Greetings, the Physics interested palrishabh community! Today, we'll be looking at an intriguing explanation that quantum mechanics provides us; nothing is real. If I started right off saying this world is not locally real would you believe me? Of course not; but read this article and reshape your perspective!
Let's begin. When I say nothing is real, I mean they're not locally real, and when I say that, I mean 2 things, one is 'locally' and two is 'real'. We'll have to define what each of them actually mean to come up with a conclusion.
'Locally' means that an entity is not dependent on any other forces or interactions outside their surroundings and that anything that influences that particular body cannot travel faster than the speed of light(since that's restricted!).
Now 'real' means that an object is present in the exact state, as it is, independent of anything else. For example, if I have a silver steel 20 cm diameter glass, it will remain as the silver steel 20 cm diameter glass, whether someone is looking at it, or not! But these 2 rules are what new discoveries defy, and present to us that the neither you nor me, neither the sun nor the stars, neither the electrons nor the protons, neither the quarks nor anything else in the existing universe are locally real. Let's understand this in better depth.
In the 20th centuries, something occurred naming it the 'Golden Era' of Physics. We discovered numerous things, and as we continued our discoveries one after another, did they present how our intuition and common sense were wrong.
While Classical Mechanics decided to deal about the large scale objects that exist around our universe, such as relativity and Newtonian Mechanics a new field of research had begun, with Schrodinger, Feynman (and of course Heisenberg's principle to rule them all) and many more physicists contributing to the new field and Stephen Hawking combining both of them to make a beautiful theory about black holes which we'll look at in another chapter.
Quantum Mechanics was an ongoing field of research and is an ongoing field of research that always concludes with something mind-bending. We discovered many principles but the one we'll focus on is Quantum Entanglement. Quantum entanglement, in reality had been concerning, and something Einstein called 'Spooky action at a distance'. One more discovery in this already boiling field and we discovered something mind-blowing.
Quantum entanglement, in simple terms is when two entities are essentially entangled, such that when one entity takes a particular form, the other would take its opposite. Let's look at an analogy to understand this better.
Imagine you have your glasses, which is broken into exactly two halves. If I combine both of them, they would exactly be a whole glass, with one being left and the other right. The idea is that, no matter how far I throw it away, no matter how far they're away, the right one will remain right and the left one will remain left. Now I put each one in two boxes, such that one box holds left and the other holds right, and they're thrown to distant parts of the universe. Another intelligent form of life picks up one box. Great. What is the probability that the picked box is left? 50%! Since it can either be left or right. I open it and find it to be right, so what is the probability the other one is left? 100%! If the one I opened is right, then the other one should be left! This is Quantum Entanglement.
The idea is that this describes that everything in our universe is essentially not locally real. I never know if one box is left or right until I observe it; that is Uncertainty and Entanglement. So even if I have the left and right sides of the glasses and I close it within a box, in a box, a piece of glass is not 'left or right' it is 'left and right'. The piece of glass is both the left side and the right side until I observe it that it chooses one form, and due to entanglement, the other one chooses the other. The only point why this does not occur is that at a large scale, the Quantum Properties of particles(for instance its wavelength) become so small that they rarely exhibit them.
So how should we interpret this? We found out 2 things. One that inside the box, we're never certain that the right glass will remain right(as per Quantum Mechanics of course. In classical mechanics, I kept a right glass in a box so it should remain right, nothing surprising!) or the left glass will remain left in the boxes until we observe it; and Two, that as soon as I realise one box has the left(or right) the other one is right(or left) which is Quantum Entanglement.
I hope this explanation was simple and easy to comprehend. Our aim is to make the complex phenomenon that govern the universe simple for everyone so they don't even dare an attempt to violate the rules and regulations!
Date Published: 20-01-2024
An Article solely written by: Rishabh Pal
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