Friday, March 17, 2017

Makes perfect sense to me.............


Quantum mechanics - a theory of the behaviour at the atomic level put together in the early 20th century - has a well-earned reputation for weirdness.  That is because the world as humanity sees it is not, in fact, how the world works.  Quantum mechanics replaced wholesale the centuries-old notion of a clockwork, deterministic universe with a reality that deals in probabilities rather than certainties - one were the very act of measurement affects what is measured.  Along with that upheaval came a few truly mind-bending implications, such as the fact that particles are fundamentally neither here nor there but, until pinned down, both here and there at the same time:  they are in a "superposition" of here-there-ness.  The Theory also suggested that particles can be spookily linked:  do something to one and the change is felt instantaneously by the other, even across vast reaches of space.  This "entanglement" confounded even the theory's originators.

-as excerpted from this Quantum leaps essay in The Economist

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