Higgs boson: The ‘God Particle’ explained. Elementary particles have duality.

• Higgs boson: The ‘God Particle’ explained.
• Discrete, indivisible units of energy are called quanta. Energy is not continuous.
• Light is not only a wave but also a particle.
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• Quantum mechanics is best summarized by the five major principles of quantum theory:

1. Energy is not continuous but comes in small, discrete units.
2. Elementary particles have duality; they behave both as a particle and a wave.
3. Movement of these particles is random and unorganized.
4. It is physically impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. They vary inversely with one another—that is, the more you know about one property, the less you know about another.
5. The atomic world has absolutely nothing to do with classical mechanics.

• The basis of quantum mechanics is energy’s ‘packaging’ into small, discrete units. Multiple experiments by Planck proved not only that light has particle properties as well but also that energy is ‘quantized.’
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• Non-continuous energy means that only certain energies are allowed. It’s analogous to a set of stairs—only certain positions are allowed. For example, you cannot sit on the vertical drop between two stairs. In the same way, energy is bounded by certain values that it can have and others that it cannot.
• Elementary particles have duality.
• Particle/Wave Duality is the assumption that elementary particles behave both like particles and waves.

• Physicists today accept the dual nature of light. Thomas Young conducted a famous experiment in 1804 that confirmed the wave nature of light, but it’s now possible to rethink the experiment. Light will travel away from a source as an electromagnetic wave. When it encounters a screen with two slits, it continues while dividing into two wave fronts. As the wave fronts approach the screen, they overlap. At the moment of contact, the entire wave front disappears and a photon appears. Quantum physicists like to describe this as a “collapsing event”—that is, the entire wave collapses into a small point.

•  Quantum Theory. All it says is that the particle is what you measure it to be. When you see it as a particle, it is a particle, and the same is true for the wave. Bohr goes on to say that the only reality is that which has been observed, and it is meaningless to attribute properties to anything that has not been measured.

• Black holes that transform matter into dark energy could solve ‘cosmic hiccups’ mystery

• The random and unorganized movement of particles is relatively self-explanatory, so we’ll move on to Number 4.
• You can’t know the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously.
• One foundation of quantum mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—essentially, one cannot know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. The more you know about one property, the less you know about another.

• Einstein spent much of his life trying to determine both the position and momentum of an electron—but that was an uncharacteristic failure. The whole of quantum physics would collapse if this were possible. Therefore, Werner Heisenberg proposed that it is physically impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle. However much our technology advances over the next few centuries, we will never be able to figure out these two properties at the same time.
• The atomic world has nothing to do with classical mechanics.
• I think we’ve learned enough to know that the quantum world has nothing to do with the world we live in. But just to make sure, let’s explore the world of quantum mechanics—a little bit deeper.
• In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger created several quantum equations using wave mathematics and concluded that quantum waves were nothing like real waves. Each particle described as a wave needed three dimensions but still jumped from one quantum state to another. Thus, even in waveform, space was not continuous.

• Schrodinger is the famous author of the Schrodinger’s Cat conundrum.
• Schrödinger never particularly liked quantum physics, but he attempted to illustrate our inadequate understanding of the quantum world. Imagine a cat in a closed box. There is a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, and cyanide. The detector is turned on for long enough that the radioactive material has a fifty-fifty chance of decaying. If the radioactive material decays, the Geiger counter detects the particle and crushes the cyanide, killing the cat. If it doesn’t decay, well, the cat stays alive. Until the box is opened, the cat can be considered both dead and alive.
• Schrödinger’s cat has never been fully solved, but the most popular interpretation is the Many Worlds Theory.