this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Which is what's so "magical" about it - Newtonian rules seem to break down at the quantum level.
It was an incredible discovery, and for practically anyone not a physicist, it's incredibly hard to comprehend. I say this as a not-a-physicist who struggled to comprehend it decades ago, and read several books on the subject to finally get my head around it (as much as a non-physicist can).
Also, it's just a meme mate.
I disagree with it being hard to comprehend. The maths is an absolute bitch, but the basic premise is fairly simple. Everything is (quantised) waves. The rest clicks, once you get your brain to accept this. Everything else is a consequence. Those consequences can lead you down deep dark tunnels, filled with evil maths and mind bending results, but the basic idea is simple.
I have a bit of an issue with memes that are actively misleading.
Well, famously, they're waves and particles. The double slit which way experiment will only set off the detector in one slit, as if it was a particle. Yet, without a detector it will interfere with itself as if it were a wave that passed through both slits.
QM entities are quantised waves. You can make a wave look very close to a particle quite easily, a particle can never behave like a wave.
Dumping the mental short hand of particle interactions is one of the main reasons most people can't get their heads around it.
That’s wrong though, and further belies my point about math, and perhaps needing to take a quantum class before talking about it.
They are particles and waves.