This Was Not Supposed To Be That Long - Tumblr Posts

Quantum physics simplified by an idiot

Quantum physics. I'd like to begin by saying that I, an English-obsessed potato, couldn't spell quantum for the life of me.

Ok, now then, onto the physics.

[This is just what I know, not the entirety of quantum physics]

SO in the beningenning, there was a little tiny particle. We'll call him Jeff. Jeff is so smol that super smart people studying him decided to collectively call him a quantum particle. These quantum particles are werid 'cuz they kind of have no mass.

Now something you must understand about Jeff is that he's not like other particles. He can exist as a superposition of all his possible states at once. That probably made little to no sense, since these words are usually only used in this field. Basically, normal particles like our friend Bob here, can exist as a boolean, or a 'true or false' question. Bob can be one state, or 'true', as an example, and he can be the other state, or 'false'.

See, this is where Jeff's superposition makes him so unique. He can exist as any place between his two states all at once. It doesn't even need to be a boolean (neither did Bob, but it's easier to explain that way); it can be the numbers 1 and 5, or and two values. Jeff can then exist as every possible state in between those values at the same time. He can exist as 1, 3.5, pi, 4.2352, and 5, all at the same time, for infinity.

But there's one catch to Jeff's marvellous science: He's really shy, so when someone looks at him, he chooses only one state to exist in (don't we all, Jeff). So if a smart-guy scientist decided they wanted to observe Jeff and measure him, they would be met with Jeff's one state he chooses.

Something else quantum particles do is really interesting.

Here's the scenario: From Jeff's creation, he has had a single partner, a pairing, somewhere in the universe. Let's call them Taylor. Taylor is millions upon millions of miles away from Jeff, yet they remain synced up all of the time. What this means is that if a scientist looks a Jeff, Taylor will assume a correlated-to-Jeff state as well.

If Jeff decides his one state will be 'on', Taylor's will most likely be 'off'.

This syncopated change will happen instantaneously, no matter where in the universe the two are.

There's this famous little thought experiment when it comes to quantum particles that makes them seem like such a science-fiction-y thing that it's hard to believe they're real. That experiment is thus:

Take a box. A simple box. Put a cat in it. (I'm sorry to my fellow cat-lovers). Now small, circular hole in the box, insert a tube, and put a removable cover over the hole. Then, you feed the tube into a tank of poisonous gas, keeping the box poison-free while you do so. Then, finally, you make it so that if a specific quantum particle you're holding hostage in the box is at one state (or 'true', for our purposes), then the fumes are released into the box, killing the cat (Schrödinger was a psychopath apparently). However, if the particle is in the opposite state, the box stays sealed, and the cat lives.

The thing is, so long as no one measures the particle's state, it remains in superposition of both states, and, by proxy, the cat is both dead and alive.

Thanks for reading this long post (I don't blame you if you didn't lol), and the reason there are no citations is that most of this I learned from a Veritasium video [search up 'veritasium quantum entanglement? i think???? ].)

This is a horribly inaccurate and skewed explanation of quantum physics, so don't take my word for it.