The Quantum Physics Of Vampires
I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture.
Tami Varma, right, and her brother Robin, the grandchildren of Devendra Varma, a scholar of English gothic tales and an expert in vampire lore, pose in coffins, at the Bran Castle, in Bran, Romania, Monday, Oct. 31, 2016. A Canadian brother and sister are passing Halloween night curled up in red velvet coffins in the Transylvanian castle that inspired the Dracula legend, the first time in 70 years anyone has spent the night in the gothic fortress, after they bested 88,000 people who entered a competition hosted by Airbnb to get the chance to dine and sleep at the castle in Romania. A portrait of medieval prince Vlad the Impaler is placed on the wall. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
Tami Varma, right, and her brother Robin, the grandchildren of Devendra Varma, a scholar of English gothic tales and an expert in vampire lore, pose in coffins, at the Bran Castle, in Bran, Romania, Monday, Oct. 31, 2016. A Canadian brother and sister are passing Halloween night curled up in red velvet coffins in the Transylvanian castle that inspired the Dracula legend, the first time in 70 years anyone has spent the night in the gothic fortress, after they bested 88,000 people who entered a competition hosted by Airbnb to get the chance to dine and sleep at the castle in Romania. A portrait of medieval prince Vlad the Impaler is placed on the wall. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
Like a lot of things these days, it started with a tweet, by Zach Weinersmith:
The fact that vampire skin can tell candle light from sunlight HAS to violate quantum mechanics. I just need to figure out how…
— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) March 27, 2018
I immediately made a physics joke in return:
It’s just a temperature threshold. You need to catch several vampires, and expose them to black-body radiation at a range of temperatures between “incandescent bulb” and “surface of the Sun.” t.co/nUdRwr2FdE
And since then, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the quantum physics of vampires… Having put that time in, though, I might as well get a blog post out of it.
The central physics idea that I’m about to grossly overthink is that vampires are somehow distinguishing sunlight from other forms of light. They’re perfectly capable of appearing in brightly lit rooms to attack ordinary humans, but sunlight reduces them to ash in seconds. But in physics terms, one photon is just like another. So what could possibly distinguish sunlight from other forms of light?
In physics, we can describe any individual photon of light in terms of two related numbers, the frequency and the wavelength (they’re related through the speed of light– frequency times wavelength is equal to the speed– which is a universal constant; for this reason, physicists will frequently switch between the two, opting for whichever is most convenient at a given moment). To characterize a source of light, though, we need to know the full spectrum of frequencies it puts out– what’s the intensity of light emitted (how many photons per second) at a particular wavelength.
Most sources that generate a significant amount of light are either thermal sources or atomic line sources. A thermal source is just an object that’s emitting light because it’s very hot– the heating element in a toaster, say, or the filament of an incandescent bulb. An atomic line source, on the other hand, consists of a collection of atoms of a particular element that are then induced to emit light at one of the characteristic frequencies associated with those atoms– a neon light, or those yellowish sodium-vapor streetlights, say. For these purposes, lasers are a special case of an atomic line source– they emit only a single narrow range of frequencies (though in the case of semiconductor lasers, these aren’t actually coming from atomic states).
Max Planck in 1901 (photo from Wikimedia) next to an incandescent bulb and its spectrum.
The light from a thermal source has a very broad spectrum, emitting a wide range of different frequencies, which might seem like a total mess, but it turns out there’s a simple way to characterize these. Hot objects emit light in what’s called a “black-body spectrum,” a particular distribution of intensities vs. wavelength that depends only on the temperature. the physics of black-body radiation was first explained by Max Planck in 1900, and Planck’s theory is what gives us the term “quantum” for a unit of energy.
So, if you’re looking for a distinction between sunlight and candlelight (as Zack originally noted) or sunlight and an incandescent bulb (for more modern vampires), the key distinction between them is the temperature. A candle flame is pretty hot in human terms, but only around 2000K (reminder: Kelvin temperatures are measured starting at absolute zero, and one kelvin is one degree Celsius; room temperature is a little bit less than 300K), while a really hot light bulb filament might hit 3000K. The Sun’s spectrum closely matches a black-body at something like 5600K.
