Thursday, January 22, 2009

Are we idiots?

So I've been learning about quantum mechanics (if you don't know what it is, I think you are better off just not knowing, ignorance is bliss.) Quantum mechanics is sorta like learning a new language, except you don't know any languages yet. Nothing makes sense, but you learn it because you have to. Just like with languages, questions often arise. Why are certain words pronounced certain ways? Why are there only 26 letters in the alphabet? Likewise with quantum mechanics, many more questions arise. Quantum mechanics does not make any logical sense, so when learning it, you must discard all common sense and all logic. Most people won't know about quantum mechanics as it only occurs on quantum scales, but should you choose to delve into it, heres a lil glimpse. Pop quiz, what is an electron, a wave or a particle? If you answered any of those two, then you are incorrect, unless you answered both. It seems that an electron is able to act as both a wave and a particle at the same time. But when you choose to measure it as a particle, then it is a particle. By choosing to see what it is, then you have caused it to act that way. That is a bit of what quantum mechanics incorporates.

So to the purpose of this blog post, why is quantum mechanics so weird? Most of the time in science, experiments are done in order to prove a hypothesis. But sometimes theories are made up in order to prove the results of an experiment. This is how quantum mechanics was invented. Because science had no other answer for weird phenomenon, something weirder had to be the answer. But doing all this quantum stuff makes me wonder if we are right. Often the first ideas are wrong, and then we learn from it. In the past, very absurd ideas were believed because people had nothing else to believe it. The Earth was the center of the universe because what else would be? Now we look back at laugh at all these ridiculous ideas, because we know that they were wrong. That is what I think about quantum mechanics. Perhaps we are wrong now, and in the future, something better will be found to explain everything, and then quantum mechanics will be nothing more than a textbook example of things that were wrong. Or, maybe everything is really this weird ....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe quantum theory can explain why teh Cardinals - and not the Eagles - are in the Super Bowl.

Shouji Chen said...

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5631015&id=862455367#/group.php?sid=1e9f2df81fbac23291d56f09087adcc0&gid=2217915679

yep