David Friedberg
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So he showed like if you put helium-3 cold enough, it kind of almost has this new sort of characteristics with the physics and how it moves and how it works.
I think that's really worth spending a moment on.
Yeah, great.
So when we talk about quantum mechanics, when we talk about the relative position or energy or movement of a particle at the atomic scale, as small as an atom or smaller than an atom,
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.