Brilliance meets confusion

Fair enough. I am, indeed, confused by quantum mechanics.

Have you ever tried to explain it to Sabine Hossenfelder?

you see, theres a cat in a box…

“Women are smarter than you are?” Based on fucking what? As far as i know you’ve got smart folks and dumbasses on both sides.

the only thingi understand about qm is that i dont understand it , but at the same time i understand it , if somebody ask me or makes me takes a test the system will collapse and nobody will know if i really do

How to change a flat tire

Ik how to explain quantum mechanics!

I have the strangest feeling that this particular woman isn’t very bright.

I sat on my balls once at a cookout. Every guy was sympathetic and most women asked how that could happen.

We were all in our 30s.

Gotta love when the sexist-karen gets exposed as – you guessed it – sexist

Ok imma try to get the basics across.

There are three fundamental, heavily linked, concepts I will try to explain to you*: Quantisation, Uncertainty, and wave function collapse. They all have to do with the fact that the objects in the quantum world (particles) are incomprehensibly small.

First the easy one: quantisation. This one makes some intuitive sense. If you look at a video screen, you can see a continuous display. But when you get closer and closer, you see that the display is made of pixels. It’s just that the screen is so big when compared to the pixels, that they all look like a continuous plane.

Energy is just so: on the human level, the things we interact with seem to be able to have any energy. But when you get smaller and smaller, you notice that energy comes in little jumps, and energies in between are forbidden. For example: an electron around a hydrogen atom can have an energy of -13.6 eV, and an energy of -3.4 eV, but it can’t have an energy of, say, -6 eV. There’s just not a pixel there: energy, and many other properties, is quantised, not continuous.

Next let’s talk communication, using even more analogies.

We as animals communicate in lots of ways: sound, light, some animals communicate via smell or taste, but in every single case, something must physically make its way from the source to the observer. Even when communicating with sound: air waves are physical things that must travel some distance.

Particles are just so: if they want to “communicate” with each other (and theyll have to communicate for the world to work! If two particles interact, then some communication has to take place for that interaction to occur properly), they must exchange something.

Let’s keep the sound metaphor going: when you talk ar something very flimsy (like a plant, or a sheet of paper), it will start swaying because of your voice. This is because the sound waves you produce are about as strong as the thing you’re talking to.

Particles also exchange “things” to communicate, but these “things” are about a strong as the particles themselves. So when they communicate, they are immediately moved.

This is a problem for us, because to measure something, we must communicate with it. This idea leads to the famous uncertainty principle; you can’t measure the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously, because when you do, both your measurement apparatus and your particle are being jostled around, due to that very measurement.

And this isn’t some property of the measurement apparatus: we can’t invent a better telescope to dodge this problem, because it is inherent to the structure of how nature communicates information (its a law we can derive mathematically). In a way, nature herself doesn’t even exactly know the position and velocity of a particle exactly.

Due to this uncertainty, we say that particles behave like waves. We say that the peak of the wave is the most likely place for a particle to be, but it can be in any place spanned by the wave.

And this wave is physical! It’s not just a way for us to think about particles, it’s a real thing that nature herself deals with too, because she herself doesn’t know exactly either.

So let’s test that wave! It’s finally time to talk about the double slit experiment. If you’re a physicist, the first experiment you’d think to run is to make the wave go through a wall with two side-by-side slits, and observe what happens on the other side. The specifics aren’t relevant, but in the macroworld we have two patterns we can expect: an wave-like pattern, or a particle-like pattern.

When we do this experiment, and the slits are sufficiently close together, we see a wave pattern, even if we send the particles in one-by-one! If we now want to know which of the slits the particle actually went through, we have to measure them. But as soon as our measurement becomes precise enough to determine which slit it goes through, the pattern changes to a particle-like pattern!

The magic here isn’t that the particle “knows its being observed”, of course it knows! It’s being pelted by comparatively huge photons (bits of light), it’s gonna notice. The magic also isn’t that the behaviour changes at all (after all, youd also start behaving differently if i pelted you with rocks), it’s when it does: the behaviour changes precisely at the point that we would learn which slit the particle travels through.

This is called “wave function collapse”: this probability distribution I mentioned earlier, is collapsed to a single point (a particle with a defined position) as soon as we learn enough about it.

What they want to eat