What’s the difference between these? Well, the peak of the black-body spectrum shifts toward shorter wavelengths as the temperature increases, which is why objects being heated glow first a dull red, then yellow, then white. So sunlight would have a lot more short-wavelength radiation than candlelight or incandescent bulb lights– really a lot more, because the drop-off at the short wavelength end of the spectrum is extremely rapid. The spectrum of the sun extends well into the ultraviolet, while candles and light bulbs produce next to no UV light.
So, it might be just the ultraviolet light that’s the problem– one series of vampire novels by Charlie Huston has vampires exposed to sunlight dying from extremely rapid cancers caused by UV lights, which is a nod toward this feature. But, of course, if UV alone were the culprit, that would present another problem– as we know from modern vampire movies, they frequently hunt on the dance floors of night clubs, and it’s a rare nightclub that doesn’t feature some “black lights” bathing the crowd in ultraviolet radiation…
So, how could you distinguish sunlight from a black light source? Well, the sun emits light over a huge range of wavelengths, where “black lights” tend toward the atomic line source end of things, so maybe you need both short-wavelength radiation and long-wavelength radiation at the same time. Maybe, vampires in sunlight are victims of a two-photon process.
Shutterstock
If your only exposure to the idea of photons is a survey course, this might seem like an impossibility. We usually introduce the idea of photons through an experiment like the photoelectric effect, where short-wavelength light has photons with enough energy to knock electrons loose from a metal surface. When we do that in intro courses, we specifically deny the possibility of absorbing multiple low-energy photons to build up the necessary energy.
The forbidding of multiple-photon processes is a lie-to-children, though: you can, in fact, have processes where you absorb two photons at once, but they’re much less likely than single-photon absorption, and thus not really relevant for the photoelectric effect. This is what makes a green laser pointer possible, though: a green laser pointer uses an infrared laser source that enters a special “doubling crystal” that can absorb two infrared photons and spit out one green photon with half the wavelength (twice the frequency). This is exceedingly unlikely to happen, and thus requires a fairly high intensity, which is why you should be careful when playing with green laser pointers: they’re supposed to have a filter in them to block the vast majority of the infrared light that doesn’t get absorbed, but if that filter was left out to hold down the price, they can actually be much more intense than advertised, and dangerous to your eyes.
For vampires to be sensitive to sunlight specifically, you might imagine some process involving two photons of different invisible-to-humans wavelengths, one in the ultraviolet and one in the infrared. The sun produces huge amounts of infrared radiation, but many human light sources do not, opting instead to optimize the amount of visible light emitted. The likelihood of this process would depend very strongly on the intensity of the light– it would go like the product of the intensity at each of the relevant wavelengths, so cutting the intensity in half would reduce the rate of two-photon absorption by a factor of four. This would explain why vampires are sensitive to sunlight, but can strike dramatic poses in the light of the full moon, which is, after all, just reflecting light from the Sun– the many-times smaller amount of light from the moon has all the right wavelengths, but not enough intensity to be a problem.
So, there’s my crazy retcon for why sunlight specifically, but not candles, incandescent bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, and black lights in nightclubs: something about the process that reanimates them is disrupted by a two-photon process involving both long and short wavelengths found in sunlight… It’s a theory that makes fairly specific predictions, so as I said on Twitter, now we just need to collect a bunch of vampires and put it to the test…
Chad OrzelContributor
I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College.
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Tests:
Legends about cats and vampires
hollyganz
I had the good fortunate to spend this Halloween in the field collecting samples from black-footed cats in the Karoo region of South Africa. As part of a study that Jonathan Eisen and I are conducting on the coevolution between bacteria and cats, we are collecting samples from as many different cat species as possible. The black-footed cat is the smallest cat in Africa and is endemic to Southern Africa. They are solitary and rarely seen and, fortunately for them, they do not prey upon chickens like some wild cats, so they are not a target of predator control by farmers.
Studying black-footed cats requires spending much of the night looking for them using spotlights. In addition we spent the middle part of the day tracking down cats with radio collars so we could change the batteries (and collect a few samples). After a week of sleep deprivation under a waning full moon, including the night of Halloween, my mind turned to thoughts of vampires and cats. These small cats are quite fierce and have lovely fangs and bright green eyes that shine yellow in the spotlights. Like vampires, they are predators who drink blood and go underground during the day. And they seem similarly upset when you dig them out of the burrow and bring them out into the daylight. The only way to do this is to sedate them first.
