Where Things Get Really Weird
On the ride home from work tonight I got to thinking about how truly bizarre the implications of quantum mechanics really are. It has often been said that if you don't find quantum theory astounding, you don't truly understand it. Popular science materials water down the reality of it and even popular science fiction treads carefully where quantum weirdness is concerned.
And can you really blame them? As is often pointed out in writing, just because something is true doesn't mean it's believable. Quantum mechanics is so weird that we're even careful about teaching it to kids in science class.
While those drawings of atoms behaving like well-ordered miniature solar systems might be comical in their simplicity, how exactly are we supposed to explain to impressionable young minds that when two atoms form a molecule, what's actually going on is that those "shared" electrons are in many places at the same time?
Think about this for a moment. According to our best scientific understanding -- a theory that has been rigorously verified in countless experiments -- there is a very real probability that you will wake up tomorrow morning not in the comfort of your own bed, but on a lifeless planet on the other side of the universe.
To be sure, that probability is extremely small. It's so small that you would probably have to wait several times the lifetime of the universe for such a ridiculous event to actually occur. But it's not zero.
I find that unsettling. Not so much because I'm particularly worried about waking up in the morning on the wrong planet. But what is my mind supposed to do with the knowledge that, at a very basic and fundamental level, the world we see around us can work in such an absurd way?
And can you really blame them? As is often pointed out in writing, just because something is true doesn't mean it's believable. Quantum mechanics is so weird that we're even careful about teaching it to kids in science class.
While those drawings of atoms behaving like well-ordered miniature solar systems might be comical in their simplicity, how exactly are we supposed to explain to impressionable young minds that when two atoms form a molecule, what's actually going on is that those "shared" electrons are in many places at the same time?
Think about this for a moment. According to our best scientific understanding -- a theory that has been rigorously verified in countless experiments -- there is a very real probability that you will wake up tomorrow morning not in the comfort of your own bed, but on a lifeless planet on the other side of the universe.
To be sure, that probability is extremely small. It's so small that you would probably have to wait several times the lifetime of the universe for such a ridiculous event to actually occur. But it's not zero.
I find that unsettling. Not so much because I'm particularly worried about waking up in the morning on the wrong planet. But what is my mind supposed to do with the knowledge that, at a very basic and fundamental level, the world we see around us can work in such an absurd way?