Hey guys!
I'm Jon and WELCOME to Respect Your Intellect!
You might already be familiar with the term "Quantum Leap" or "Quantum Jump" in contexts
other than science, such as to mean a dramatic improvement in something, but now we're gonna
talk about what a Quantum Leap actually is in science and how it works.
Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons and lllet's get started!
[Intro]
In order to understand a bit more how quantum leaps work, let's once again start by looking
at an example in classical physics since that's what we're naturally more familiar with.
As a small reminder to those who haven't been following the entire series yet, classical
physics is all based on orderly and predictable behavior like throwing a ball up and always
seeing it come back down in a predictable manner.
Quantum physics on the other hand is all based on randomness, unpredictability, and uncertainty,
like how particles travel as waves of probabilities and collapse when they interact with something
else.
We had an example in the introduction video to this series where we talked about throwing
a ball against a wall and how different and weird that simple behavior can become in the
quantum world.
So in classical physics, you expect that when you throw a ball towards a wall, it'll start
by traveling there.
Then it'll reach the wall and somehow interact with it.
If it has very little energy, the ball will be stopped by the wall and drop to the ground.
If it's just about equal, the ball might become embedded inside the wall.
And finally, if the ball has enough energy, it'll break through the wall and get to the
other side.
Now all of this, we're very familiar with because that's the world we've experienced
our entire lives; the ball will have a continuous and predictable trajectory.
It might come at no surprise to you at this point though that, in a quantum world, this
isn't how things necessarily work all the time.
The Quantum Leap, or Quantum Jump, effect is the equivalent of throwing the ball towards
the wall and simply having it disappear from your hand and appear right away at the wall
without having travelled there.
In other words, particles in the quantum world seem to be able to pretty much instantly jump
from one position to another without traveling between the two points; appearing to follow
a discontinuous trajectory.
Stay tuned until the end though because there's actually a recent development in regards to
this.
So the easiest way to explain the behavior of quantum leaps is to talk about something
called Atomic Electron Transition; which is just a fancy way of describing how electrons
move inside of an atom as they gain and lose energy.
If you've been following my channel for a while now, you might already be familiar with
the way that atoms interact with light since we've covered this before.
If you haven't seen that specific video, I highly suggest you go check it out right here
and come back afterwards to make sure you can follow along.
So let's just quickly summarize how atoms and light interact.
An atom is comprised of a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons with the number of
protons determining the type of atom that it is.
Now around this nucleus is where the electrons will orbit, if there are any in this specific
atom.
Normally, an atom has an equal amount of protons in the nucleus, each with a charge of +1,
as it has electrons orbiting around the nucleus, each with a charge of -1, resulting in a net
charge of zero.
If the number of protons differs from the number of electrons, the atom is known as
an ion because it has a non-zero charge; which will be relevant to know in a moment.
So now, let's take a hydrogen atom as an example which is the simplest one we can use; with
a single proton and a single electron.
The electron that orbits the nucleus is not always at the same distance away from the
nucleus.
There are different orbitals in the atom that the electron can jump to as the atom absorbs
and emits energy when it interacts with light.
Now these orbitals that the electron can jump to are very limited in an atom.
If we have orbital 1 some distance away from the nucleus and orbital 2 even further away,
the electron can only really be in either orbital 1 or orbital 2 but nothing in between;
at least not for any significant amount of time.
This seemingly discontinuous jump is why this effect was coined a "Quantum Leap".
The way that electrons move from one orbital to another in an atom is by absorbing particles
of light, called photons, of a precise amount of energy to jump further away from the nucleus
and changing the atom into an excited state.
The atom then re-emits that energy as a photon as the electron jumps back down to orbital
1, resulting in a relaxed state again.
The energy that an atom emits is always exactly the same as what it absorbed to make the electron
jump up to a higher orbital.
So these jumps of the electrons between the different orbitals of an atom is what's usually
referred to as a Quantum Leap or a Quantum Jump.
Like the other quantum effects, there's nothing in classical physics that can compare to this
behavior without seeming like magic; or so we thought until this year, in 2019.
So up to now in this presentation, I presented the quantum leap effect to you in the same
way as we've been doing for years now but there's a recent discovery that was published
in the Nature Journal of Science that really changes things.
The study shows experimental results that, contrary to what we've mainly thought up to
now, demonstrate that quantum jumps are actually continuous, coherent, and deterministic.
They show this by catching a quantum jump mid-flight and reversing it before it reaches
its intended destination.
This means that the jumps are not actually instantaneous which makes this quantum effect
not quite as magical as we previously thought.
This discovery could lead to a pretty significant advancement because it could help with Quantum
Computing by improving the early detection of errors; which is currently one of the biggest
challenges in quantum computing.
I'll leave a link to this article in the description, if you're interested in learning more about
catching quantum jumps mid-flight and reversing them.
If you find the interaction between light and atoms interesting, I highly suggest you
check out my video on what light is for a lot more details on that.
I especially recommend it to learn how spectroscopy works which allows us to study the atomic
level of objects over astronomical distances.
I also have a video on the double slit experiment, as well as one on the quantum eraser experiment,
that talks about experimental results of how light behaves.
If you haven't seen that, I also suggest you check that out since, to me, it's definitely
one of the most influential experiment in science as well as a big part of what got
me interested in science in the first place.
I hope you enjoyed this video and I also wanna thank my patrons on Patreon for supporting
the channel.
I really appreciate the support!
I'm also planning to make a new series that I'll likely be introducing in the next video
so make sure you subscribe and click that bell notification so you don't miss out!
If you have anything else to contribute, don't hesitate to write it down in the comments
because I always enjoy interacting with you guys.
You can also check out my website at respectyourintellect.com for all the information and videos on this
channel.
Until next time, thanks for watching and remember: Respect Your Intellect!