirdness.

First I’ll remind you what’s not weird about quantum mechanics, though you may have been told it is. In quantum mechanics we describe everything by a wave-function, usually denoted with the Greek letter Psi. The wave-function itself cannot be observed. We just use it to calculate the probabilities of measurement outcomes, for example the probability that the particle hits a screen at a particular place. Some people say it’s weird that you can’t observe the wave-function. But I don’t see anything weird with that. You see, the wave-function describes probabilities. It’s like the average person. You never see The Average Person. It’s a math thing that we use to describe probabilities. The wave-function is like that.

Another thing that people seem to think is weird is that in quantum mechanics, the outcome of a measurement is not determined. Calculating the probability for the outcome is the best you can do. That is maybe somewhat disappointing, but there is nothing intrinsically weird about it. People just think it’s weird because they have beliefs about how nature should be.

Then there are the dead-and-alive cats. A lot of people seem to think those are weird. I would agree. But of course we don’t see dead and alive cats.

But then what’s with particles that are in two places at the same time, or two different spins. We do see those, right? Well, no. We actually don’t see them. When we “see” a particle, when we measure it, it does have definite properties, not two “at the same time”.

So what do physicists mean when they say that particles “can be at two places at the same time”? It means they have a certain mathematical expression, called a superposition, from which they calculate the probability of what they observe. A superposition is just a sum of wavefunctions for particles that are in two definite states. Yes, it’s just a sum. The math is easy, it’s just hard to interpret. What does it mean that you have a sum of a particle that’s here and a particle that’s there? Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know what could possibly answer this question. But I don’t need to know what it means to do a calculation with it. And I don’t think there’s anything weird with superpositions. They’re just sums. You add things. Like, you know, two plus two.

Okay, so superpositions, or particles which “are in two places” are just a flowery way to talk about sums. But what’s with entanglement? That’s nonlocal, right? And isn’t that weird?

Well, no. Entanglement is a type of correlation. Nonlocal correlations are all over the place and everywhere, they’re not specific to quantum mechanics, and there is nothing weird about nonlocal correlations because they are locally created. See, if I rip a photo into two and ship one half to New York, then the two parts of the photo are now non-locally correlated. They share information. But that correlation was created locally, so nothing weird about that.

Entanglement is also locally created. Suppose I have a particle with a conserved quantity that has value zero. It decays into two particles. Now all I know is that the shares of the conserved quantity for both particles have to add to zero. So if I call the one share x, then the other share is minus x, but I don’t know what x is. This means these particles are now entangled. They are non-locally correlated, but the correlation was locally created.

Now, entanglement is in a quantifiable sense a stronger correlation than what you can do with non-quantum particles, and that’s cool and is what makes quantum computers run, but it’s just a property of how quantum states combine. Entanglement is useful, but not weird. And it’s also not what Einstein meant by “spooky action at a distance”, check out my earlier video for more about that.

So then what is weird about quantum mechanics? What’s weird about quantum mechanics is best illustrated by the bomb experiment.

The bomb experiment was first proposed by Elitzur and Vaidman in 1993, and goes as follows.

Suppose you have a bomb that can be triggered by a single quantum of light. The bomb could either be live or a dud, you don’t know. If it’s a dud, then the photon doesn’t do anything to it, if it’s live, boom. Can you find out whether the bomb is live without blowing it up? Seems impossible. But quantum mechanics makes it possible. That’s where things get really weird.

Here’s what you do. You take a source that can produce single photons. Then you send those photons through a beam splitter. The beam splitter creates a superposition, so, a sum of the two possible paths that the photon could go. To make things simpler, I’ll assume that the weights of the two paths are the same, so it’s 50/50.

