Sunday, 21 February 2016

The weird nature of reality

Quantum physics plays a very important role in our lives , even though its implications elude our common experience without the advancements in quantum physics life as we know it would be over , the computer I am using to write this would not exist , the network you are using to read this would not exist , no phones ,camera , not even tv. Now that I have established that there is no ignoring quantum effects ,I will discuss about the most basic and  very bizarre quantum effect that is the uncertainty principle






Imagine that a dog has been tied to a tree with a 5m rope, and I tell you to close your eyes and set the dog moving and ask you to tell me the position of the dog you will say that the dog is at any point inside the circle with the tree as the centre and the radius of 5 metres and you will be right the dog is at a particular position in that circle you just cant see it . Now let us replace the dog with a particle let us say that the some how it has been confined in such a way that the farthest it can be from the tree is 5 metres and i ask you to close your eyes and tell me the position of the particle you will again say that it at a point in that 5 metre radius around the tree but this time you will be absolutely wrong , the answer would be that the particle is everywhere in that 5 metre radius around the tree . the instant you measure its position it will come to a definite position inside that circle but now that you have measure its position precisely there is no way to know its velocity ,not because you don’t have the equipment but because nature has forbidden you to ,the very statement of knowing the position and the velocity of a particle has no meaning and it is absurd to think it that way , and if you precisely measure the velocity of this quantum particle then the particle could be any part of the universe rendering the confinement useless . This is the uncertainty principle . 
the velocity and position both of a quantum particle cannot be known , precisely knowing of one will give infinite values to the other and before any measurement is made on the particle the particle has several values of both positions and velocity at the same time.The implications of this principle are profound , this means that the nature of reality is entirely dependent on the observations made by an observer . 
Now you must be wondering that why don't we observe this in our daily lives since we are made of particles? here is the answer this strange thing happens because of something called the wave-particle duality it is established in quantum physics that matter also behaves as a wave and thus has a wave length which is inversely proportional to the momentum of the object concerned the momentum of a particle is very very less as its mass is very less thus it behaves as such, and anything we handle in our daily life is comparatively very heavy thus has huge momentum thus the wave-length is negligible and thus this strange behaviour is negligible .


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