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tivity requires that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light or c this creates a hard limit for how fast information can be moved from one place to another defining distances between objects in both space and time and this preserves causality or the order in which one event causes another event to occur within the universe and yet quantum interactions will collapse a wave function over an expansive region instantaneously in a letter to max born in 1947 einstein objected to this instantaneous action through all of space whenever quantum waves were compelled to relinquish their secrets translated from german einstein stated the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space free from ghostly spooky action at a distance many experiments however show that this instantaneous fixing of outcomes really is what happens when a quantum wave collapses and this is the case even if the distance between correlated measurements is separated by light years however no one is going to be sending messages faster than light or backward in time while one quantum measurement may indeed determine another even over a vast distance the information from an observation of one result still can t travel to the observer of another faster than light it s simply that the two correlated measurements regardless of when and where in the universe they take place will always correspond to one another the universe stays consistent while its mechanisms keep their secrets somehow these seemingly random systems that underlie the universe resolve themselves into an overall order and they do this according to rules that make no sense on the stage of space and time from which we watch the performance could it be that the entirety of our existence is a non local phenomenon like some ever changing hologram or perhaps all that collapses is one s ignorance postscript washing out of a pre med during college i decided to look for something that might utilize a little of what i d already struggled to grasp and that was when a chemistry professor who understood my frustrations explained something mind blowing about the nature of light while pointing me toward the door to the physics department i ended up in the applied aspect of the discipline my sincere sympathies to those who chose academics but i ve never forgotten that conversation or how it changed the way i perceive everything science when applied with objectivity can give usefully consistent descriptions of how things work that s what makes it so materially powerful but behind what causes our perceptions there s a meta physical order that merely results in something that makes sense we can know its result as the universe in which we exist but just what it is and what it all means if anything remains a mystery stuff born s and einstein s conversations were the source of the famous god doesn t play dice born saw quantum mechanics as something fundamentally random and not merely unpredictable einstein however viewed this as in direct conflict with necessary order of relativity it s a debate that still remains and that has resulted in some pretty out there ideas born m einstein a 1948 quantum mechanics and reality the born einstein letters dialectica 2 issue 3 4 pp 320 324 1948 the information philosopher retrieved august 14 2026 https www informationphilosopher com solutions scientists einstein dialectica html a reasonably non technical presentation of a few popular interpretations of wave function collapse ivezic m 2025 september 4 wave function collapse when quantum possibilities become reality postquantum com https postquantum com quantum computing wave function collapse at the shore august 10 2026 by lightness traveling in boundary behavior hmmm mystery science 28 comments time is an ocean but it ends at the shore bob dylan oh sister 1976 continuing with my attempt at a simple and non mathematical explanation of an idea from quantum physics i ll cover a little more about the double slit experiment in my last post i discussed how thomas young s 1801 version of the experiment revealed that light traveled as a wave counter to isaac newton s long accepted version of light moving as an object or particle and while it would take another 25 years for light waves to enter the realm of scientific theory it s something that can now be demonstrated on a kitchen table in 1905 however albert einstein threw a wrench into the works when he published a paper which explained a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect he did this by showing that light acts as a quantized packet or a sort of particle called the photon but this particle isn t newton s corpuscle moving through space like a speeding object rather a photon is more like a chunk of energy with no mass or volume einstein would later receive the 1921 nobel prize in physics for this discovery einstein also showed that the energy contained in a photon is proportional to the frequency of the wave multiplied by some fixed value determined by nature now known as planck s constant in simple terms this constant of nature first postulated by the physicist max planck in 1900 defines a fundamental minimum value or quanta for the smallest things in the universe this is the meaning of the word quantum in quantum mechanics in 1927 clinton davisson and lester germer at bell labs discovered that electrons which are particles of matter can also exhibit wave like behavior by creating interference patterns after being scattered off a crystal but if photons and electrons are particles what s going on here what s waving light waves called electromagnetic waves and matter waves called de broglie waves cannot be observed directly when they interact with the environment in a measurable way they act as particles this sudden change from a wave to a particle is usually termed a wave function collapse and since collapse will inevitably occur whenever an attempt is made to measure the wave the wave s existence can only be inferred by the existence of the diffraction and interference patterns so the precise nature of the waves is variously disputed by physicists with explanations that go well beyond the scope of this article but what is clear is that quantum particles such as photons and electrons do travel from one point to another as waves and this is always the case even when a photon or an electron travels one quanta at a time in 1974 a group of physicists at the university of bologna set up a variation of the double slit experiment using a beam of electrons in this case the slits were actually regions on either side of an extremely thin electrically charged wire that would deflect an electron differently depending upon which side of the wire the electron passed then electrons were fired toward the apparatus one at a time and this is what they saw this is a loop of 300 frames from a similar experiment running at 72 times actual speed in the experiment an electron was detected about once every second each electron is hitting a screen behind the experiment one at a time as a particle like individual grains of sand but observe the pattern that emerges over time it reveals an interference pattern remember there are no other electrons making waves with which to interfere this pattern shows that each electron traveled to its destination as a wave that could pass through both slits at the same time in order to interfere with itself it is only when the electron interacts