Along each possible path there’s a mirror, so that the paths meet again. And where they meet there’s another beam splitter. If nothing else happens, that second beam splitter will just reverse the effect of the first, so the photon continues in the same direction as before. The reason is that the two paths of the photon interfere like sound waves interfere. In the one direction they interfere destructively, so they cancel out each other. In the other direction they add together to 100 percent. We place a detector where we expect the photon to go, and call that detector A. And because we’ll need it later, we put another detector up here, where the destructive interference is, and call that detector B. In this setup, no photon ever goes into detector B.

But now, now we place the bomb into one of those paths. What happens?

If the bomb’s a dud, that’s easy. In this case nothing happens. The photon splits, takes both paths, recombines, and goes into detector A, as previously.

What happens if the bomb’s live? If the bomb’s live, it acts like a detector. So there’s a 50 percent chance that it goes boom because you detected the photon in the lower path. So far, so clear. But here’s the interesting thing.

If the bomb is live but doesn’t go boom, you know the photon’s in the upper path. And now there’s nothing coming from the lower path to interfere with.

So then the second beam splitter has nothing to recombine and the same thing happens there as at the first beam splitter, the photon goes both paths with equal probability. It is then detected either at A or B.

The probability for this is 25% each because it’s half of the half of cases when the photon took the upper path.

In summary, if the bomb’s live, it blows up 50% of the time, 25% of the time the photon goes into detector A, 25% of the time it goes into detector B. If the photon is detected at A, you don’t know if the bomb’s live or a dud because that’s the same result. But, here’s the thing, if the photon goes to detector B, that can only happen if the bomb is live AND it didn’t explode.

That means, quantum mechanics tells you something about the path that the photon didn’t take. That’s the sense in which quantum mechanics is truly non-local and weird. Not because you can’t observe the wave-function. And not because of entanglement. But because it can tell you something about events that didn’t happen.

You may think that this can’t possibly be right, but it is. This experiment has actually been done, not with bombs, but with detectors, and the result is exactly as quantum mechanics predicts.

Everything vibrates. It really does.

[This is a transcript of the video embedded below.]



I’ve noticed that everything vibrates is quite a popular idea among alternative medicine gurus and holistic healers and so on. As most of the scientific ideas that pseudoscientists borrow, there’s a grain of truth to it. So in just which way is it true that everything vibrates? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Today’s video was inspired by these two lovely ladies.

We don't have the vibrational frequency to host that virus.  

And I taught her that. 

So if you don't have that vibrational frequency right here you're not going to get it. 

We don't have the vibrational frequency to get COVID? 

Correct. Do you know that everything in this universe vibrates. And is alive. There is life with that. That's what I'm talking about. I don't put life into COVID. I'm not going to wear a mask. 

I'm not going to wear a mask either. I never wear a mask. Ever.

Now. There’s so much wrong with that, it’s hard to decide where to even begin. I guess the first thing to talk about is what we mean by vibration. As we’ve already seen a few times, definitions in science aren’t remotely as clear-cut as you might think, but roughly what we mean by vibration is a periodic deformation in a medium.

The typical example is a gong. So, some kind of metal that can slightly deform but has a restoring force. If you hit it, it’ll vibrate until air resistance damps the motion. Another example is that the sound waves created by the gong will make your eardrum vibrate. The earth itself also vibrates, because it’s not perfectly rigid and small earthquakes constantly make it ring. Indeed, the earth has what’s called a “breathing mode”, that’s an isotropic expansion and contraction. So the radius of earth expands and shrinks regularly with a period of about twenty point five minutes.

But. We also use the word vibration for a number of more general periodic motions, for example the vibration of your phone that’s caused by a small electric motor, or vibrations in vehicles that are caused by resonance.

What all these vibrations have in common is that they are also oscillations, where an oscillation is just any kind of periodic behavior. If you ask the internet, “vibrations” are a specific type of “mechanic” oscillation. But that doesn’t make sense because material properties, like those of the gong, are consequences of atomic energy levels of electrons, so, that’s electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, not mechanics. And we also talk of vibrational modes of molecules. Just where to draw the line between vibration and oscillation is somewhat unclear. You wouldn’t say electromagnetic waves vibrate, you’d say they oscillate, but just why I don’t know.

