Saturday, December 8, 2012

'Oldest Living Blogger' says: "I'm too old for Quantum Mechanics!"

The Internet is a marvelous place to visit, isn't it? I was reading something about the Mars rover Opportunity still in action on Mars, and how it has found all sorts of tiny little spherules in the rocks there....

and these are quite small, the biggest ones being only about 3 mm in diameter, but there are different kinds, and at many different locations where Opportunity has been.

That got me reviewing what I've learned so far about Mars, and then checking other related topics on the Internet, and somehow or other, I ended up reading about Quantum Mechanics, or more specifically an introduction to the basics of Quantum Mechanics for Dummies. And there's a high probability I won't live long enough to get a grasp of Max Planck's constant and quantizing of energy, and why in an atom only certain energy levels are allowed while others are forbidden, and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to picture something being both a wave and a particle simultaneously.

That latter because a wave implies something made up of more than one, while a particle suggests a single item on its own whizzing around its proton or nucleus or whatever. I found the old classical definition of an atom as depicted in a planetary situation more logical than this modern system describing a "95% probability of it being in this region here..." and the author of the article was right in saying that we would find ourselves having trouble getting our heads around some of these ideas. I agree with 'Uncle Albert' when he said "I can't believe God plays dice with the universe."

But I can understand that there would need to be different rules for microcosmic objects which of necessity operate on a different time frame and at different speeds than those of the macrocosmic world with which we're more familiar. Electrons orbiting their nucleus are obviously going to be traveling at a different rate than for example a planet like Earth travels around its nucleus, the sun. And if the Earth is moving through space in 8 directions simultaneously, then it's no wonder we need some conversion factors to explain the motions of those atomic and subatomic particles/waves making up this whole unidentified flying object here. And today's Question Everything is this:
Do those electrons and other subatomic particles have their own versions of the moons/satellites flying around our planets, and is that why their behavior fits both the wave and particle model?

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