A black-footed cat looking quite peeved by our intrusion. Photo by Beryl Wilson, Black-Footed Cat Working Group.
A black-footed cat looking quite peeved by our intrusion (photo by Beryl Wilson, Black-Footed Cat Working Group).
According to Wikipedia, cats are included among the animals linked to historical tales of vampires. From Mesopotamia comes the mythical Lilitu or Lilith, a demon who preyed on men and subsists on the blood of babies. In tales from the European Jews of medieval Rhineland, Lilith was the first wife of Adam who was banished. She became a demon who transformed herself into a cat and charmed her victims into believing that she was benevolent and irresistible. In other sources, Lilith is also depicted as a terrifying blood-sucking creature with a lion’s head and the body of a donkey.
A black-footed cat sedated and fitted with a radio collar (photo by Holly Ganz).
A black-footed cat sedated and fitted with a radio collar (photo by Holly Ganz).
When they are sedated, you can see that the black-footed cats have lovely black spots and stripes and yellow-green eyes. You might be tempted to think that such a lovely small cat would make a nice pet. But in actuality they are fierce little cats who must contend with a lot to survive. Despite their mesmerizing beauty, the black-footed cats are not demons. But for fun, next year I suggest that one of the black-footed cats who is collared is also given the name Lilith.
Test:
Vampire not only have red or golden eyes color, it is said that they also have blue,green, etc. The color of their eyes show their best vampire power, for example, if a vampire have green eyes, they are very good in speed and so -------------.?.
A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technologies
ISSN 1541-0099
21(1) – January 2010
Nietzsche, the Overhuman and the Posthuman: A Reply to Stefan Sorgner
Michael Hauskeller
Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 21 Issue 1 – January 2010 - pgs 5-8
jetpress.org/hauskeller.htm
Sorgner (2009, 29) has argued that Bostrom (2005, 4) was wrong to maintain that there are only surface-level similarities between Nietzsche’s vision of the overman, or overhuman, and the transhumanist conception of the posthuman. Rather, he claims, the similarities are “significant” and can be found “on a fundamental level”. However, I think that Bostrom was in fact quite right to dismiss Nietzsche as a major inspiration for transhumanism. There may be some common ground, but there are also essential differences, some of which I am going to point out in this brief reply.
Beyond good and evil
First of all, transhumanists believe that it is both possible and desirable to improve human nature by means of technology (More 2009). They tend to assume that by “making better people” we will, as John Harris (2007, 3) puts it, make “the world a better place”. Posthumans will allegedly lead happier, more fulfilling lives than we do now. This assumption is the main reason why transhumanists demand that we pave the way for posthumanity. In other words, there is a moral imperative at the heart of the transhumanist agenda. David Pearce calls it the “hedonistic imperative” (lifelong well-being as a basic human right), Julian Savulescu (2001) the “principle of procreative beneficence”, which, if adhered to, naturally leads to the embrace of radical human enhancement and, by implication, posthumanity.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, had nothing but contempt for those who sought to improve the human condition, such as John Stuart Mill whom he denounced as a “blockhead” (Flachkopf) because Mill still believed in good and evil (both natural and moral) and felt that one should make it one’s duty to bring about the victory of the former and the destruction of the latter (E, WIII, 665). According to Nietzsche, the philosopher needs to position himself “beyond good and evil,” because there are no moral facts and nothing that is truly better or worse than anything else. Happiness for instance is not to be considered better than suffering. To believe otherwise indicates a grave error of judgement. And more than that: trying to improve humanity is actually an attempt to “suck the blood out of life,” an act of “vampirism” (EH, WII, 1158). Consequently, Nietzsche fervently denied that he himself intended any such thing: “The last I would promise is to better humanity.” (EH, WII, 1065).
