Title text:
Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.
Transcript:
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Source: https://xkcd.com/3141/
Ehh, its a bit more than that.
Its a particle in that we know they are quantized into single photons. As in, it is impossible to observe half of a photon, or any non-integer number of photons, and one photon can only be observed in one place. This makes it like a particle.
But its a wave in the way it behaves - it can interfere (not just with other photons, with itself), and its movement can only be described through wave functions that can even take seperate paths at the same time, according to how waves propogate.
And, there are ways in which they act like particles no matter how they are observed, and same for wavelike behavior
Worth noting: “observation” is just physical measurement. You have to keep in mind that observing something fundamentally requires interacting with it - in order to look at an apple, photons must bounce off of it, which is a physical interaction. On the quantum scale, these interactions cannot be ignored.
Also also: this isn’t just photons, everything is like this. It may not align with how we observe things on a macroscopic scale, but this is fundamentally how the universe works.
Wow, I think this answered my question before I asked it. So yeah, I was wondering about that double slit experiment, I’ve seen it demonstrated with photons and visible light, but do the principles demonstrated by the experiment actually apply to other particles? In the right environments, do atoms behave similarly?
In theory yes, but once you have multiple particles interacting things get really complicated really fast and nice tidy interference patterns like in the double slit experiment become much less common.
All atoms are multiple particles at quantum scales, even a single hydrogen atom is comprised of four.