Okay, let me set the scene for you: It’s Wednesday, and I have no ideas for an article. This gives me roughly three days to come up with an article idea, draft an outline, and write the entire thing in time for the Saturday deadline. A smarter, more efficient person would have gotten the easiest topic in their backlog and written about that, saving more complicated articles for when they can get an earlier start on writing. HOWEVER, my friends, this is not an efficient blog. We pride ourselves on tackling incredibly over-complicated subjects in the shortest amount of time possible.

With that being said, let’s talk quantum physics.

The Set Up

I had been planning on making an article on quantum physics pretty much the second I thought of the explainer series. This is really the go-to topic when it comes to “being able to digest complicated things that don’t really make sense”, and while I do believe there are really much more complicated things then quantum physics it naturally became a target just because of its infamy.

Now, due to my lack of time – and the immensity of the task before me – I highly doubt I will be able to finish a good discussion on quantum physics within one article. Instead, I’m going to set the foundations here, and we’ll continue the rabbit hole next week. Think our Networking series, except that one was actually planned out in advance and this one is not.

In this article, we’ll focus on the two most famous concepts to come out of quantum mechanics: observer interference, and wave-particle duality. As an advanced warning, I have a lot of things to say on this topic I have virtually no formal training about. I do not claim to be an expert. If there are any physicists in the audience (I somehow doubt this) feel free to argue my points in the comments and I’ll try to “patch fix” in Part II of the series.

The Most Misunderstood Idea in Physics

There are three “levels” of physics in reality: gravitational, classical, and quantum.

These levels, more or less, depend on the size of the objects that are feeling the physics. Gravitational physics works on very large, hefty objects like planets and stars. Classical physics works on most of the stuff we’re used to, such as apples all the way up to skyscrapers. Quantum physics, on the other hand, works with really tiny stuff – molecules, atoms, electrons, and anything smaller than that.

Classical physics is pretty much a solved problem. Gravitational physics, while quite weird, doesn’t really have any paradoxes and is explainable in ways that make sense, albeit are incompatible with classical physics.

Quantum physics is just a fucking mess.

I think the main problem with quantum physics is that it “released” at a time where physics was part of pop culture, and a lot of the ideas in quantum physics got telephoned to the general public as being essentially “magic” when in reality they represent unsolved problems of things we still don’t quite understand. A lot of this revolves around quantum physics’ most famous experiment: the double-slit.

Let’s say you had a wall with two slits.

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And we got a big gun – an electron gun, even – that’s capable of shooting one electron at a time.

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Let’s say we then shot the gun, one electron at a time, through the slits. On the other side of the slit, we have a detector screen that tells us where the electrons ended up. We’d expect something like –

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Obviously, because we’re shooting it directly at the slits. Given the spread of the gun, some of them are going to hit the barrier between the two slits, and the rest will go into one of the two slits. Right? Right??

Well, as it turns out, if you do this, the result is:

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The electrons appear to be curving, or otherwise passing through the wall, straight to the other side. Not only is this weird because these stupid electron motherfuckers are showing up all over the place, but if you look more closely, you see that it still follows a pattern:

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Outside of our two slits, there are bundles of dots that appear, with sparse groupings of dots in between. It’s almost as if it follows a pattern of peaks and troughs, almost like a wave…

Oh no.

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As it turns out, this shit works exactly like a wave, to the point where we can use our old wave math, tweak it a bit, and predict exactly where these dots are going to appear. Say our slits were positioned at A and B – we’d see the resulting electrons appear in bundles at spots C, D, E, and F, with sparse spaces in between.

Obviously, this result was rather scary for scientists. So, they decided to try the experiment again: this time, they wanted to measure what exactly the electrons were doing in order to get them to follow a wave pattern. Because, as we know, electrons are not big waves – they’re simply small dots, and should appear only within the two slits.

After measuring these electrons, the result on the slits was:

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Oh God damn it.

This idea of observer interference, also known as the uncertainty principle, is the first major piece of quantum physics information misunderstood by the media. If you’ve heard of this experiment – or this principle – you probably believe that just the act of looking at where the electrons go makes them follow a completely different pattern, AKA go back to normal. It’s like the dog ruining your sofa but when you watch the dog he acts like nothing happened.

In other words, the media – like most things in science – thinks this is magic. It is, unfortunately, not magic. It is science.

What the uncertainty principle actually states is that, for whatever reason, every pre-existing measure that we have for electrons will fuck with them to such a degree that they go back to a traditional two-slit spread. This makes a lot of sense, because obviously we can’t just see electrons – we have to use things like photon scattering, or magnets, or what have you. And so far everything we’ve tried – even things that really shouldn’t affect electrons – still ends up affecting the electrons in this experiment. Sensitive little bastards.

 This is a huge problem for us, because it means we don’t actually know what the electrons are doing to make a pattern like this. And if we don’t know what they’re doing… we have to assume that they are both waves, and particles, at the same time.

This creates a lot of problems. Like, a lot of problems.

Wave-particle duality is arguably the most controversial topic in all of science. Theories for how this works range from “we have no idea what we’re doing”, “the world is just splitting into multiple timelines like Doctor Strange”, “electrons are actually not particles but in fact little cute string fellas”, and the most popular theory of them all, “I don’t know, fuck it, they just exist everywhere at the same time, stop asking me questions”. And we will get to all four of these theories, including the one I believe the most and why… in part II of this series.

See you then!

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