A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
"Well... You see... When its a particle it spins. When its a wave its still doing that. How does a waveform spin you ask? Listen. Shut the fuck up. The math is really weird and some of this stuff just happens and you can't visualize it in your head. We didn't believe it at first either but after 50 years of experiments we have to just accept that reality is consistent with the math even if we don't fully conceptualize what that means even"
You seem to be up to date with this stuff; did we find out whether there's more than one yet..?
Personally don't like the idea of everyone reusing the same electon for everything... seems quite unhygienic. I'd rather we had at least one per person, maybe share it with people we trust, if we must...
Also please don't look at it
think of it as a camera.
if you set it up with a high speed to take a picure of a bouncing ping pong ball you will know its precise location at the moment of the shot.
if you set it up with a low speed you will see a blur of the path it took, but not a precise location.
It's a point but it doesn't actually exist at any point. It exists in a cloud where it could exist anywhere in there.
You can observe it but doing so changes its behavior. Why? Well... Um... Maybe it's just the simulation breaking down?
It's because to observe something you have to interact with it. Dealing with particles is like playing pool in the dark and the only way you can tell where the balls are is by rolling other balls into them and listening for the sound it makes. Thing is, you now only know where the ball was, not what happened next.
In the quantum world, even a single photon can influence what another particle is doing. This is fundamentally why observation changes things.
holy shit the pool explanation is so good, I'm gonna recycle it for sure
like trying to measure a soft noodle lengthwise with a caliper
So, if we had a machine that could "see" without photons, we could observe an electron directly? (I know nothing about this)
We have such devices, unfortunately they tend to use electrons instead (electron microscopes). We also have devices that just work by measuring the electromagnetic field (atomic force microscopes). Again though, to measure the field you have to interact with it, so you can't do it immaculately.
Electrons are especially hard because they are so incredibly light yet intensely charged compared to everything that can actually interact with them.
When talking about particles, the interaction very rarely involves actual contact, as that tends result in some manner of combination. Two electrons for instance don't really bounce off each other, they just get close, interact and then diverge. If a photon 'hits' an electron it gets absorbed and a new one is emitted. Look up Feynman Diagrams if you want to see some detail to this. I don't think you need any deep knowledge to benefit from looking at them, they are really quite an elegant way to visually show the mathematics.
think of it as a camera.
if you set it up with a high speed to take a picure of a bouncing ping pong ball you will know its precise location at the moment of the shot.
if you set it up with a low speed you will see a blur of the path it took, but not a precise location.
Google "Electron Orbitals". All the spaces there are all the ~~possible~~ highest likely locations for the electrons. Good Introduction to some Quantum Mechanics 👍
I don't think so. Orbitals give you the spaces of highest probability! Electrons could be outside as well. And since it is based on probability it is definitely a useful model.
Electronic orbitals are regions within the atom in which electrons have the highest probability of being found.
I'll have a look at this later, I remember it being any possible existence of an election, not just highest probabilities, from when I was taught this several weeks ago.
Ah yes. And if two fields are too close, ~~teleportation~~ tunneling can happen.
In the end, reality is just one big probability engine.
If we theorize that the universe is like a computer program, then maybe the Universe has several layers of abstraction and we only can access our current layer, therefore forever having an incomplete model. If something external to our layer is affecting it, it would probably be impossible to know.
Stupid Java-ass AbstractUniverseControllerFactoryBuilderSingleton reality we live in.
Now everything is clear. Thanks!
We haven't even started with quantum fields yet.