For this reason, I think it’s better to talk about oscillations than vibrations, because it’s clearer what it means. An oscillation is a regularly recurring change. In a water-wave for example, the height of the water oscillates around a mean value. Swings oscillate. Hormone levels oscillate. Traffic flow oscillates, and humans, yeah, humans can also oscillate.

With this hopefully transparent shift from the vague term vibration to oscillation, I’ll now try to convince you that everything oscillates. The reason is that everything is made of particles, and according to quantum mechanics, particles are also waves, and waves, well, oscillate.

Indeed, every massive particle has a wave-length, to so-called Compton wave-length, that’s inversely proportional to the mass of the particle. So here, lambda is the Compton wave-length, h is Planck’s constant, and c is the speed of light. The frequency of this oscillation is the speed of light divided by the wave-length. But just what is it that oscillates? Well, it’s this thing that we call the wave-function of the particle, usually denoted Psi. I have talked about psi a lot in my earlier videos. The brief summary is that physicists don’t agree on what it it, but they agree that Psi gives us the probability to observe the particle in one place or another, or with one velocity or another, or with spin or another, and so on.

For an electron, the wave-function oscillates about ten to the twenty times per second. This means, the particle carries its own internal clock with it. And all particles do this. The heavier ones, like protons or atoms, oscillate even faster than electrons because the frequency is proportional to the mass.

Neutrinos, which are lighter than electrons, don’t just oscillate by themselves, they actually oscillate into each other. This is called neutrino-mixing. There are three different types of neutrinos, and as they travel, the fraction between them periodically changes. If you start out with neutrinos of one particular type, after some while you have all three types of them. This can only happen if neutrinos have masses, so the neutrino oscillations tell us neutrinos are not massless, and a Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery in 2015.

Photons, the particles that make up light, are, for all we know massless. This means they do not have an internal clock, but they also oscillate, it’s just that their oscillation frequency depends on the energy.

Okay, so we have seen that all particles oscillate constantly, thanks to quantum mechanics. But, you may say, particles alone don’t make up the universe, what about space and time. Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock you probably know that space-time can wiggle, that’s the so-called gravitational waves, which were first detected in twenty fifteen by the LIGO gravitational wave interferometer.

The gravitational waves that we can presently measure come from events in which space-time gets particularly strongly bent and curved, for example black holes colliding or a black hole eating up a neutron stars or something like that. But it’s not that this is the only thing that makes space-time wiggle. It’s just that normally the wiggles are way, way too small to measure. Strictly speaking though, every time you move, you make gravitational waves. Tiny ripples of space-time. So, yes, space-time also vibrates. Really, everything vibrates, kind of, all the time. It’s actually correct. But it doesn’t help against COVID.

Physicist Despairs over Vacuum Energy

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Vacuum energy is all around us, it makes the universe expand with quantum fluctuations, and before you know they’re talking about energy chakras and quantum healing. Even many physicists and science writers are very, very confused about what vacuum energy is. But don’t despair, at the end of this video you’ll know why it’s not what you were told it is.

This video came out of my desperation over a letter that was published in the June 2021 issue of Scientific American. It’s a follow-up question about an article about the accelerated expansion of the universe and it reads as follows

“[The article] “Cosmic Conundrum” by Clara Moskowitz, describes how the most likely cause of the accelerating expansion of the universe is “vacuum energy,” the effect of virtual particles popping in and out of existence. But it does not explain why vacuum energy would cause the universe to expand. I would think that if space is filled with evanescent virtual particles, they would collectively exert a huge gravitational force that would counteract expansion.”

To which the editor replies:

“Vacuum energy is positive and has a constant density throughout space. Thus, increasing the volume of space increases the total amount of vacuum energy, which requires work. It is the opposite of a gas, whose energy and density decrease as it expands. When that happens, the gas exerts positive pressure. In contrast, because vacuum energy is positive, it exerts negative pressure, so galaxies on the largest scales are pushed apart, not pulled together.”