with its environment and is detected or measured that it does so as a discrete particle this is what s being referenced when one hears the term wave particle duality in quantum physics when the fundamental things of the universe move they do so as waves but when these things are measured they emerge as particles in quantum physics the diffraction or interference wave patterns are usually treated as a probability distribution this just means that one can only use what information can be known about the wave to determine where a quantum particle is most likely to be measured wave interference will cause some regions to be more likely and to cancel out in others the mathematics used for these statistical predictions is called a wave function usually symbolized with a greek psi ψ or ψ in summary quantum objects like photons and electrons travel from one place to another as a wave these waves cannot be directly observed but they can be evaluated to determine the probability of a particle being measured at a given point quantum particles really only exist at the point at which they interact with their surroundings when and where they are measured just what s waving and exactly what constitutes a measurement are both areas of disagreement in physics i ll get a bit more into that later but the general idea of quantum things moving as waves and being measured as particles is scientifically well established and mathematically consistent in the next post however i want to throw out a curve ball wave particle duality implies something about the nature of the universe and einstein who equated both space and time with one another had something to say about it source reference further reading admin famous double slit experiment holds up when stripped to its quantum essentials mit physics 2025 july 28 https physics mit edu news famous double slit experiment holds up when stripped to its quantum essentials a description of the electron double slit experiment and animations of results bach r pope d liou s batelaan h 2013 controlled double slit electron diffraction new journal of physics 15 3 033018 https doi org 10 1088 1367 2630 15 3 033018 a simple explanation of the photoelectric effect howell e photoelectric effect explanation applications live science references 2017 april 25 https www livescience com 58816 photoelectric effect html davisson s and germer s 1927 experiment showing that electrons can act like waves wald c landmarks electrons act like waves american physical society phys rev focus 17 17 2006 https physics aps org story v17 st17 a super simple explanation of planck s constant what is the planck constant national institute of standards and technology nist 2023 https www nist gov education resources for parents 252c teachers and students what planck constant traveling light august 7 2026 by lightness traveling in boundary behavior hmmm mystery science 23 comments the breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea vladimir nabokov the real life of sebastian knight 1941 feeling perhaps a little over confident i m going to take a shot at a series of shorter posts explaining a fundamental idea from quantum physics without any mathematics and in a way that i hope will make sense to anyone my illustrations will focus mainly on what s known as the double slit experiment which reveals something non intuitive about the way that the universe actually works i ll apologize in advance however for the occasional historical narratives to start with imagine a series of coherent waves waves moving together in a single pattern like smooth ripples traveling across the surface of a pond now imagine that they come to a barrier in the pond if there is a small opening in the barrier some of the wave pattern will emerge from a point on the opposite side radiating outward in a circle the term for this is wave diffraction now imagine two small openings through which waves can diffract two separate and synchronized waves will begin radiating in circles on the opposite side of the barrier as the circles expand they will cross over and interact with each other in the places where they intersect where two crests from each of the waves meet the water will be boosted even higher where two troughs from each wave meet the water will fall even lower constructive interference and in the places where a crest from one wave meets the trough from the other they will cancel out to a neutral state destructive interference the image at the right is from a ripple tank showing how two sets of crossing water waves interact with each other in what s called an interference pattern if a wall is placed at the edge of the pond where the two interfering waves are traveling different parts of the wall will receive different sizes of waves some areas will be hit by constructively larger waves other areas may receive little movement of the water as they re in zones where the waves from one source destructively cancel out waves from the other source in 1801 thomas young demonstrated this same effect with light young sent a thin beam a way to make the light more coherent of sunlight toward two very thin slits in an opaque screen then he observed what he saw on another screen placed behind the slits and what young saw was an interference pattern suggesting that the light had traveled from the source to the screen in waves but this was somewhat controversial in 1704 isaac newton had published opticks in which he proposed that light consists of little fast moving masses or particles that traveled in the same manner as any other material objects and for nearly 100 years this had been the prevailing dogma upon which most other scientists of the time had based their own works this exposed young to withering criticisms from many of his peers so damaging his reputation that he afterward abandoned the study of physics entirely it wasn t until the late 1830s that work by the french physicist augustin jean fresnel caused young s discovery of light waves to be taken seriously and for a wave theory of light to replace newton s corpuscles indeed a contemporary version of young s experiment can be set up at home on a table top using a laser pointer as the coherent light source passing the light through two thin slits in a piece of aluminum foil it s easily demonstrated that light really does travel from one place to another as a wave that can interfere with itself in the next post however albert einstein will apply a wrench to the picture source reference further reading university of virginia physics department newton s particle theory of light pdf 2004 https galileo phys virginia edu classes 609 ral5q fall04 lecturepdf l20 lightii pdf university of cambridge whipple museum of history of science thomas young s wave experiments n d https www whipplemuseum cam ac uk explore whipple collections models wave machines thomas youngs wave experiments muller d the original double slit experiment veritasium video 2013 https www youtube com watch v iuv6hy6zsd0 the value of a pen july 17 2026 by lightness traveling in altitude boundary behavior history risk science 19 comments it was time to think of sleep and every man rolled himself in his blankets and stretched himself in the best and softest spot he could find looking up at the stars in the ceiling of his bedroom dan dequille history of the big bonanza 1876 it was july 20 1969 and the astronauts neil armstrong and buzz aldrin had completed their historic first walk on the lunar surface returnin...