Quantum Mechanics
The world of Quantum Mechanics is fascinating. As you may note, from my quotes, I enjoyed; In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, by John Gribbin. I can pretty well state; by Quantum Mechanic's own admission... "nothing is real"__ thus Quantum Physics appears to be Fantasy. The atoms, and particles are probably real, but quantum theory is only in writing, and mathematics. If I take away quantum theory, will the Universe go on? If I take out mathematics, what good is quantum theory? Using some of it's own logic... "if I don't observe, it is not real"... so if quantum theory is not observed, is it real?
John Gribbin writes about classical actions of Newton's works. (see quotes below) He writes about comparing classical physics with quantum, as not being compatible. Well, I have to say... that classical physics and mathematics__ first, are not that correct, or exact themselves, such that they should even be used as comparisons in the first place, but they do have good parts, that should be retained, and as far as I can tell, many are used in quantum mechanics... so I don't relate to quantum physics as a separate branch of physics, but more as some of Nature's physics that has some seemingly peculiar unknown facets. I have shown that Newton's exactly equal and opposite reactions are not exactly equal and opposite either. If they were exactly equal, nothing in the universe would move. John says "pulled down by gravity", but I have shown that anything being pulled is actually being pushed, as pressure being brought to bear in a direction towards the "pulling" origin. And, the forces he mentions are all just pressure actions. It would seem silly to say we have a tennis ball force origin, a tennis racket force origin, a pen force origin, and a desk force origin. Nobody knows if there is really a gravity force... it might be a space force origin, and my bet, would be on all the actions as pressure! The quantum is said to be so un-understandable... What about gravitation? A name was given to actions of bodies coming together that has never been explained how, or understandable for over 300 years! How un-understandable is that? In classical physics we have waves... but no-one has ever seen a wave... we only see material in motion. We do not see a curve... only the shape of something we named. How un-understandable is that? I realize it is an impossibility to see some tiny particles, and even some we can see, change their state by looking at them. But, even for these tiny orts, if an atom is smashed... it is accomplished with impact pressure. I am willing to bet that nuclear particles being emitted from radioactive materials are pushed out with pressure, and not sucked out by the surrounding atmosphere! Isn't nuclear fission described as a chain reaction of particles "smashing" into other particles? What kind of action is smashing? Classical Physics? If you read the quotations below concerning quantum mechanics you will see pressure mentioned quite a bit. But, how-do-you-do; __Pressure__ is Classical Physics. Motion is Classical Physics. And classical physics are supposedly, not used, in quantum mechanics? Hum... Heisenberg gave us formulation, that observing micro particles, using light... a must... in order to see; screws up or alters the results when observing. In other words the results are inaccurate. Why should this seem so peculiar? If taken to extremes__ there is not one measurement in the Universe that can be measured exactly! We seem to only be arguing degree of accuracy! What makes the quantum mechanics think they are so special? The macro of the Universe is always, and totally inaccurate! (If someone imagines, thinks, they can measure something, anything, exactly... it is fantasy, and if allowed, it allows me the same freedom to imagine or invent, in my mind, tools of fantasy that could observe the quantum mechanics... fair is fair!) Perpetual Motion has good logic "why" it is a Fool's Errand to chase; but I don't want to put the unknown cause of gravitation, or the unanswered items in quantum mechanics as Fool's Errands quite yet! (And, as a further note... if the Universe is in total motion__ is this perpetual motion? Hum?)
So far, I still remain with the concept__ problems or experiments created using fantasy, cannot be explained with reality, and should not be expected to succeed. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear__ did it make any noise? If no-one was there, there may not have been a falling tree, and there may not have been a tree at all, or a forest! If there is no-one alive that ever saw dinosaurs, does it mean they were never a reality, or existed? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote something like... fact is fact; until in time, it appears as fiction.
As far as the thought: "if the velocity and position of every particle in the Universe were known... then the future positioning could be predicted"... It would seem that it would also be a requirement to know what humans are thinking... When and where they might move themselves, or alter the state of other particles?