I didn’t understand this answer. Which is a little bit embarrassing because I’m one of the people quoted in the original article. So I want to look at this in a little bit more detail.

First of all, the terminology. What’s vacuum energy and why is it important?

If we leave aside gravity, we can’t measure absolute energies. We only ever measure energy differences. You probably remember this from your electronics class, you never measure the electric potential energy, you measure differences in it, which is what makes currents flow. It’s like you have a long list of height comparisons, Peter is 2 inch taller than Mary and Mary is one inch taller than Bob and Bob is 5 inch smaller than Alice. But you don’t know anyone’s absolute height. Energies are like that.

Now, this is generally the case, that you can only measure energy differences – as long as you ignore gravity. Because all kinds of energies have a gravitational pull, and for that gravitational pull it’s the absolute energy that matters, not the relative one.

So it really only becomes relevant to talk about absolute energies in general relativity, Einstein’s theory for gravity. Yes, that guy again. Now, if we want to find out the absolute value of energies, we need to do this only for one case, because we know the energy differences. Think of the height-comparisons. If you know all the relative heights, you only need to measure the absolute height of one person, say Paul, to know all the absolute heights. In General Relativity, we don’t measure Paul, we measure the vacuum.

How do we do this? For this we need to have a look at Einstein’s equations for General Relativity. Here they are. They are called “Einstein’s Field Equations”. They contain two constants, so they have the same value at every point in space and at every moment in time. The one constant, the G, is Newton’s constant and determines the strength of gravity. The other, the Lambda, is called the cosmological constant. The R’s here quantify the curvature of space-time.

And this term with the T contains all the other kinds of energies, particles and radiation and so on. This means, if we set the T-term to zero, we have empty space. You can therefore interpret Lambda as the energy-density of the vacuum. So, not the entire energy, but energy per volume. This vacuum energy-density doesn’t dilute if the universe expands because it’s a property of space-time. That makes it different from all other kinds of energy densities that we know. The other ones, for example for matter or radiation, all dilute with the expansion of the universe. The vacuum energy density doesn’t.

What does the energy-density of vacuum have to do with the acceleration of the universe? If we want to know what the universe does as a whole, we introduce what’s called the “scale factor” a. The scale factor tells you how distances change with time. So a is a function of time, a(t). If the universe expands, a increases, if the universe shrinks, a decreases. You plug this into Einstein’s equations. And then one of the equations says that the second time derivative of the scale factor, so that’s the acceleration of the expansion, as a contribution that is proportional to the cosmological constant. So that’s where it comes from. A positive lambda makes the expansion speed up.

What’s this all got to do with vacuum fluctuations? Nothing. And that’s where physicists get very confused. You see, we cannot calculate this measureable vacuum energy-density which appears in general relativity. It’s a constant that we infer from observations and that’s that.

A lot of physicists claim that particle physics predicts the vacuum energy-density, and it’s 120 orders of magnitude too large, and that’s the worst prediction ever, I’m sure you’ve heard that story. But that’s just wrong. This value which you get from particle physics is unmeasurable, so it’s not a prediction. If you hear someone claim it was a bad prediction, I suggest you ask them what theory was ruled out by the conflict between the prediction and observation? The answer is: none. And why is that? It’s because it wasn’t a prediction.

Okay, so we have learned: vacuum has an energy-density, it’s a constant of nature, it’s proportional to the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and it has nothing to do with quantum fluctuations. This hopefully also clarifies how something that’s supposedly due to fluctuations can be constant both in space and in time. It’s because nothing is fluctuating. So that would have been my response to the question.

