![]() ![]() If it was paint instead of water, and you held a stick just above the surface of the rippling liquid so the peaks could lick at the stick, the result would be something like the photographs physicists take of diffraction patterns. The intersecting, expanding ripples form a diffraction pattern. If you don’t know what diffraction is, think of a pair of stones dropped into a pond simultaneously. When you torture an electron (which we normally think of as being particle-like) by forcing it through a pair of narrow slits, it creates a diffraction pattern, like a wave. So what does it feel like to be Mabel Electron, and how is that different from being Alice Electron?įor those who never took college-level physics, the basic point demonstrated by the double-slit experiment is that elementary particles like electrons have both particle-like and wave-like natures. What is it like to be an electron in a double-slit experiment? How is it different from being an electron that’s just kinda bumming around in less weird environments, without double-slit torture chambers? Let’s call the electron Alice while it is traveling through ordinary space, and Mabel when it is passing through weird Wonderland-like double slits spaces where it’s hard to be in denial about your inner wave-like nature. Like you’re in multiple states at once, with those states interfering with each other in ways that creates subjective dyschronia or timelexia. If your state of mind is normally like that of a particle - you are here and now, thinking about this, doing that, with some uncertainty around it all - being diffracted is feeling like a wave. ![]() Animation by Jean-Christophe BENOIST at French Wikipedia. ![]()
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