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Max Planck, at the turn of the past century, made observations regarding how light was emitted by hot objects. He observed that light energy was emitted in discrete packets, which he called ‘quanta’, and this emission of heat did not perform as a continuum, as had been supposed by the ongoing mathematical principles of that time.
This observation led both Albert Einstein and Planck to show that light could paradoxically behave both as a wave and as a particle (a photon), depending on how it was observed. This was the beginning of a slow and quiet revolution which finally began to take pace during the 2oth century: the fact that the common-sense view of the world is wrong, that it is just an illusion.
There were a myriad of exciting things in physics: Einstein showed that space and time were a continuum, not separate things, and of course, had the sublime inspiration that led him to deduce his now very famous equation E=mc2 to describe the relationship between mass (m), electromagnetic energy (E) and (c) the speed of light; but also he predicted that no object could travel faster than the speed of light. But in the meantime, other physicists were developing the ‘planetary’ theory of the atom with electrons in orbit around a central nucleus, which up to this day, is still a very popular theory even taught in schools as a hard solid fact. Naturally, the planetary model was very successful, because it provided an explanation for the properties of chemical elements.
Nervetheless, as soon as in the 1920s, this planetary model was already questioned and put in the stand: electrons were shown not to be solid "bits" of matter like planets (which at the end, they only look like that); no, paradoxically enough, the electrons could exhibit wave or particle properties just as light does. Also, there were some few other problems with this planetary model; basically, why did not negatively charged electrons collapse into a positively charged nucleus, and what force made them stay in particular orbits? Where did the energy for that motion come from?
1. See a very interesting and funny explanation about where particles go.
And furthermore, particles popped in and out of existence just in front of the observer. Where did they go? (1. See a very interesting and funny explanation in What The Bleep).
In the interesting PBS series, Nova: The Elegant Universe (2003), it comes a very graphical and articulate description by Brian Greene of the superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, or the Theory of All, narrating the diverse and intense attempts to explain or at the least describe the strange behaviour of sub-atomic particles, which led to a new type of mathematics, known now as quantum mechanics.
It was observed that the wave aspect of such particles was not exactly like the kind of rippled wave formed by a disturbance on water, but was rather a wave of probability revealing the likelihood that a particle would be found in a particular place depending of the observer.
Probability waves or strings (or planes) as now they are seen, were bell-shaped: the chance of finding the particle was highest in the centre and less and less likely as the observer moved further away from it; however, the probability of finding the particle never became zero, independently of how far away in the universe one tried to measure it; its influence was potentially present everywhere.
And this had strong scientific as well as spiritual or philosophic implications, since the influence of each electron from any atom could be found everywhere, leading to the notion that everything, everywhere is potentially in touch with everything else... elsewhere.
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The Principle of uncertainty: Faster than the speed of light?
Observations and meditations about Quantum mechanics, revelead other interesting challenges to the conventional way of thinking.
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Relative Tags: quantum mechanics, quantum physics, quantum theory, quantum for dummies, easy quantum mechanics
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