quantummindclassicalheart:

bogleech:

3pblueberry:

sadclowncentral:

my opinion on quantum physics is that we should stop looking into it. it’s none of our business and frankly the particles seem to agree

scientists should walk away really exaggerated and call out ‘OK! i guess i’ll stop researching quantum physics…’ and then when the particles relax, they whip around super fast like a kid who just watched Toy Story trying to trick their toys into acting alive

Isn’t that already how it’s studied

Hey, your friendly neighborhood quantum physicist here. We used to do this, until we realized there was a better way.

You know those movies where there’s a horse that everyone claims is unrideable and too wild, and then a horse girl comes along and proves them all wrong by winning its trust? That’s us. The particle is the horse and the physicists are the horse girls.

Befriending particles is like befriending introverts. The tricks of studying quantum physics are

1. being extremely chill (like, tens of microkelvin chill),
2. accepting that the particles have complex stuff going on in their own lives that you don’t always get to see (namely, the full wavefunction), and
3. taking them for what they are (intrinsically not-classical objects described by probability amplitudes).

As some of us will find relatable, it’s not an issue with the particles themselves but with people’s desire to impose simple binary notions (spin up or spin down, 0 or 1) onto quantum systems that causes the trouble. In fact, their states aren’t just “0“ or “1″ or “0 and 1″ or “sometimes 0, sometimes 1″ but something new altogether (rays in Hilbert space).

In the end, it’s only when we appreciate the complex and non-binary nature of quantum systems that we see how incredible they truly are.