What I’m about to say might disappoint a lot of kids, and some adults too.
There is no such thing as real magic.
No one is making things disappear and reappear.
No one is making things go through walls.
No laws of nature are being broken.
It’s all sleight of hand and optical illusions.
However, there is a realm where if it were possible for us to view directly, we would
swear that we were witnessing real magic, where our everyday physics and sense of reality
would appear to be completely violated.
I’m talking about the quantum world, where a different set of physical laws seem to make
things behave in ways that we can’t fathom, like objects going through walls, or appearing
and disappearing constantly.
We’re going to do something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
We are going to project the behavior of quantum objects onto the macro scale.
If our everyday objects like tables, chairs and tennis balls behaved like quantum objects
such as electrons and atoms, what would we see?
Now here’s a little secret that is not widely known, the quantum world does not operate
with a different set of laws, the very same laws apply to everything.
We just can’t see the weird behavior at our scales.
Why is that?
I will tell you the answer to that.
But first let’s look at the fascinating visualization of quantum mechanics projected
onto everyday objects…coming up right now.
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Now, back to the show.
Let’s say you are alone in a classroom that seats 10 students.
When a second student enters the room, you appear to be sitting in all the seats at once.
This student doesn’t know where you are.
But as soon as he sits or touches one of the chairs to see if it’s empty, you appear
in one of the seats sitting by yourself.
And he is then able to take a seat.
You were in what’s called a superposition, which is the ability of a quantum object such
as a photon, electron, atom or anything sufficiently isolated, to be in multiple positions at the
same time until it is measured.
This principle come from the Schrodinger equation which contains a term called the wave function.
The wavefunction for an object contains all the information that describes the quantum
object, such as its position, spin, momentum, etc.
In quantum mechanics, objects are in a state of superposition, where they can take on all
possible states prior to measurement.
Once a measurement is made, however, the properties of the particle gets fixed to only one of
the states.
Note that a measurement does not mean a physical measurement made by a human or any conscious
observer.
A measurement is any kind of interaction and is a physical or mechanical process that does
not require a measurer of any kind.
In the case of you sitting in the classroom, the interaction occurred when the second student
tried to sit in one of the chairs.
You were in superposition before the interaction but no longer after the interaction.
Another key aspect of quantum mechanics is the departure from the deterministic classical
world to a more probabilistic world.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s say you are playing squash, hitting the ball against the wall in front of you.
And as your partner expects the ball to bounce back to him so he can hit it, no ball comes.
The ball has disappeared.
Behind the wall is a second squash court, and the players on that court find that they
are playing with two balls.
Your ball went through the wall somehow.
You look for holes in the wall, but find none.
What happened here?
This phenomenon is known as quantum tunneling.
In quantum mechanics, when a quantum object like an electron encounters an energy barrier,
like a wall, there is a non zero chance that it will end up on the other side of the wall.
This is possible because you have to remember that quantum objects are defined by a wave
function, and the wave function extends to all of spacetime.
This means that it extends, not only in your court, but also into the wall and outside
the wall into the other court.
And the smaller the energy barrier, that is, the thinner and lower the wall, the greater
the probability that it will end up on the other side.
Your squash court front wall was probably very thin.
The ball, if it is a quantum object did not go through any hole, but simply went through
the wall and ended up on the other side.
All this is presuming any player can hit the squash ball in the first place.
If the squash ball is a quantum object, it is subject to something called the Uncertainty
Principle.
This is a principle introduced by one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg.
It basically says that there is a fundamental limit to how precisely we can know certain
combinations of properties of a particle.
The most common pair of properties with such a limit, is position and momentum.
This means that the more precisely we know how fast the squash ball is moving, the less
precisely we know where it is.
We can illustrate why this is the case with a simple analogy.
Picture a rope attached to a wall with a person on the other end waving it.
If he waves his hand several times, multiple waves will form on the rope.
This is analogous to the waveform of a quantum object.
If we look at a snapshot of these waves, we will see that it is fairly easy to determine
the wavelength of this wave.
However, the position of the wave is not distinct.
The position could be anywhere.
On the other hand, if the person waves his hand only once, a single wave will travel
from one end to the other.
In this case, the position of the wave is easy to determine, but now we don’t know
what the wavelength is.
So, with this analogy, we can either know the wavelength or position fairly precisely,
but not both.
Note that I am using the term wavelength interchangeably with momentum here, because there is direct
relationship between the two via this equation, where lambda is the wavelength and p is the momentum.
and h is Planck's constant. This uncertainty of not being able to precisely
know the wavelength and position of the rope simultaneously, is analogous to the uncertainty
in position and momentum of quantum objects.
