THE BEAUTY OF QUANTUM PHYSICS-PART 2
Schrödinger’s cat is the most popular paradox in quantum physics. It has different variants; here we expose the simplest.
Quantum physics is very difficult to understand because the very way it works contradicts what we understand. An example of quantum physics at a basic level is that quantum allows or at least suggests that several things, several events can be happening simultaneously, as in Schrödinger’s cat.
Schrödinger took the cat out of Schrödinger to criticize quantum, everyone was criticizing it, they couldn’t accept that the world was so weird, Schrödinger’s cat basically consists of what: you have a particle and what your intuition tells you is that if you put a particle in a place, because it is in a place, you can move it from place to place, but things are in a place of space, in a specific place, but this in the quantum disappears, you in the quantum world so yes, you can have an object in a specific place in space but you can also have it in another place at the same time, like an object in two places in space at once or you can literally have it in infinite places in space at once.
If we talk about electrons; we isolate an electron, the fact that it is in two places at once does not mean that it duplicates, is that it is the same thing only that its property “position” is said to be undefined, that is you have a definite position, you are in such a street and such a city; with an electron you realize that there are times when you can’t tell where it is, the electron exists, but it doesn’t have a definite position.
An object in the quantum world can go at various speeds at once, that is, it can be standing and going at a thousand per hour or standing, going at a thousand per hour and going at a thousand per hour backwards at once, it can go at all the speeds it wants at once.
Speaking of the atoms themselves; the atoms in the background are electrons that revolve around the nucleus of the atom, but what happens is that the electrons behave with the quantum laws and when we say they “spin” they’re actually doing very strong things around the nucleus, just like I mentioned that the position or velocity of an electron does not have to be defined, they are in overlapping states, the act of rotating also happens to it, the electrons are undefined around the nuclei, really, you have an atom and if you want to think about it you’re not going to think of it as some kind of “ball” that revolves around the nucleus, what happens there is that the electron is in a kind of cloud that surrounds the nucleus and it’s really the electron being in many places in that space at once, and in the same way it is moving at different speeds simultaneously.
The nice thing, what shows that this is true, is that thinking like this, thinking about electrons in this way, in these clouds that are called orbitals, this solves many problems; in fact, it can be shown with quantum that we exist, that is, that our atoms can stick together to form molecules, because electrons behave like this, that’s a result of quantum, that the fact that electrons behave this weird way, is what allows multiple atoms to stick together.
Currently, there’s a branch of physics that’s called “condensed matter physics” that what it does is create quantum materials, which are materials that physicists invent, something that they imagine, which are going to have special properties. Quantum materials are found in objects like cell phones, which is why they’re so small; we’re surrounded and shaped by quantum.
