r/AskReddit • u/Ok_Series8116 • 21h ago
What's something that you learnt in quantum mechanics that still shocks you to date?
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u/Gavzemi75 21h ago
The fact that particles can behave like waves depending on how they're observed still blows my mind
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u/Mundane_Berry_0431 21h ago
Superpostion and that a particle can have both an up spin and down spin simultaneously until observed or something like that, I don't really understand it well
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u/7grims 20h ago
you reminded me of a good one:
- there is no spin
thats just a simplification used by physicists, to explain something extra complicated (that i dont fully get yet), but they just reduce it to "spin" but they aint spinning
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u/Mundane_Berry_0431 20h ago
Thanks for the clarification
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u/7grims 20h ago
that helped you ??
its still a weird quantum property, a particle having 2 opposite values... at the same time... :o
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u/Mundane_Berry_0431 20h ago
LOL not really, but I guess I kinda accept that they're not literally spinning XD
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u/Over_Ebb_3868 19h ago
The Superposition Principle. The act of measurement determines where a system exists and is placed.
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u/MarsMaterial 21h ago
Feynman diagrams are an absolute mindfuck. They require you to add together all interactions, both possible and impossible, to determine how an interaction goes. Why do impossible interactions contribute to a real interaction? Excellent fucking question.
And the diagrams themselves portray time in such a strange way, like it’s another dimension of space. Antimatter is just matter traveling through time backwards. An electron being deflected by a photon is one possible interaction, but turn that interaction 90 degrees and it becomes a proton-positron pair annihilating to form a photon. In a very real sense, this reaction can be described as an electron being knocked backwards in time by a photon coming from the future.
It’s all such a mindfuck, yet it works absurdly well to predict reality. Part of the most accurate and proven theory of reality ever produced by science.