Quantum mechanics is difficult to understand at the best of times, but new evidence suggests that the current standard view of how particles behave on the quantum scale could be very, very wrong.
In fact, the experiment hints that an alternative view predicted almost a century ago might have been right this whole time. And before you get too bummed about that, the good news is that, if confirmed, it would actually make quantum mechanics a whole lot simpler to understand.
So let's step back for a second here and break this down. First thing's first, this is just one study, and A LOT more replication and verification would be needed before the standard view comes crumbling down. So don't go burning any text books just yet, okay? Good.
Now that we've got that straight, here's what's going on. Right now, one of the most confusing (but important) aspects of quantum mechanics is the idea that particles don't have a location until they're observed.
We've talked about this a few times, but what that basically means is when quantum physicists talk about a particle, there's a cloud of possibilities for its location, and that's described by a mathematical structure known as a wave function.
As soon as a particle is observed, its wave function collapses. And only then does it have a specific position.
The mathematics behind all of that is clear enough, and scientists can use it to work with particles on the quantum scale. But for the rest of us, it's all a little odd.
Even Albert Einstein had issue with this part of the standard view, which we often called the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein's biographer Abraham Pais remembers this conversation, as Dan Falk reports for Quanta Magazine:
"We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the Moon exists only when I look at it."
So why did the Copenhagen interpretation become our standard view then? Well, we did have an alternative, known as the pilot-wave theory, or Bohmian mechanics, which states that particles really do have precise positions, whether or not we're observing them.
But it never really took off, in part, because it would mean that the world must be "strange in other ways," as Falk explains.
To simplify it greatly, the weirdest part about Bohmian view is that it insists upon nonlocality, which basically means that anything in the Universe can affect anything else, no matter how far apart these objects are.
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