Revaluation of all values
Transhumanists may want to revaluate certain aspects of our existence, but they certainly do not, as Nietzsche did, advocate the revaluation of all present values. On the contrary, they emphasise the continuity between (past and present) humanist, (present) transhumanist, and (future) posthuman values and see themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment’s legacy against its modern (bioconservative) enemies. “The posthuman values,” writes Bostrom (2005b, 5), “can be our current values”. Of course, a few things that are supposed to be valuable by some, such as “the natural,” are discarded, but on the whole a transhumanist would regard as good and valuable what is commonly regarded as good and valuable, e.g., a long, healthy and happy life, intellectual curiosity and proficiency, the ability to form deep and lasting relationship, etc.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, wanted to turn our whole system of values upside down, or rather rip it apart. He prided himself to be the “first immoralist” and hence “destroyer par excellence” (EH, WII, 1153). What was commonly regarded as evil needed to be recognized as the highest good. “Evil is man’s best power […] necessary for the best of the overhuman” (TSZ, WII, 524). He wondered whether not all great humans were in fact evil (E, WIII, 449), and he specifically and repeatedly mentions Cesar Borgia as “a kind of overhuman” (TI, W2, 1012), whom he admiringly describes as a “human predator” (Raubmensch) (BGE, WII, 653). Compassion, charity, loving one’s neighbour – traditional Christian values, but not alien to transhumanists either – are scoffed at as symptoms of decadence. According to Nietzsche, universal altruism would take the greatness from existence and effectively castrate humanity (EH, WII, 1155). Consequently, what puts Nietzsche’s (or more precisely Zarathustra’s) overhuman over the merely human is precisely his indifference to common moral concerns: “the good and just would call his overhuman devil” (EH, WII, 1156). Surely, transhumanists would not want to hold that the posthuman is post in this respect.
The non-existence of the mind
Transhumanists continue the logocentric tradition of Western philosophy. By and large they believe that what makes us human, and what is most valuable about our humanity, is the particularity of our minds. We are thinking beings, conscious of ourselves and the world, rational agents that use our environment including our own bodies to pursue our own freely chosen ends. And because our essence consists in our thinking, it is at least conceivable that we may one day be able to transfer (“upload”) our very being to a computer (or another biological brain) and thus achieve some kind of personal immortality. Generally, the organic body is held to be replaceable.
Nietzsche, however, opposed what he thought of as the Christian devaluation of the body and the bodily instincts. The mind, as an entity distinct from the body, was a clever invention, in other words a lie (EH, WII, 1157). It doesn’t exist. Because the invented mind used to be taken as a proof of humanity’s divine origin, one could only hope to reach human perfection by retracting, tortoise-like, one’s senses into oneself, relinquishing all commerce with earthly things, discarding one’s mortal shell, and thus retaining only what was essential to our humanity: pure spirit. For Nietzsche, however, “pure spirit” was “pure folly,” and consciousness in general a “symptom of imperfection” (A, WII, 1174). Nietzsche’s will to power, which is the essence of all life, and in fact the essence of all being, is preconscious and non-rational, although it has its own, superior, reason. One characteristic of the overhuman is that he knows himself to be “entirely body and nothing else” (TSZ, WII, 300).
The big lie of personal immortality
Transhumanism “stresses the moral urgency of saving lives”, which makes anti-aging medicine “a key transhumanist priority” (Bostrom 2005b, 9). The indefinite extension of our life spans is believed to be an obvious good. Nobody wants to die, death is an evil, and life generally (though not necessarily under any circumstances) a good. Hence, if we could achieve personal immortality, we should not hesitate, but seize it. For Nietzsche, however, the promise of personal immortality is nothing but a “big lie” (A, WII, 1205). Not so much because he thought it was impossible for us to ever become immortal, but rather because he believed that most of us are far too insignificant and worthless to deserve immortality.
Promising immortality (or indefinite life extension) to everybody only boosts the widespread delusion that the world revolves around every single one of us, whereas in fact most of us should never have been born in the first place. Most people actually die too late, not too early, because they have never learnt to live (TSZ, WII, 333). “‘Immortality’, granted to every Peter and Paul, has been the biggest, most vicious attack against noble humanity to date” (A, WII, 1205). The promise of personal immortality pretends that we are all equal. It denies difference and rank. Moreover, it is based on an erroneous reification (Versubstanzialisierung) and atomisation of the individual self. The ego is wrongly differentiated from the non-ego, which are in fact inseparable in the eternal process of becoming (E, WIII, 612). By wishing for personal immortality I cut myself off from this process, believe myself to me more important than the rest of the world, which, for all I care, may perish if only I will be safe (HATH, WI, 753). That is not an affirmation of power, but on the contrary an indication of impotence. That is why, just like the human, the self or the “I is something that needs to be overcome” (TSZ, WII, 303). Instead of doing everything to escape death we ought to practice the art of going at the right time and celebrate our dying as something that we freely embrace (TSZ, WII, 334), in order to plunge again into the great “ocean of becoming” (D, WI, 1193), in which we belong. The overhuman understands how to live and how to die. The transhumanist, in Nietzsche’s view, understands neither.