Let us then look at the editor’s response. This response uses an analogy between the vacuum energy-density and the simplest type of gas called an “ideal gas”. An ideal gas is just a bunch of particles moving around bumping of each other. The ideal gas has a volume, temperature, pressure and an internal energy. Internal energy is what you need to do work. The key equation is

ΔU = - p ΔV

U is the internal energy, p the pressure and V the volume. Those Δ’s mean you have small changes of the quantities that come after the delta. The pressure of an ideal gas is always positive. What this equation tells you is that if you increase the volume, so ΔV is positive, then ΔU is negative, so the internal energy decreases. This means if the gas expands it does work, and then you have less internal energy left. Makes sense.

Now, as we have seen, the energy-density of the vacuum, Lambda, is just a constant. The total energy is just the density times the volume. This mean, if the volume increases, because the universe expands, but the energy density of the vacuum is constant, then the amount of vacuum energy increases with the volume. If you identify this energy with the internal energy of a gas, this means delta U has to be positive, and if Delta V is also positive, because space expands, this can only be if the pressure is negative.

And this is correct. If you associate a pressure with the vacuum, then that pressure is negative. However, the problem with this explanation is that the vacuum energy is not an internal energy, it’s a total energy, and the vacuum energy is not a gas in any meaningful way because it’s not made of anything, and how you get from the ideal gas analogy to the expansion of the universe I don’t know.

So I don’t want to call this answer wrong, but I think it’s misleading. It strongly suggests a physical interpretation, namely that the cosmological constant is some kind of weird gas, but it doesn’t spell out that this is really just an analogy. I am picking on this because simplified analogies like this that make no sense if you think about them are the reason so many people either physics is incomprehensible or physicists have totally lost it or maybe both.

If you look at the math, the best way to think about the vacuum energy-density is that it’s just a constant of nature.

Why the Hype around Hypersonics?

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Recently, we’ve seen quite a few headlines about traveling faster than the speed of sound. For example, the startup Venus Aerospace wants to reach 12 times the speed of sound. That’s nine-thousand miles per hour, and would bring you from New York to Frankfurt in less than half an hour.

NASA is working on a Quiet SuperSonic airplane called X fifty-nine, that’s supposed to have a reduced sonic boom and be ready in twenty-twenty-four. The American Airline United announced they want to offer supersonic flights by twenty-twenty-nine. And Boeing as well as some other companies have made deals with the US military about developing hypersonic missiles. How seriously should you take these headline? What’s the difference between supersonic and hypersonic? And what’s with those missiles? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

First things first, what is hypersonic flight? Is it just a fancy name to mean really fast? You know… hyperfast! No. Hypersonic flight is defined as flight above Mach 5. The Mach number tells you how many times faster than the speed of sound you are moving. So, moving at Mach 1 through a medium means you are moving at the speed of sound in that medium. Below Mach 0.8 you’re subsonic. The range from 0.8 to 1.2 is called transonic. Between Mach 1.2 and 5 you’re Supersonic, and faster than Mach 5 is hypersonic.

What happens once you fly faster than sound? A plane emits noise that travels outwards into all directions, at the speed of sound, but in rest with the air, not with the plane. If the plane moves below the speed of sound, some of the sound moves ahead of the plane. But if you reach the speed of sound, the plane moves exactly with the sound, and the sound piles up along a cone creating a shock-wave. This is what creates the supersonic boom. You can’t hear the plane coming, but you hear a loud bang once it’s passed by.

Actually, a plane usually creates two shockwaves, one at the front and one at the back of the plane. This means there are really two supersonic booms and if the plane is large enough, you can hear them separately. Here’s an example from the Concorde.

The supersonic boom happens at any speed above the speed of sound though it’s the loudest directly at the sound barrier since the sound spreads out somewhat more at higher speeds. For this reason, supersonic flights are currently forbidden over populated areas, they’re just too loud.

But what’s so special about Mach 5 that everything above is “hypersonic”? It’s somewhat of an arbitrary definition, but it’s roughly at about Mach 5 that some “funny effects” start to become important, effects that either don’t happen or aren’t important at lower speeds.

