David Friedberg

we have to use kind of probabilities to describe where things are going to be.

That was what was really kind of the big understanding of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, right?

Is that there's the probability of things being where they are and moving as they're moving.

It's not like deterministic, like we can see with the ball that we throw around.

When you get very, very small,

Things get very fuzzy and it's very hard.

So quantum mechanics ultimately became a field that people say is very non-intuitive in terms of understanding where small particles are, the energy they have, where they're moving to.

And basically, we resolved to figuring out

that we have to use these functions.

It's not just a single point, but it's a distribution.

It's a whole bunch of places.

And there's a probability of where the atom could be or where the electron could be.

It's also a probability of how fast it might be moving.

All of these things become probability functions.

So rather than think about an electron moving around an atom in a pre-described path and I can know where it is at any point in time, the right way to think about an electron around an atom is it's in a wave.

There's a wave that describes kind of where it is and what it's doing.

And so one of the other kind of features that arises from the fact that everything at a micro scale is described by wave functions is that there's a small probability of something kind of extreme or extraordinary happening.

Like the one example is Stephen Hawking figured out that you could have a particle and antiparticle come out of nowhere in space and the antiparticle goes into the black hole, the particle shoots off.

And that the probability of that happening is so low, but it happens enough

that the antiparticle actually starts to delete part of a black hole and that's how black holes evaporate and this theory, all these interesting things.