Who is quantum

Project video game. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? View source. History Talk 0. Do you like this video? Play Sound. White , Quantum of Solace. A Quantum pin, as seen in Quantum of Solace Fan Feed 1 Madeleine Swann 2 Mr. White 3 Lyutsifer Safin. Universal Conquest Wiki. Intelligence Agencies. The most common approach to understanding this result is to say that quantum mechanics is non-local: that the results of measurements made at a particular location can depend on the properties of distant objects in a way that can't be explained using signals moving at the speed of light.

This does not, however, permit the sending of information at speeds exceeding the speed of light, though there have been any number of attempts to find a way to use quantum non-locality to do that. Refuting these has turned out to be a surprisingly productive enterprise-- check out David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics for more details. Quantum non-locality is also central to the problem of information in evaporating black holes, and the "firewall" controversy that has generated a lot of recent activity.

There are even some radical ideas involving a mathematical connection between the entangled particles described in the EPR paper and wormholes. Images of a hydrogen atom as seen through a quantum telescope. Credit: Stodolna et al. Quantum physics has a reputation of being weird because its predictions are dramatically unlike our everyday experience at least, for humans-- the conceit of my book is that it doesn't seem so weird to dogs.

This happens because the effects involved get smaller as objects get larger-- if you want to see unambiguously quantum behavior, you basically want to see particles behaving like waves, and the wavelength decreases as the momentum increases.

The wavelength of a macroscopic object like a dog walking across the room is so ridiculously tiny that if you expanded everything so that a single atom in the room were the size of the entire Solar System, the dog's wavelength would be about the size of a single atom within that solar system.

This means that, for the most part, quantum phenomena are confined to the scale of atoms and fundamental particles, where the masses and velocities are small enough for the wavelengths to get big enough to observe directly. There's an active effort in a bunch of areas, though, to push the size of systems showing quantum effects up to larger sizes. I've blogged a bunch about experiments by Markus Arndt's group showing wave-like behavior in larger and larger molecules, and there are a bunch of groups in "cavity opto-mechanics" trying to use light to slow the motion of chunks of silicon down to the point where the discrete quantum nature of the motion would become clear.

There are even some suggestions that it might be possible to do this with suspended mirrors having masses of several grams, which would be amazingly cool. Comic from "Surviving the World" by Dante Shepherd. The previous point leads very naturally into this one: as weird as it may seem, quantum physics is most emphatically not magic.

The things it predicts are strange by the standards of everyday physics, but they are rigorously constrained by well-understood mathematical rules and principles. So, if somebody comes up to you with a "quantum" idea that seems too good to be true-- free energy, mystical healing powers, impossible space drives-- it almost certainly is. That doesn't mean we can't use quantum physics to do amazing things-- you can find some really cool physics in mundane technology -- but those things stay well within the boundaries of the laws of thermodynamics and just basic common sense.

So there you have it: the core essentials of quantum physics. I've probably left a few things out, or made some statements that are insufficiently precise to please everyone, but this ought to at least serve as a useful starting point for further discussion.

Its crowning glory came in with the discovery of the Higgs boson , the particle that gives all other fundamental particles their mass, whose existence was predicted on the basis of quantum field theories as far back as But beneath all these practical problems lies a huge quantum mystery.

At a basic level, quantum physics predicts very strange things about how matter works that are completely at odds with how things seem to work in the real world. Quantum particles can behave like particles, located in a single place; or they can act like waves, distributed all over space or in several places at once.

How they appear seems to depend on how we choose to measure them, and before we measure they seem to have no definite properties at all — leading us to a fundamental conundrum about the nature of basic reality. Light behaves similarly in that it bounces off walls and bends around corners, and that the crests and troughs of the wave can add up or cancel out.

Added wave crests result in brighter light, while waves that cancel out produce darkness. A light source can be thought of as a ball on a stick being rhythmically dipped in the center of a lake. The color emitted corresponds to the distance between the crests, which is determined by the speed of the ball's rhythm. Waves of matter : Matter can also behave as a wave.

This ran counter to the roughly 30 years of experiments showing that matter such as electrons exists as particles. In , German physicist Max Planck sought to explain the distribution of colors emitted over the spectrum in the glow of red-hot and white-hot objects, such as light-bulb filaments.

When making physical sense of the equation he had derived to describe this distribution, Planck realized it implied that combinations of only certain colors albeit a great number of them were emitted, specifically those that were whole-number multiples of some base value.

Somehow, colors were quantized! This was unexpected because light was understood to act as a wave, meaning that values of color should be a continuous spectrum. What could be forbidding atoms from producing the colors between these whole-number multiples? This seemed so strange that Planck regarded quantization as nothing more than a mathematical trick.

According to Helge Kragh in his article in Physics World magazine, " Max Planck, the Reluctant Revolutionary ," "If a revolution occurred in physics in December , nobody seemed to notice it.

Planck was no exception …". Planck's equation also contained a number that would later become very important to future development of QM; today, it's known as "Planck's Constant. Quantization helped to explain other mysteries of physics. In , Einstein used Planck's hypothesis of quantization to explain why the temperature of a solid changed by different amounts if you put the same amount of heat into the material but changed the starting temperature.

Since the early s, the science of spectroscopy had shown that different elements emit and absorb specific colors of light called "spectral lines.

In , Johannes Rydberg derived an equation that described the spectral lines emitted by hydrogen, though nobody could explain why the equation worked.