![]() ![]() This problem, it turns out, is not limited to photons. (Einstein, born in Germany, played an important role in developing quantum theory.) ![]() “Do you really believe the moon exists only when you look at it?” Albert Einstein famously asked. They shouldn’t only see a particle when they look for particles, and only see waves when they look for waves. So how scientists study them shouldn’t matter. This is one of the bizarre ideas that pops out of quantum theory. At the quantum scale, things can appear as particles or waves - and exist in more than one place at once. But it’s impossible to measure them as waves and particles at the same time. It’s possible to set up experiments where photons behave like particles, and others where they behave like waves. Wave or particle? Neither or both? Some scientists even offered a compromise, using the word “wavicle.” How scientists answer the question will depend on how they try to measure photons. Those findings caused a lot of confusion. A hundred years after that, newer experiments showed light could sometimes act like waves, and sometimes act like particles, called photons. Then, 200 years ago, experiments demonstrated that light could travel as waves. Centuries ago, scientists believed light traveled as a stream of particles, like a flow of tiny bright balls. These are the particles that make up light and radiation. Why the tiniest laws of nature work that way isn’t clear - to anyone.Ĭonsider photons. And they sometimes travel like particles. Waves do.īut in experiments, particles in the subatomic world sometimes travel like waves. A baseball doesn’t ripple or form peaks and valleys as it travels from one place to the next. But the baseball and the waves move differently. In both cases, something travels from one place to another. Those waves eventually reach the other side. If you drop a baseball in a pond, waves ripple away in growing circles. Here’s a taste of that weirdness: If you hit a baseball over a pond, it sails through the air to land on the other shore. Trained as a physicist, Lindley now writes books about science (including quantum science) from his home in Virginia. “We don’t really have the concepts to deal with it,” he says. “The bottom line is, the quantum world just doesn’t work in the way the world around us works,” says David Lindley. Particles sometimes travel like those waves. If you leave it under your bed, you know it’s there and that it will stay there until you move it.) If you drop a pebble in a pond, waves ripple away in circles. ![]() Scientists can predict where they might be - yet they never know where they are. They also can spread out as waves, like ripples on a pond.Īlthough they might be found anywhere, the certainty of finding one of these particles in any particular place is zero. Sometimes, they behave like clumps of matter. These subatomic bits of matter don’t follow the same rules as objects that we can see, feel or hold. Explainer: Quantum is the world of the super small ![]()
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