• ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Like toll booths on highways. Understood.

    In QM however, neat particles don’t exist, it deals with quantised, probabilistic waves. The above effect gets blurred over the waveform. No one atom definitely absorbs it or doesn’t, it gets blurred together into a general slowing of the wavefront.

    That’s exactly the amount of QM I can understand. Which means I don’t understand QM. ;)

    • cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      QM isn’t insane to understand. It’s main issue is that it doesn’t map well/at all to our normal experience. You need to dive into the maths, and accept what falls out.

      The main deeper level here is how the blurring happens. The photons explore all possible paths. The result is an integral of them all. In general, vast areas cancel out, leaving classical (ish) behaviour. This makes sense mathematically, but has no classical analogy to compare to.