Richard Feynman was one of my favorite humans, and scientists. But, when a scientist says something like "absolutely impossible" in reference to the quantum mechanics world ...it is liable to come back to haunt him. I always liked the saying: Anything is possible__ it is just that__ some things are highly improbable, or difficult to imagine.
Using probabilities of accuracy of measuring a wood board, expecting it to fit a slot__ is not that much unlike__ using probabilities of accurate prediction measurements for quantum mechanical results... Isn't it, a micro quantum scenario when a person thinks of mating up one exactly smooth plane surface__ exactly with another exactly smooth surface? How smooth is smooth? And, isn't it wiggling anyway?
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In my research of geometric regular polygons and regular polyhedrons, I dug into the likes of the Mobius Strip. For those that don't know of this: a Mobius Strip is a single ribbon, or strip of paper. Down the full length center of one side a black line can be drawn, and down the other side a red line can be drawn. Then the ends of the strip are overlapped, and glued together with one 180 twist. Thus the result is a ring with a twist... and the respective ends of the red and black lines, mate with opposite colored lines as with reds to blacks. If you trace along the paper center line continuously... the path will take you completely along the black line, and the red line before you return to where you started; 720 degrees hence. Or to say it differently, you must go around twice to get back to where you began. Similar to what is said of the natural attributes of an electron!
"... electron spin is not like the spin of a child's top because the electron has to spin twice to get back to where it started." (See quotations below) In Quantum mechanics physics, this phenomena is considered, as not an occurrence in nature... but it seemed, and seems similar... to the actions I just mentioned concerning the Mobius Strip.
When I studied the Mobius Strip I somehow wondered what I would get if I imagined the strip as a length of flattened tubing or hose, (i.e. hollow cylinder)__ and then I inflated the hose until it was again round? So, I experimented with geometry and paper models, making measurements and calculating... A hose with a 180 degree twist, formed into a circle, creates a round ring or torus. This torus depicts vividly how the red and black lines, paths or trajectories progress. They progress in rotation around the torus body... while they also orbit the ring of the torus. It shows how it is a requirement to orbit twice to get back to where you started... all the while following a torus turning in upon itself from one direction... (turning outward if looking at the other side.) Like the two sides of a clock... looking from the outside and the inside... from the inside the clock goes counter clockwise...
Also, while the centerline distance of the torus remains exactly the same as the original flat strip, the inflated and circled hose, now is a twisted torus with an outer circumference and an inner smaller circumference. (Sometimes the inside circumference can be zero.) Half of the surface area expanse has been stretched, while the other half surface area has been shrunk or compressed, directly proportionally, equal and opposite. Half the black line expanded and half shrunk... equally and opposite. The red line did likewise, traveling the reduced and expanded surfaces areas. Both lines remain the same length but are longer as traversing the outside of the torus, and become shorter traversing the inside surface portions.
Going back to the possible atom's resonate wave lengths of orbiting electrons modeled by Louis de Broglie (see quotation below), I have harbored bad feelings about an electron orbiting as a resonate sinusoidal wave in the model as Bohr's atom solar system. A vibrating string, in resonance, has half waves on a plus side, that are real close to equal the half waves on the negative opposite side. In the world of electromagnetism the area under the half waves represents the power available, and when it is available in time. The amplitude represents the voltage with respect to the zero center crossover alternating wave. If a sinusoidal wave is put into a circle or ellipse, the wave halves are distorted; inside smaller, outside larger. I have doubts if it would still resonate? If the wave didn't rotate while progressing, the lines as above would not need to go around twice to get home. The only way to maintain a balance of, ability to do work, (kinetic energy), in the resonating half waves is to rotate the wave progression. All humps and troughs remain in physical proportion to each other with equal balancing of energy (work ability) within each. If a particular torus orbit shell had more than one electron... they would be orbiting opposing each other in trajectories similar to a double helix formed into a ring. Thus the orbits of atoms might be a tori... or an orbit torus shell, within larger torus shell, within larger... I have not gone into this notion in that depth yet... but, it seems like it would align with requirements of: orbit integer progression, speed, orbit shape, orientation, and particle spin of the electron...? It would also seem that multiple overlaid torus orbits would have electron property similarities to Schrodinger's "waves" configuration of space, and multiple dimensions of 3D, 6D, 9D, & etc... depending on reference to whatever...? If you buy a "Slinky" toy, and paint lines on the sides when it is sitting as a cylinder in an upright position__ then flex the Slinky into a torus, with one 180 degree twist, and fasten it together__ it will give you a wonderful visual observation of the possible trajectory of an electron in an atom, differing from anything you read about in books... To, my knowledge, this knowledge of the atom is still unknown?! Quantum Fantasy can be lots of fun!
