can you explain quantum physics to me?

Question

i saw a documentory about this but it was vague. id also like to know of any good web sites

Answer 1

It's a huge subject with many different areas, try one of the links some of the others posted. Here are some basics and you can go from there. I think these basic concepts are what kill people the most in getting it. Here are some although highly simplified. It's been a while since I took physics so if I get something wrong, someone correct me.

1. You can never know the exact position or state of something, just the probability that it is there. You can't prove 100% you are in front of your computer reading this right now, it's just really likely. There is also the possibility that you are a smurf on the planet Saturn dreaming you are a human in front of your computer, you'll never fully know.

2. If you measure one property of of an object, like how fast you move, you lose accuracy on your position in space, and vice versa. This is used a lot with the probability of finding the position of electrons in atoms. If you accurately know the position of an electron, you don't know it's speed and if you are really sure about its speed, you can't really find it's position. Think of this, if a car is moving really fast, it is hard to guess it's exact position when your watch hits 12:07 and three milliseconds P.M., but if the car is parked, it's easy, but the car might be moving one inch every year, you just can't tell. Orbitals are just an area of high probability of finding a specific electron there. In fact, quantum physics says that a specific electron can be anywhere in the universe, it is just most likely in that orbital around that nucleus at that particular time. A mathematical wave graph is a way of illustrating the probablity of something existing in a specific state or area, but nothing is absolutely certain in the universe.

2. Things don't have to have a concrete reason for being. Sometimes they just happen. You may say the big bang had to have a source. Quantum physics says maybe it didn't. Maybe there was nothing and the big bang just happened. Particles can just come into existence and disappear. Quantum physics really gets into the area of "what is reality?"

3. Any possibility exists in Quantum physics. In a way, it says anything can happen and every possibility always exists. There is this universe and an infinite amount of others in an infinite amount of dimensions with an infinite amount of laws. We just happen to be in one of these. In Quantum physics, there is another universe just like this, except we all look like Mickey Mouse. There is also another just like this, except all clocks run backwards. Get the drift?

In a way, Quantum physics just steps out of the box of high school physics and asks "what if?" Some of the questions get pretty big, like into the existence of a God and all that.

The crazy thing is that it actually works, your monitor is using a property of quantum physics to produce a clear image instead of a blurry one.

Someone also mentioned quanta and packets of energy. Like I said, it's a big subject and describing it all at once is to hard to do on here.

Answer 2

Starting back in ancient Greece, it was proposed that matter could be subdivided into smaller and smaller pieces, until you got down to something that could not be divided any longer. Democratus called this smalles substance an "atom". We've learned much since then, but we generally accept that there is a smallest particle somewhere, although science keeps finding smaller ones time after time.

Quantum physics has the same rules about energy. There is a smallest unit of energy which Max Planck called a "quanta". The same way atoms of different elements ahve different sized atoms, so too there are different "quanta" of energy fo rdifferent substances.

Taking it one step further, and if you need more you should go on the internet, small quanta of energy have dual properties, They can act like a particle (photons) or they can act like an electromagnetic wave. From here on it gets complicated

Answer 3

If you want to research it some important names to look up are:
Planck
Schrodinger
Heisenberg
Fermi
Pauling
Gell-Mann
Feynman
Hawking

Quantum Physics is so different from everyday physics (Kinetics, Optics, Electricity, Fluid Dynamics, etc.) that it completely baffled me... I used to be good at Physics until I got to Quantum Mechanics. The math is very difficult at that level, but the concepts are even worse... Light is both a particle and a wave at the same time, but if you gear an experiment to demonstrate light is a wave, light will be a wave for you. If you devise an experiment to show light is a particle, then light will be a particle for you. It gets worse when you study electrons... according to Heisenberg there is just some stuff about an electron that you can never know, no matter how good your lab equipment is (see uncertainty principle). Its very tough stuff to truly 'understand'. Good Luck, you're gonna need it.

Answer 4

I can't explain why but I can explain the results. Some computer company is promoting the first "quantum computer." Much faster. Computers run on 1s and 0s. In the quantum world computers could run on multiple 1s and Os. So one 1 and the same 1 could exist simultaneously. Parallel universes, in a sense, although only in our own. Read Hawking. Or watch Star Trek. lol

Answer 5

Okay. You know physics, right? Well it's a branch of that. The complication is Quantum. The quant of physicality. Let's start with the basics. 1 plus 1 is 2. ie if you add another banana to the one you already have, that makes you the owner of two bananas. Now, if one banana is a regular banana and the other one is a lemon, you have a situation akin to quantum physics. Although, I really think you have to be there.

Answer 6

To really understand quantum physics, you'd kind of need to get a doctorate at a major university, and even then it's pretty shakey. Try reading the works of Stephen Hawking.

Answer 7

umm.. let's see quantum physics...i don't know much because this subject is very confusing to me. i was just learning a little about this last semester..there are four quantum numbers i'm not sure but i think they are: S, P,N, and L...u can probably look up what they represent....i'm pretty sure it has something to do with the charge of an ion and the # of valence electrons an atom has...hope i didnt confuse you. but that's all i remember right now.

Answer 8

Type in NOBEL in your Browser. I wish I could give you more. I have the Original Tape recordings of the man who wrote the book but sadly I can not recall his name at this moment it time. The Theory is beyond a concept. It has proved itself evident with each passing day. Study it hard and remember what you have learned. For me to explain it is for you to make the request. It is to lengthily for this format.

Answer 9

Nope. Too much uncertainty, Heisenberg's.
So now that you know you can't get there from here, you get to Planck yourself down orthogonally with the Hamiltonian.
It's a figment of human imagination, developed to cover up discontinuities in our understanding.

Answer 10

Search for "richard feynman"