What is the Overhuman?
If the overhuman is not an improved version of the human, what is he? There are of course statements in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, especially in the first sections, that sound as if Nietzsche was indeed advocating the transformation of the human into some kind of posthuman. “Man is something that needs to be overcome” (TSZ, WII, 279). The overhuman is “the meaning of the earth” (TSZ, WII, 280), and man merely a “rope tied between animal and overhuman” (TSZ, WII, 281). But Nietzsche has no clear concept of the overhuman and produces at best vague intimations of what he has in mind (Shapiro 1980, 171). There is a chance that his overhuman is merely an ironic device, never meant to be taken seriously as an ideal human (Ansell-Pearson 1992, 310). After all, we shouldn’t forget that the overhuman was preached by Zarathustra, not Nietzsche himself, and may well be understood as a provisional concept in the ongoing movement of understanding (Lampert 1987, 258), as one possible perspective on the way things are, but not necessarily a true one, let alone the true one (Ansell-Pearson 1992, 314).
Nietzsche himself warned of misunderstanding the overhuman as some kind of higher human. Zarathustra, he reminds us, is the destroyer of all morality, not half saint, half genius, not an idealist type of higher human, not a Parsifal, but a Borgia (EH, WII, 1101). He is mainly characterised by contempt: of personal happiness and of reason (TSZ, WII, 280). The overhuman is not thought of as an exemplar of a future human or posthuman race, but as the “exceptional human” (Ausnahme-Mensch) (EC, WII, 1155), and there have always been such exceptional humans who were “in relation to the whole of humanity a kind of overhuman” (A, WII, 1166). Even though Nietzsche sometimes talks as if a whole race of overhumans were possible, the overhuman can in fact only exist in the singular, that is, set apart from others. Overhuman is who is strong enough to take reality as it is, in all its fearfulness (EC, WII, 1156), with all its pain and suffering, who does not want anything different, to the point that he would welcome the opportunity to live it all again, just as it was. The eternal recurrence of the same, the idea of which is the true centre of the Zarathustra, is counter to the dynamic optimism that characterises transhumanist thought, and its non-selective affirmation by the overhuman counter to transhumanism’s morally toned selectivity.
All this makes it very unlikely that Nietzsche would, as Sorgner (2009, 34) claims, “have been in favour of genetic engineering” or indeed the transhumanist movement as a whole.
References
Ansell-Pearson, K. 1992. Who is the Ubermensch? Time, truth, and woman in
Nietzsche. Journal of the History of Ideas 53(2): 309-331.
Bostrom, N. 2005. A history of transhumanist thought. Journal of Evolution and Technology 14(1): 1-25.
Bostrom, N. 2005b. Transhumanist values. Review of Contemporary Philosophy 4: 87-101.
Harris, J. 2007. Enhancing evolution. The ethical case for making better people. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Lampert, L. 1987. Nietzsche’s teaching. An interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
More, M. 2009. True transhumanism. Global Spiral February 2009.
Nietzsche, F. 1966. The antichrist (A). Beyond good and evil (BGE). Ecce homo (EH). Estate from the 80s (E). Human, all too human (HATH). Thus spoke Zarathustra (TSZ). Twilight of idols (TI). In: Werke in drei Bänden (W). Ed. Karl Schlechta. Munich: Hanser Verlag.
Pearce, D. 1995. The hedonistic imperative: hedonistic-imperative.com
Savulescu, J. 2001. Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 15(5/6): 413-426.
Shapiro, G. 1980. The rhetoric of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Boundary 2(8): 165-89.
Sorgner, S. 2009. Nietzsche, the overhuman, and transhumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology 20(1): 29-42.
And literal metaphors:
unireadinghistory.com/2017/05/2 … e-vampire/