The following is a quotation that seems to fit in here, with these writings, rather than down below with the quote listings:
""Whole books have been written about the particle zoo, and many physicists have built their careers as particle taxonomists. But it seems to me that there cannot be anything very fundamental about such a profusion of particles, and the situation is rather like that in spectroscopy before quantum theory, when spectroscopists could measure and catalogue the relationships between lines in different spectra, but had no idea of the underlying causes of the relationships they observed. Something more truly fundamental must provide the ground rules for the creation of the plethora of known particles, a view that Einstein expressed to his biographer Abraham Pais in the 1950's. "It was apparent that he felt that the time was not ripe to worry about such things and that these particles would eventually appear as solutions to the equations of a unified field theory." Thirty years on, it looks very much as if Einstein was right, and the sketchy outlines of one possible unified theory which incorporates the particle zoo will be described in the Epilogue.""
"EPILOGUE... UNFINISHED BUSINESS... The story of the quantum as I have told it here seems neatly cut and dried, except for the semi-philosophical question of whether you prefer the Copenhagen interpretation or the many-worlds version. That is the best way to present the story in a book, but it isn't the whole truth. The story of the quantum is not yet finished, and theorists today are grappling with the problems that may lead to a step forward as fundamental as the step Bohr took when he quantized the atom. Trying to write about this unfinished business is messy and unsatisfying; the accepted views of what is important and what can safely be ignored may change completely by the time the report gets into print. But, to give you a flavor of how things may be progressing, I include in this epilogue, an account of the unfinished aspect of the quantum story and some hints about what to watch out for in the future."
""The clearest sign that there is still more to quantum theory than meets the eye comes from the branch of quantum theory that is generally regarded as the jewel in the crown, the greatest triumph of the theory. This is quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short, the theory that "explains" the electromagnetic interaction in quantum terms. QED flowered in the 1940's, and has proved so successful that it has been used as the model for a theory of the strong nuclear interaction, a theory that is in turn dubbed quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, because it involves the interactions of particles called quarks, which have properties that the theorists distinguish, whimsically, by labeling them with the names of colors. Yet QED itself suffers from a major flaw. The theory works, but only as a result of fudging the math to make it fit our observations of the world."
""The problems relate to the way in which an electron in quantum theory is not the naked particle of classical theory, but is surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles. This cloud of particles must affect the mass of the electron. It is quite possible to set up the quantum equations corresponding to an electron + cloud, but whenever those equations are solved mathematically they give infinitely large "answers." (These particles may not affect the electron, if mass-less, and only gain direction mass when changed from an, idle virtual particle or idle photon, into a light frequency radiation... photon with directional mass... rad)
"Starting from the Schrodinger equation, the cornerstone of quantum cookery, the correct mathematical treatment of the electron yields infinite mass, infinite energy, and infinite charge. There is no legal mathematical way to get rid of the infinities, but it is possible to get rid of them by cheating."