What are those “funny effects”? The issue with hypersonic flying is what physicists call “stagnation points.” If you have an object that’s flying through a gas fast enough, it’ll basically stop the flow of gas at some places. But the kinetic energy from the gas molecules has to go somewhere, and that increases the temperature to what’s called the “stagnation temperature”. Problem is, this stagnation temperature increases quickly with the Mach number.

The equation that relates the two looks like this, where T naught is the stagnation temperature and T the temperature before stagnation. M is the Mach number, and γ is a constant that depends on the medium. For air, γ is about 1.4. As you can see, the temperature increases with the square of the Mach number. That’s a problem.

Let’s plug in some numbers for illustration. If you are flying at an altitude of about twelve kilometers, like an average overseas flight, T is about 219 Kelvin, or a little below -50C. For Mach 1 this gives a stagnation temperature of about 260 Kelvin, so not much happens.

But already for Mach 2 the stagnation temperature is 390 Kelvin, that’s 117 Celsius. Next time you fly on a fighter jet don’t stick your hand out of the window. At Mach 5 the stagnation temperature is 1300 Kelvin and by Mach 8 you have 3000 Kelvin. At that temperature, most metals melt. That’s not good.

And it’s not enough to keep the metal from melting, because materials weaken long before they melt and also, the pressure increases along with the temperature. Worse, in these conditions out-of-equilibrium chemical processes occur, causing molecules to split or ionize.

Well, you may say, what about rockets, seems to work for them. Indeed, for example, the space shuttle was flying regularly at Mach 25. But. The thing with rockets is they go up. And if you go up, the atmosphere thins out and eventually ends, so air resistance is no longer a problem. The space shuttle left the atmosphere at “only” about Mach 3. Flying hypersonic in the atmosphere, that’s what’s the problem.

And we don’t want to do it with a rocket engine, but with a jet engine. The difference is that a rocket uses combustion with additional oxygen supply, and the rocket carries the source of the oxygen with it. That’s why they work in outer space. Jet engines on the contrary, take in and push out air. They are what’s called “air-breathing” machines. This requires less fuel and makes them lighter.

So how do you get to hypersonic speeds without melting the aircraft? Well the obvious thing is to use materials with extraordinarily high melting points. Among the most promising materials are Tantalum carbide and hafnium carbide with melting temperatures above four-thousand Kelvin. But that isn’t enough. To get beyond Mach 5, you need to redesign the whole engine. Interestingly, and maybe contrary to what you might have expected, you do this by removing parts.

In a jet engine, air enters the engine from the front is compressed with rotating blades. This heats the air, which is then mixed with fuel in the combustion chamber. But above about Mach 3 the air which enters the engine is hot and compressed just because it’s being slowed down so much, so one doesn’t need the compressor. The thing that’s left is called a ramjet, called that way because it “rams” into the air.

A ramjet can’t fly below Mach 3 because it doesn’t have a compressor, so it needs to be launched by other planes. But it works up to about Mach 6. Above that, temperature and pressure get too high to have good combustion

So why don’t we just keep the air flowing through the engine, instead of slowing it down, which causes the heating? Indeed, great idea. If you do this, you get what’s called a scramjet, short for Supersonic Combustion Ramjets.

The Scramjet design greatly alleviate the heating problem inside the engine. Scramjets are basically tubes with some divisions inside where fuel is injected into the air – they don’t even have moving parts. The problem with Scramjets is that the air goes in and out the other end in about a millisecond, and it’s also turbulent. So the challenge is to find the right shape to control the turbulence and get the fuel where it needs to be. Scramjets work from about 4 Mach upward. The current speed record is Mach 9.6 and is held by NASA’s X-43 jet.

In 2013 Boeing’s X-51 scramjet broke a record. It was the first scramjet to use jet fuel instead of hydrogen and had a more lightweight design. The record that it broke was not that of speed (it just flew a bit over Mach 5) but that of duration: it flew for 3.5 minutes.

