Strange, that.

Andy Ilachinski

.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

―Richard Feynman (treasure)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

.

 

When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? 

Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. 

Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. 

And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. 

But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. 

We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.
 

—Christophe Galfard

The Universe in Your Hand

.

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882
tao of photography

.