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Page Relevant Quotes
"With his physics of particles such a success, it is hardly surprising that when Newton tries to explain the behavior of light he did so in terms of particles. After all, light rays are observed to travel in straight lines, and the way light bounces off a mirror is very much like the way a ball bounces off a hard wall. Newton built the first reflecting telescope, explained white light as a superposition of all the colors of the rainbow, and did much more in optics, but always his theories rested upon the assumption that light consisted of a stream of tiny particles, called corpuscles." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"The Dutch Physicist Christiaan Huygens was a contemporary of Newton, although thirteen years older, having been born in 1629. He developed the idea that light is not a stream of particles but a wave..." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Any good classical physicist starting out from Boltzmann's equations to construct a blackbody radiation formula would later have completed integration. Then, as Einstein was later to show, the adding up of the pieces of energy would have restored the ultraviolet catastrophe. It was only because Planck knew the answer that he was looking for that he was able to stop short of the full, seemingly, classical solution of the equations. As a result, he was left with pieces of energy that had to be explained. He interpreted this apparent division of electromagnetic energy into individual pieces as meaning that the electrical oscillators inside the atom could only emit or absorb energy in lumps of a certain size, called quanta. Instead of dividing the available amount of energy up in an infinite number of ways, it could only be divided into a finite number of pieces among the resonators, and the energy of such a piece of radiation (E) must be related to its frequency (denoted y the Greek letter, ν) according to a new formula, E = hν ,where h is a new constant, now called Planck's constant. In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"...Thomas Brown almost eighty years before. Brown noticed that when a pollen grain floating in a drop of water is examined using a microscope it is seen to bounce around in an irregular fashion, moving in a random pattern that is know called Brownian motion. Einstein showed that this motion, although random, obeys a definite statistical law, and that the pattern of behavior is exactly what should be expected if the pollen grain is being 'kicked' by unseen, submicroscopic particles that move in accordance with the statistics used by Boltzmann and Maxwell to describe the way atoms move in a gas or liquid. It looks so obvious... ... But before Einstein made this point, respected scientists could still find room for to doubt the reality of atoms; after his paper appeared, there was no longer room to doubt." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"...One of the papers introduced the special theory of relativity and is largely outside the scope of the present book; another concerned the interaction of light with electrons and was later recognized as the first scientific work dealing with what we now call quantum mechanics__ it was for this work that Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921. The third paper was a deceptively simple explanation of a puzzle that had baffled scientists since 1827__ an explanation that established , as far as any theoretical paper ever could, the reality of atoms. In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Einstein refined his ideas on quantum radiation over the years up until 1911, establishing that the quantum structure of light is an inevitable implication of Planck's equation, and pointing out to an unreceptive scientific world that the way to a better understanding of light would involve a fusion of the wave and particle theories that had vied with each other since the seventeenth century. ... It took until 1923 for the reality of the quantum nature of light to be established beyond all doubt, and in turn led to a new debate about particles and waves that helped to transform quantum theory and ushered in the modern version of the theory, quantum mechanics." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Bohr had a particular genius... ...was quite willing to patch together different ideas to make an imaginary 'model' that worked in at least rough agreement with the observation of real atoms... ... So he took the image of an atom as a miniature solar system, with electrons moving around orbits in accordance with the laws of classical mechanics and electromagnetism... ... His model turned out to have been wrong in almost every respect, but it provided a transition to a genuine quantum theory of the atom, and as such it was invaluable." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"De Broglie thought of the waves as being associated with particles, and suggested that a particle such as a photon is in fact guided on its way by the associated wave to which it is tied. The result was a thorough mathematical description of the behavior of light, which incorporated the evidence from both wave and particle experiments." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"In 1906 J. J. Thomson had received the Nobel Prize for proving that electrons are particles; in 1937 he saw his son awarded the Nobel Prize for proving that electrons are waves. Both father and son were correct... In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"...but de Broglie realized that the fact that electrons only existed in 'orbits' defined by whole number (integers) also looked in some ways like a wave property. ""The only phenomena involving integers in Physics were those of interference and of normal modes of vibration,"" he wrote in his thesis. ""This fact suggested to me the idea that electrons too could not be regarded simply as corpuscles, but that periodicity must be assigned to them."" ... This is indeed, similar to the way electrons 'fit' into atoms n states corresponding to quantum-energy levels 1,2,3,4, and so on. Instead of a stretched straight string, imagine one bent into a circle, an 'orbit' around an atom. A standing vibration wave can run happily around the string, provided that the length of the circumference is a whole number of wavelengths." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"One of the puzzles of atomic spectroscopy that the simple Bohr model of the atom failed to explain involves the splitting of the spectral lines that 'ought' to be single into closely spaced multiplets. Because each spectral line is associated with a transition from one energy state to another, the number of lines in the spectrum reveals how many energy states there are in the atom__ how many 'steps' there are on the quantum staircase, and how deep each tread is. From their studies of spectra, the physicists of the early 1920s came up with several possible explanations for the multiplet structure. What proved to be the best explanation came from Wolfgang Pauli, and it involved assigning four separate quantum numbers to the electron. This was in 1924, when physicists still thought of the electron as a particle and tried to explain its quantum properties in terms familiar from the everyday world. Three of these numbers were already included in the Bohr model, and were thought of as describing the angular momentum of an electron (the speed with which it moved round its orbit), the shape of the orbit, and its orientation. The fourth number had to be associated with some other property of the electron, a property that came in only two varieties, to account for the observed splitting of the spectral lines. ...Pauli's fourth quantum number described the electron's 'spin,' which could be thought of as pointing either up or down, giving a nice double-valued quantum number. ...But what is this thing called spin? ...electron spin is not like the spin of a child's top because the electron has to spin twice to get back to where it started." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"The complete break with classical physics comes with the realization that not just photons and electrons but all 'particles' and all 'waves' are in fact a mixture of wave and particle." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Dirac was delighted to find that by including time as a number along with all the rest in his equations he was inevitably led to the 'prediction' that an atom must suffer a recoil when it emits light, just as it should do if the light is in the form of a particle carrying its own momentum, and he went on to develop a quantum-mechanical interpretation of the Compton effect." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Schrodinger thought that he had eliminated quantum jumps from one state to another by putting waves into quantum theory. He envisaged the 'transitions' of an electron from one energy state to another as something like the change in the vibration of a violin string from one note to another (one harmonic to another) and he thought of the wave in his wave as the matter wave invoked by de Broglie. But as other researchers sought to find the underlying significance of the equations, these hopes of restoring classical physics to the center stage evaporated. Bohr, for example, was baffled by the wave concept. How could a wave, or a set of interacting waves, make a Geiger counter click just as if it recorded a single particle? What was actually 'waving' in the atom? And, crucially, how could the nature of the black body radiation be explained in terms of Schrodinger's waves? So in 1926 Bohr invited Schrodinger to spend some time in Copenhagen, where they tackled these problems and came up with solutions that were not very tasteful to Schrodinger. ...First, the waves themselves turned out, on close inspection, to be as abstract as Dirac's q numbers. The mathematics showed that they couldn't be real waves in space, like ripples in a pond, but represented a complex form of vibrations in an imaginary mathematical space called configuration space. Worse that that, each particle (each electron, say) needs its own three dimensions. One electron on its own can be described by a wave equation in three-dimensional configuration space; to describe two electrons requires a six dimensional configuration space; three electrons require nine dimensions, and so on. As for the blackbody radiation, even when everything was converted into wave-mechanical language the need for discrete quanta, and quantum jumps, remained. ... As Heisenberg put it in his book Physics and Philosophy, "... The paradoxes of the dualism between wave picture and particle picture were not solved; they were hidden somehow in the mathematical scheme." ... Without doubt, the appealing picture of physical real waves circling around the atomic nuclei that had led Schrodinger to discover the wave equation that now bears his name, is wrong. Wave mechanics is no more a guide to the reality of the atomic world than matrix mechanics, but unlike matrix mechanics, wave mechanics gives an illusion of something familiar and comfortable. It is that cozy illusion that has persisted to the present day and that has disguised the fact that the atomic world is totally different from the everyday world. Several generations of students, who have now grown up to be professors themselves, might have achieved a much deeper understanding of quantum theory if they had been forced to come to grips with the abstract nature of Dirac's approach, rather than being able to imagine that what they knew about the behavior of waves in the everyday world gave a picture of the way atoms behave. And, that is why it seems to me that although there have been enormous strides in the application of quantum mechanics, cookbook fashion, to many interesting problems (remember Dirac's remark about the second-rate physicists doing first rate work), we are scarcely today, more than fifty years on , any better placed than the physicists of the late 1920s concerning our fundamental understanding of quantum physics." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"Bohr gave us a philosophical basis with which to reconcile the dual particle/wave nature of the quantum world. and Born gave us the basic rules to follow in preparing our quantum recipes." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"What Heisenberg showed was that if you tried, in this case to measure both the position and momentum of an electron you could never quite succeed, because Δp x Δq must always be bigger than h, Planck's constant divided by 2¶. The more accurately we know the position of an object, the less certain we are of its momentum__ where it is going." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"In addition, we have to interfere with the atomic process in order to observe them at all, and said Bohr, that means that it is meaningless to ask what the atoms are doing when we are not looking at them. All we can do, as Born explained, is to calculate the probability that a particular experiment will come up with a particular result." In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.
