#wavefunction

[rauko]

Nearly 100 years ago, Schrödinger and Heisenberg deciphered the nature of the outer layer for the Hydrogen atom—the Electron cloud.

[geometrymatters]

Diffraction patterns for natural and synthetic fibers

Encyclopedia of X-rays and gamma rays, 1963

[deadcolour]

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Once environmental decoherence blurs a wavefunction, the exotic nature of quantum probabilities melts into the more familiar probabilities of day-to-day life.¹⁵

15. Just to give you a sense of how quickly decoherence takes place – how quickly environmental influence suppresses quantum interference and thereby turns quantum probabilities into familiar classical ones – here are a few examples. The numbers are approximate, but the point they convey is clear. The wavefunction of a grain of dust floating in your living room, bombarded by jittering air molecules, will decohere in about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth (10^-36) of a second. If the grain of dust is kept in a perfect vacuum chamber and subject only to interactions with sunlight, its wavefunction will decohere a bit more slowly, taking a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth (10^-21) of a second. And if the grain of dust is floating in the darkest depths of empty space and subject only to interactions with the relic microwave photons from the big bang, it's wavefunction will decohere in about a millionth of a second. These numbers are extremely small, which shows that decoherence for something even as tiny as a grain of dust happens very quickly. For larger objects, decoherence happens faster still. It is no wonder that, even though ours is a quantum universe, the world around us looks like it does.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

[tenth-sentence]

Instead, Bohm imagined that the wavefunction of a particle is another, separate element of reality, one that exists in addition to the particle itself.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

[ghastmaskzombie]

something you might not know about quantum mechanics: it’s not hard because it’s complicated. in the grand scheme of physics, the math of it is quite well understood. it’s hard because it’s weird. turbulence is complicated. misplace the last digit of a very long number and your whole simulation comes out different eventually. but it’s intuitive. it makes a kind of natural sense. quantum mechanics is cheap to compute, and with all the randomness most errors you could make were on the table already. but it is so fucking bizarre. it’s the kind of thing that seeing isn’t enough to believe. it presents a world where something can be thrown off course by its other self that could have been but wasn’t. a world where things can exist in hindsight without ever having existed in the present. a world where you shine a light through two slits and spend 200 years arguing about what the fuck happened and how many universes it involved. it’s just weird, okay?

[startswithabang]

Proof Of 'God Playing Dice With The Universe' Found In The Sun's Interior

“If it weren’t for the quantum nature of every particle in the Universe, and the fact that their positions are described by wavefunctions with an inherent quantum uncertainty to their position, this overlap that enables nuclear fusion to occur would never have happened. The overwhelming majority of today’s stars in the Universe would never have ignited, including our own. Rather than a world and a sky alight with the nuclear fires burning across the cosmos, our Universe would be desolate and frozen, with the vast majority of stars and solar systems unlit by anything other than a cold, rare, distant starlight.

It’s the power of quantum mechanics that allows the Sun to shine. In a fundamental way, if God didn’t play dice with the Universe, the nuclear flame that powers the stars would never light, and the life-giving fusion that occurs in our Sun's core would never come to be. Yet with this randomness, we win the cosmic lottery all the time, to the continuous tune of hundreds of Yottawatts of power. Thanks to the fundamental quantum uncertainty inherent in the Universe, we've achieved a chance at existence. Fiat lux.”

Inside the nuclear furnace of the Sun, protons and other atomic nuclei are compressed together into a tiny region of space, where the incredible temperatures and energies try to overcome the repulsive forces of their electric charges. At a maximum temperature of 15 million K, and with a long-tailed (Poisson) distribution of energies at the highest end, we can compute how many protons are energetic enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier, interact with one another, and wind up in a more tightly-bound, fused state. That number, if you do that calculation, turns out to be exactly zero. When you consider that 95% of stars are less massive and reach lower core temperatures than our Sun, the situation appears to be even more dire. If there were no quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion would be an impossibility. Yet we’re saved by a feature of quantum indeterminism, where spread-out wavefunctions can overlap, and nuclear fusion as we know it can proceed.

If Einstein and Bohr knew how the Sun worked, they could have settled the question of whether “God plays dice” with the Universe once and for all. Find out the answer today!

[kicsi-kati]

Today’s #googledoodle celebrates the 135th birthday of German physicist & mathematican Max Born ➰ I was very happy to illustrate this impressive scientist among his world of wave functions, interferences and subatomic particles ➰ check out some background info with the link in my bio • . . . #illustration #google @google #doodle #maxborn #psi #nuclear #atom #interference #nobleprie #wavefunction #physics #optic #quantummechanics #mathematics #drawing #katiszi #katiszilagyi (hier: Göttingen)