And you should know that is not due to an observer effect. In other words,
it’s not a limitation of what we can measure.
It is a limitation of what we can know.
It is inherent in the properties of wave-like objects.
Given this, it would be very hard for either player to hit the ball because if he could
see very clearly see where the ball is, he wouldn’t know how fast it’s going, so
he might swing before it gets to his racket.
On the other hand, if he knew how fast it was going, he would have no idea where it
is.
Now, let’s keep going with the squash ball visualization.
Suppose there is a squash ball machine that creates and shoots squash balls onto the wall
for practice purposes.
Remember our imaginary squash ball is a quantum object.
If you were in the court, you would not actually see any balls coming out of the ball machine.
All you would see is balls bouncing off the wall in front of you.
If would be as if the balls are coming out of the wall.
But what’s really happening is that the balls coming out of the ball machine are in
superposition.
They only become localized and visible to you after they have interacted with the wall
in front of you.
Before this happens, their location could be anywhere in the court.
The various locations would have a probability associated with them.
They could even be outside the court due to quantum tunneling I described previously.
But if we make the walls of the court thick and high enough, the ball is likely to be
confined to within the court.
Now suppose there happen to be two slits on the wall.
If the balls coming out of the machine are now fired towards the slit, you would not
see them at all, some might bounce of the wall adjacent to the slits, but most would
simply go through the slits remaining in superposition onto the court next to yours.
If you went to the adjacent court however, you would see the balls bounce of the wall
in the next court.
The interesting thing is that if you could see the scuff marks on the wall of the adjacent
court after the machine throws many hundreds of balls towards the slits, you would see
that the scuff marks make a distinct interference pattern, as if multiple waves were hitting
the wall.
This illustrates the famous double slit experiment which is done typically with photons and electrons,
but can be done with any quantum particle.
So these illustrations beg the question, why don’t we actually see this in our everyday
experience?
Why don’t these quantum behaviors appear in our macro world?
Do the laws of quantum mechanics apply only to micro objects?
The answer is no, the laws of quantum mechanics do not change.
They apply to everything, including the squash ball.
But the effects of quantum mechanics are too small to be noticed.
So why is the effect more obvious at atomic scales, but not noticeable at our everyday
macro scales?
Subatomic and atomic scale objects act like waves, and so behave like quantum objects.
But large objects are made of a huge number of atoms.
For example a squash ball is made of almost 10^15 or one quadrillion atoms, each of which
are wave like quantum objects.
But the problem is that all these innumerable atoms act in a disorganized and random manner.
Their individual waves interfere with each other, and average out to zero on the macroscopic
scale.
This disorganized wave-like behavior is called “decoherence” in physics.
In order to get a macro object like a squash ball to behave like a quantum object, we would
need all its quadrillions of individual waves to be coherent.
In other words, we would need to get them to behave in an organized way.
The more coherent an object, the more it acts like a wave and thus a quantum object.
This is next to impossible to do for this and other large objects.
Although this is not feasible for something like a squash ball, you should know that coherence
has been achieved in some large molecules consisting of several thousand atoms.
So for example molecules consisting of 2000 coherent atoms have been used in the double
slit experiment and demonstrated to have wave-like or quantum mechanical behavior, just as I
showed in my example.
In addition, there are several real-world examples of macro objects displaying quantum
mechanical behavior.
One example is superconductors, where at very low temperatures, large groups of electron
pairs act in unison to form what’s called a Bose-Einstein condensate which acts like
a quantum object.
I made a video on this if you want to know more details.
Quantum behavior in superconductors can be very large, up to kilometer-sized in superconducting
wires.
Other examples are superfluids where at very low temperatures, a fluid flows with no loss
of kinetic energy.
Another interesting example you might be familiar with can be seen in this photograph:
You will notice that you can see this person’s finger prints on the inside of the glass.
This should not happen because the photons at the glass air interface are all totally
reflected back towards the water, making a mirror like surface.
The reason you can still see the fingerprint ridges is due to quantum tunneling.
This phenomenon is called FTIR or Frustrated Total Internal Reflection.
I have a reference link in the description if you want to know more details on this.
The main takeaways I want you to get out of this video are that quantum mechanics is really
everywhere and everything at its core is really a wave.
This wave-like behavior is all around you, but you would not be aware of it.
If you could shrink yourself to quantum scales, or project quantum behavior to your macro
scales, like the animations I showed, the world would look completely different.
But that’s real world we live in, and is the way the universe actually operates.
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up.
If you have a question, please post it in the comments below.
I will see you in the next video my friend.