Wanna learn some basic principles of quantum physics? I got ya!
I love and adore quantum physics and I hope I'll make a job out of this hobby I have. And I want people to see the beauty of quantum mechanics even though this shit doesn't make any se...
There is an experiment that was made by Thomas Young in 1801 to demonstrate or prove that light had a wave behavior. It's called the double-slit experiment (another name for it would be Young's experiment but the most used one is double-slit)
Now imagine that we have a first wall that has two slits in it, and a second wall behind it, totally intact, and that we would start shooting them with a gun. The idea here is that the bullets of the gun are like particles. If we shoot thousands of them, the result in the second wall will be two lines. Seems logical, right?
Now let's do the same experiment with water. The idea here is that the water will make waves that pass through the two lines. We will put a screen that will record the interference pattern, and we will find ourselves with a result like this one:
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You can see on the interference pattern both the results of the two experiments with bullets and water.
Now onto the real thing. The real experiment was made with photons (quanta* of light) instead of bullets. Young made something that could shoot photons one by one and did the same thing but with photons. Now the mind-blowing thing is that: it appears that photons could show characteristics of both wave and particle. Here is what happened:
When shooting the photons, we shot them one by one as if they were particles. But after shooting thousands of them, the interference pattern that showed was like they were waves. Here is a representation of it:
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For more information, here is the document that has been published in 1989 in the American Journal for this discovery
Now, you have an idea of how mind-blowing quantum physics can be! After being made with photons, they did the same with electrons. Guess what? Same thing! Even electrons have both wave and particle characteristics, and that's why it's called wave-particle duality.
Quantum physics is very confusing and requestion our sense of logic and common sense.
*Quanta: A quanta is the smallest discrete unit (such as a particle) of a natural phenomenon in a system where the units are in a bound state. For example, a quanta of electromagnetic radiation, or light, is a photon. A quanta of electricity is an electron... etc
