But a new generation of researchers are rethinking why measurements would cause a collapse in the first place.Ī new experiment, known as the TEQ collaboration, could help reveal a boundary between the weird quantum world and the normal classical world of billiard balls and projectiles. The idea is similar to flipping a coin, but before you look at the result, the coin can be thought of as both heads and tails-the act of looking, or measuring, forces the coin to “collapse” into one state or the other. Now, nearly a century later, a growing number of physicists are no longer content with the textbook version of quantum physics, which originated from Bohr’s and others’ interpretation of quantum theory, often referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation. But other factions, led by Albert Einstein, were never fully satisfied by the explanations of the quantum world, and new theories to explain the atomic realm began to crop up. They believed the quantum world could be understood according to probabilities-when you examine a particle, there’s a chance it does one thing and a chance it does another. And sometimes you can’t even know where they are.įor some physicists, like Niels Bohr and his followers, the debates surrounding quantum mechanics were more or less settled by the 1930s. Sometimes they seem to exist in two places at once. Particles sometimes act like waves, and vice versa. Beneath the world of classical physics, at the smallest scales, tiny particles don’t follow the usual rules. The quantum revolution never truly ended.
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