Do it yourself Quantum Weirdness!
 

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A nice slide show.
More useful information.

Go forth and amaze your friends.

On a more serious and purposeful note I pose a question or two:

Does it seem reasonable that humans and observation play such a key role in determining reality? What other philosophical questions might things like this pose?

My own little worthless theory on quantum weirdness is that the smaller scale you use, the closer matter and energy are to being the same thing. since

E=mc^2 , we know that matter and energy are but different faces of each other, and one can be converted to the other (theoretically)

And the smaller the matter in question becomes, the more it resembles energy and behaves in wave fashion. Since photons exhibit an extremely small, nigh immeasureable amout of mass, they have very pronounced wavelike properties. Its almost like at such a small scale, light cannot decide whether it is matter or energy, and as such displays properties of both until forced by observation to carry information about itself.

This line of thinking, and headache, has led me to update my signature.

Matter is mostly space. The distance between the nucleus of an atom and its first electron shell is roughly the size of a football field when scaled to the size of a pinhead.


Not only that, but it can exist in more than one place at a time. They've found that once you get into smaller and smaller particles, there comes a point where the two halves actually act as one. They've done studies showing that these particles will respond to the same stimulus, even separated by miles of space.


Physics is getting to the point where it can really break your brain in wonder and sheer self-contradiction.

All I have to say is there's a reason I study chemistry over physics. I mean I still deal with quantum calculations every day but's it not all I deal with and thus my brain is intact.
And quantum things scare me, hugely. When you start to think about everything around you and the craziness that it works under it starts to bring into question how we normally think about things and what the universe is really like.

When you have something this crazily random at the base of existance, it makes me wonder why everything at our level is so stable. I mean it's built off of something that seems to be pure chaos, and yet there's a lot of order on our level.

"A cat that is simultaneously alive and dead."

I must learn how to produce that....

Anyway, I'm taking notes and I might build one of those out of my boredom to see how it works and mess with it from there.

I find quantum physics to be one of the most fascinating subjects out there...
The possibility that everything in life has multiple states, in in multiple places at multiple times is infinitely amazing

edit: Also, Light is not the only type of radiation that exhibits this phenomenon.. In fact, ALL forms of electromagnetic radiation do.

Well, duh. It's called a zombie. You use a virus, black magic, the Sands of Time, or any other method you deem necessary. You can probably find out how to make a zombie cat by googling it.

Anyway, this physics contradiction stuff confuses me enough that I have to close it halfway through to avoid leaking brain matter from each ear.

what says "we" are stable? i believe in a thing i like to classify as organized chaos. Where there is a order within the chaos that constantly changes in-order to balance the universe. contradictions are common in this system.
oh and light is a Wave of particles and energy (since energy cannot be expressed without matter) so thus it is both a wave and a particle.

Seems pretty stable to me.