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    Quantum Physics

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    Milan Basu
    1) Everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature simultaneously, which seems counterintuitive but is an experimental fact. 2) Quantum objects are neither particles nor waves but a third category with some properties of both. They can be described as particles or excitations of quantum fields depending on the context. 3) Quantum physics is discrete - energy and other values come in specific amounts rather than continuously, leading to its strange properties. Single experiments have probabilistic rather than certain outcomes.

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    Quantum Physics

    Uploaded by

    Milan Basu
    55 views3 pages
    1) Everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature simultaneously, which seems counterintuitive but is an experimental fact. 2) Quantum objects are neither particles nor waves but a third category with some properties of both. They can be described as particles or excitations of quantum fields depending on the context. 3) Quantum physics is discrete - energy and other values come in specific amounts rather than continuously, leading to its strange properties. Single experiments have probabilistic rather than certain outcomes.

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    Quantum Physics

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    1) Everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature simultaneously, which seems counterintuitive but is an experimental fact. 2) Quantum objects are neither particles nor waves but a third category with some properties of both. They can be described as particles or excitations of quantum fields depending on the context. 3) Quantum physics is discrete - energy and other values come in specific amounts rather than continuously, leading to its strange properties. Single experiments have probabilistic rather than certain outcomes.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    55 views3 pages

    Quantum Physics

    Uploaded by

    Milan Basu
    1) Everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature simultaneously, which seems counterintuitive but is an experimental fact. 2) Quantum objects are neither particles nor waves but a third category with some properties of both. They can be described as particles or excitations of quantum fields depending on the context. 3) Quantum physics is discrete - energy and other values come in specific amounts rather than continuously, leading to its strange properties. Single experiments have probabilistic rather than certain outcomes.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics

    Chad Orzel
    Contributor
    Science
    I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture.
    This article is more than 6 years old.

      Quantum physics is usually just intimidating from the get-go. It's kind
    of weird and can seem counter-intuitive, even for the physicists who deal
    with it every day. But it's not incomprehensible. If you're reading something
    about quantum physics, there are really six key concepts about it that you
    should keep in mind. Do that, and you'll find quantum physics a lot easier to
    understand.
    Everything Is Made Of Waves; Also, Particles

    Light as both a particle and a wave. (Image credit: Fabrizio Carbone/EPFL)


    There's lots of places to start this sort of discussion, and this is as good as
    any: everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature, at the
    same time. There's a line in Greg Bear's fantasy duology (The Infinity
    Concerto and The Serpent Mage), where a character describing the basics of
    magic says "All is waves, with nothing waving, over no distance at all." I've
    always really liked that as a poetic description of quantum physics-- deep
    down, everything in the universe has wave nature.
    Of course, everything in the universe also has particle nature. This seems
    completely crazy, but is an experimental fact, worked out by a surprisingly
    familiar process:
    (there's also an animated version of this I did for TED-Ed).
    Of course, describing real objects as both particles and waves is necessarily
    somewhat imprecise. Properly speaking, the objects described by quantum
    physics are neither particles nor waves, but a third category that shares
    some properties of waves (a characteristic frequency and wavelength, some
    spread over space) and some properties of particles (they're generally
    countable and can be localized to some degree). This leads to some lively
    debate within the physics education community about whether it's really
    appropriate to talk about light as a particle in intro physics courses; not
    because there's any controversy about whether light has some particle
    nature, but because calling photons "particles" rather than "excitations of a
    quantum field" might lead to some student misconceptions. I tend not to
    agree with this, because many of the same concerns could be raised about
    calling electrons "particles," but it makes for a reliable source of blog
    conversations.
    This "door number three" nature of quantum objects is reflected in the
    sometimes confusing language physicists use to talk about quantum
    phenomena. The Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider
    as a particle, but you will also hear physicists talk about the "Higgs field" as
    a delocalized thing filling all of space. This happens because in some
    circumstances, such as collider experiments, it's more convenient to discuss
    excitations of the Higgs field in a way that emphasizes the particle-like
    characteristics, while in other circumstances, like general discussion of why
    certain particles have mass, it's more convenient to discuss the physics in
    terms of interactions with a universe-filling quantum field. It's just different
    language describing the same mathematical object.
    Quantum Physics Is Discrete

    These oscillations created an image of "frozen" light. (Credit: Princeton)


    It's right there in the name-- the word "quantum" comes from the Latin for
    "how much" and reflects the fact that quantum models always involve
    something coming in discrete amounts. The energy contained in a quantum
    field comes in integer multiples of some fundamental energy. For light, this
    is associated with the frequency and wavelength of the light-- high-
    frequency, short-wavelength light has a large characteristic energy, which
    low-frequency, long-wavelength light has a small characteristic energy.
    In both cases, though, the total energy contained in a particular light field is
    an integer multiple of that energy-- 1, 2, 14, 137 times-- never a weird
    fraction like one-and-a-half, π, or the square root of two. This property is
    also seen in the discrete energy levels of atoms, and the energy bands of
    solids-- certain values of energy are allowed, others are not. Atomic clocks
    work because of the discreteness of quantum physics, using the frequency of
    light associated with a transition between two allowed states in cesium to
    keep time at a level requiring the much-discussed "leap second" added last
    week.
    Ultra-precise spectroscopy can also be used to look for things like dark
    matter, and is part of the motivation for a low-energy fundamental physics
    institute.
    This isn't always obvious-- even some things that are fundamentally
    quantum, like black-body radiation, appear to involve continuous
    distributions. But there's always a kind of granularity to the underlying
    reality if you dig into the mathematics, and that's a large part of what leads
    to the weirdness of the theory.
    Quantum Physics Is Probabilistic

    (Credit: Graham Barclay/Bloomberg News)


    One of the most surprising and (historically, at least) controversial aspects
    of quantum physics is that it's impossible to predict with certainty the
    outcome of a single experiment on a quantum system. When physicists
    predict the outcome of some experiment, the prediction always takes the
    form of a probability for finding each of the particular possible outcomes,
    and comparisons between theory and experiment always involve inferring
    probability distributions from many repeated experiments.

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