Boson.
(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It’s incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)
Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one’s mind around, but it’s what these particles do that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.
Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it’s like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.
But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is
disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.
Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.
Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements quantum leaps. Pioneering quantum physicists realized that particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. They’re simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took only when it’s observed. Electrons exist in what are called ghost states, exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities collapse into the one they actually take.
Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called photons) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn’t pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?
It can’t be predicted.
Some particles pass through the glass;
Some don’t.
You can determine possibilities,
you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,
but in the end, that’s the best that can be done.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle’s location, or you can measure its speed, but you can’t measure both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.
As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don’t have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.
Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend’s beard. That’s been conventional wisdom for a number of years.
Particles and waves.
One or the other.
Particles are like bullets;
waves are spread out.
Particles can be only in specific locations;
waves can be everywhere.
Particles can’t be divided; waves can.
But then there’s light.
Light is made up of particles.
Light is a wave.
If you Ask light a wave question, it responds as a wave. ask light a particle question, and it reveals itself to be particles.
Two mutually exclusive things, things that have always been understood to be either/or,
turned
out
to
be
both.
At the same time.
Niels Bohr was the first to name this, in 1926, calling it complementarity.
Complementarity, the truth that something can be two different things at the same time, leads us to another phenomenon, one far more bizarre, called entanglement.
Communication as we understand it always involves a signal of some sort—your voice, a telephone, a wire, a radio wave, a frequency, a pulse—something to transmit whatever it is from one place to another. Not so in the subatomic realm, where particles consistently show that they’re communicating with one another with no signal involved. Wolfgang Pauli identified this truly surreal property of subatomic particles in 1925 with his exclusion principle. Pairs of quantum particles, it was discovered, demonstrate an awareness of what the other is doing after they’ve been separated. Without any kind of signal.
The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don’t have any frame of reference for:
A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.
Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they’re gone.
If you’re sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don’t return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them twice.
Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went through your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You’d take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball’s action. You’d apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you’d think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.
You’d be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion that can be known.
But in the subatomic world,
things come and go,
disappear
