10. Time Dilation For hundreds of thousands of years, people have had a concept of the continual passage of time… whether they measured it by the movement of the sun across the sky, with wristwatches, and more recently smartphones. Quantum physics, however, has shown that time isn’t as constant as it seems, with a process known as time dilation.
9. The Different Types of Water When you have a glass of water, how many different types of water do you think the glass is filled with? It sounds like a strange question, but equally as strange is the answer… because there are actually two different forms. This would be a good question for trivial pursuit!!
8. The Fifth State of Matter We all learned about the states of matter in science class, and how elements transition between solid, liquid, gas, and plasma… but quantum physics has enabled the creation of a fifth state of matter known as ‘Bose-Einstein condensates’, which itself allows more experimentation in the weird world of quantum physics.
7. Neutrino Origins Neutrinos are mysterious particles that pass through virtually everything, which makes them incredibly difficult to study, but recent experiments, such as the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory, have given opportunities to detect them, and even learn about their origins. A recent paper detailed what happened when scientists tracked where a neutrino had come from, and they couldn’t believe what they found. Based on this, now models of the universe have to be re-written.
6. Objects Can Have 2 Temperatures Schrodinger’s cat is a famous experiment from quantum physics that shows how a cat in a box can be alive and dead at the same time because of quantum mechanics… but a recent study has proven that a similarly weird phenomenon also exists that means that objects can be two temperatures at the same time on the quantum level.
5. Quantum Teleportation Have you ever watched a sci-fi show like Star Trek and wished that their teleportation technology was real? We could completely eliminate travel time!! Well, quantum teleportation is actually a thing, but it’s not something that could allow actual objects to be moved from place to place.
4. Quantum Life It has always been thought that the behaviors of particles on the quantum scale, such as entanglement, were limited to inorganic molecules, but recent studies have suggested some bacteria can be quantum entangled. The weirdness of quantum physics is typically thought of as being something that happens on the minute scale, far smaller than bacteria, but there’s an area of study looking at where the boundary between the quantum world and our world actually is, and things don’t appear to be clear cut.
3. New Particles The standard model of particle physics is the theory that classifies all known elementary particles, as well as describing three of the four fundamental forces. It includes ones you’ll have heard of, like electrons, the three types of neutrino, and quarks… and a few you may not have heard of like tau, muon, boson, and gluon particles.
2. Bell’s Theorem Bell’s Theorem, named after John Stewart Bell, is a way to distinguish the properties of the quantum world from that of classical physics. It says that ‘no physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics’… which means, in simpler terms, that looking for hidden reasons to explain why things are behaving in the way in which they are will never explain the full story.
1. Hawking Radiation The most influential physicist of our time, Stephen Hawking, progressed our understanding of the quantum world an incredible amount… but possibly his greatest discovery was the one named after him… Hawking radiation. As we know, black holes are incredibly dense objects, so much so that even light cannot escape their grasp. Or can it?? Origins Explained is the place to be to find all the answers to your questions, from mysterious events and unsolved mysteries to everything there is to know about the world and its amazing animals!