So if you take an ordinary person who is willing to devote a great deal of time and work and thinking and mathematics, then he’s become a scientist! -Richard Feynman, Fun to Imagine I had to learn that just like anybody else. I was not born understanding quantum mechanics-I still don’t understand quantum mechanics! I was born not knowing things were made out of atoms, and not being able to visualize, therefore, when I saw the bottle of milk that I was sucking, that it was a dynamic bunch of balls bouncing around. There’s no talent, no special ability to understand quantum mechanics, or to imagine electromagnetic fields, that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people. Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. Ask me if an ordinary person could ever get to be able to imagine these things like I imagine them. They don't really have a color, we just use that idea because it's sort of helpful, just like using the idea of positive and negative for charges is helpful.This is an excerpt from the book series Philosophy for Heroes: Continuum. ![]() IN the field of quantum chromodynamics, we say that particles have a color. It's just the name that we've given a quark that has certain properties. There's nothing unusually strange about the strange quark. There's a charmed quark and a strange quark. THere's nothing "up-ish" about an up quark. "Up" and "down" don't have any meaning other than to identify the type of quark. A quark can be an up quark or a down quark. We have other properties like this for other particles. It's just a characteristic that particles have or don't have, and we know what the effect is of having or not having that property. "What is spin" doesn't have any deeper answer than does the question "what is charge". But there is no point in trying to answer "what is electron spin" by referring to some familiar object like a ball or a planet, because electrons are not balls or planets, they are their own thing, and you just have to accept that they have a property whose effects we understand very well, and we happen to have named it spin. Still, they have a property that works sort of like an orbit (orbitals) and they have a property that works sort of like rotation about an axis (spin). Using this concept actually helped a bit, just like Bohr's imagination of little orbits helped a bit, but again, the electrons are not like little planets: they don't revolve around the nucleus, and they don't rotate on their axes. Just as Bohr imagined that the atoms were little planets revolving around the nucleus as though it were a sun, other scientists tried to extend that idea by imagining that the little planets, just like real planets, had spin. It got named spin back when people were working with the Bohr model and trying to extend it to atoms beyond hydrogen. Spin is just a property that electrons (and other particles) have. ![]() For another layer, you can take the fact that you can never cool anything down to exactly 0K (-273.15C) (although you can get close) and so nothing will ever have 0 velocity. (1 value in a range of reals is like trying to throw a dart at a dartboard with an infinitely thin wire and hitting the wire). With this uncertainty, the velocity is almost definitely not 0. As we can't physically measure to perfect accuracy, there is an uncertainty in both measurements of the degree that we know it's probably stationary and it's probably 'over there'. So, if you know with 0 uncertainty what the velocity is, then you have no idea where it is, and all future involvement of the particle is pretty much irrelevant (how is the electron going to diffract around an atom if the electron is in a different galaxy?). The square (probability function) shows that it has an equal chance of being anywhere. If you take the infinite wavelength interpretation, then it would be nearly 0 (1/inf) but constant everywhere. ![]() ![]() Isn't to do with the fact that the velocity is not quite 0? if you know it is exactly 0 then the uncertainty in the position is infinite as well (momentum is a function of velocity, so delta P = 0 -> delta V = 0 -> delta X = inf) therefore it has an equal probability of being anywhere.
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