"For what quantum mechanics says is that nothing is real and that we cannot say anything about what things are doing when we are not looking at them." In Search of Schrödinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; John Gribbin
"Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian scientist instrumental in the development, in the mid-1920s, of the equations of a branch of science now known as Quantum Mechanics. ...quantum mechanics provides the fundamental underpinnings of all modern science. The equations describe the behavior of very small objects__ generally speaking, the size of atoms or smaller.__ and they provide the only understanding of the world of the very small. ...Without these equations, physicists would be unable to design working nuclear power stations (or bombs), build lasers, or explain why the sun stays hot. Without quantum mechanics, chemistry would still be in the Dark Ages, and there would be no science of molecular biology__ no understanding of DNA, no genetic engineering__ at all." In Search of Schrödinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; John Gribbin
(John Gribbin referring to Newton's physics... rad) "If I hit a tennis ball with my racket, the force with which the racket pushes on the tennis ball is exactly matched by an equal force pushing back on the racket; the pen on my desk top, pulled down by gravity, is pushed against with an exact equal reaction by the desk top itself; the force of the explosion process that pushes the gases out of the combustion chamber of a rocket produces an equal and opposite reaction on the rocket itself, which pushes it in the opposite direction." In Search of Schrödinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; John Gribbin
"According to Newton's laws, the behavior of a particle could be exactly predicted on the basis of its interactions with other particles and the forces acting on it. If it were ever possible to know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, then it would be possible to predict with utter precision the future of the universe." In Search of Schrödinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; John Gribbin
"Heisenberg uncertainty principle; principle of indeterminism: The principle that it is not possible to know with unlimited accuracy both the position and momentum of a particle. An explanation of the uncertainty is that in order to locate a particle exactly, an observer must be able to bounce off it a photon of radiation; this act of location itself alters the position of the particle in an unpredictable way. To locate the position accurately, photons of short wavelength would have to be used. The high momenta of such photons would cause a large effect on the position. On the other hand, using photons of lower momenta would have less effect on the particle's position, but would be less accurate because of the long wavelength." A Concise Dictionary of Physics: Oxford
""The basic element of quantum theory, says Feynman on page 1 of the volume of his lectures devoted to quantum mechanics, is the double-slit experiment. Why? Because this is ''a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery... the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics. ...There are no analogies that we can carry over from our everyday experience into the world of the quantum, and the behavior of the quantum world is not like anything familiar. Nobody knows how the quantum world behaves the way it does, all we know is that it does behave the way it does. There are just two straws to which you can cling. The first is that both "particles" (electrons) and "waves" (photons) behave in the same way__ the rules of the game are constant. The second is that , as Feynman has put it, there is only one mystery. If you can come to terms with the double-slit experiment then the battle is more than half over, since "any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can be explained by saying 'You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? Its the same thing"" In Search of Schrodinger's Cat... Quantum Physics and Reality; by John Gribbin.