Yes, you heard that right. 3.5 minutes. That’s the record. And don’t forget that to launch, it first had to be carried aboard a B-52, then accelerated to Mach 4.5 with a rocket booster.

The leader of the team that designed the X-51, Kevin Bowcutt, delivered a TED talk in which he envision a future when people take hypersonic flights regularly and he claims that a way to do it would be to use antimatter as fuel... Hahaha.

Ok, so I’m somewhat skeptic we’ll see hypersonic commercial flights in the near future. Not only, as you have seen, isn’t the technology ready, the whole process is also ridiculously fuel consuming. When it comes to supersonic flights, NASA seems to have made good progress in alleviating the problem with the supersonic boom by smart design. This is neat but doesn’t really do anything about the fuel problem.

This makes me think we might see some supersonic flights but they’ll probably remain rare and expensive. Personally I think it makes much more sense to look for a mode of transportation in which you excavate a tube or tunnel to lower air pressure, such as the hyperloop, because that way it becomes dramatically easier to reach high speeds.

So much about hypersonic travel, but what’s with those hypersonic weapons? It seems we’re in the middle of a hypersonic arms race between the United States, Russia and China. Russia recently became the first nation to deploy a hypersonic missile, tested in December 2018. And the Chinese have created a new hypersonic wind tunnel that, if you trust the Chinese media reaches up to 30 Mach. If you don’t trust them it’s still 22 Mach.

The budgets for this research are, one could say, stratospheric. For 2021, U.S. research agencies have allocated 3 point 2 billion US dollars for hypersonic weapons research, up from 2 point 6 billion in the previous year.

The attraction is easy to understand: at these speeds the enemy just doesn’t time have to react to the missile. The path of “normal” ballistic missiles is easy to predict, so anti-missile systems can target and destroy them. They’re also easy to see coming by radar because they fly high. But hypersonic missile are fast, can fly low and only appear on the radar late, and can unpredictably change direction, so by the time you see them it might be too late to do anything about it.

But is it all advantages? No, according to a paper by researchers from MIT, that appeared in January 2021. That’s because common ballistic missiles fly at high altitudes where the air pressure is really low and reaching hypersonic speeds is fairly easy. They then simply fall down, but even so still hit the ground at hypersonic speed. According to the MIT researchers, with an optimal trajectory, a ballistic missile would even be faster than a hypersonic glider.

They calculate that for a distance of 8500 kilometers, the hypersonic glider would take 28 minutes, and the optimized ballistic path only 25 minutes. They claim that the threat from hypersonic weapons has been exaggerated by military officials, quite possibly to get funding. In their paper, they write:

“It is commonly claimed that hypersonic weapons can reduce warhead delivery times by reaching their targets faster than existing ballistic missiles could. In 2019 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command addressed this delivery time issue. Asked how long it would take a Russian hypersonic glide weapon to strike the United States, he responded: “it is a shorter period of time. The ballistic missile is roughly 30 minutes. A hypersonic weapon, depending on the design, could be half of that, depending on where it is launched from, the platform. It could be even less than that.””

The researchers then explain “The implication that a hypersonic missile could halve the time necessary to deliver a warhead between Russia and the United States—while false—subsequently permeated the U.S. discourse, fueling narratives of the revolutionary nature of these weapons.”

They also claim that even though land radars cannot detect missiles flying low until they are too close, because they are behind the Earth curvature, hypersonic vehicles flying inside an atmosphere are actually easy to detect. That’s because they become so terribly hot that they can be seen from satellites with infrared detectors. They conclude that the performance and strategic implications of hypersonic weapons would be comparable to those of established ballistic missile technologies.

So, my conclusion from all this is that we might well see some supersonic passenger flights again in the next decades, but I doubt they’ll become common, and hypersonic missiles are an overhyped threat. We have better things to worry about.