What if you entered the Quantum realm?

 What If You Entered the Quantum Realm?

It’s a popular theme in film and TV sci-fi, usually painted as some sort of psychedelic world. But is that how it really works? What’s actually going on at the quantum level? 

Today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if you entered the quantum realm?

To understand the general strangeness of quantum mechanics we first need to think about light.

Light:

Scientists were long baffled by light, unable to decide whether it was made up of waves or particles.

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein:

Isaac Newton was one of the earliest to claim that light was made of particles,

but countless others sought to prove that light had wave-like properties too… until Albert Einstein finally laid the matter to rest in the early 1900s, showing that light was both a wave (spreading in all directions) and a particle (moving in one).

Quanta/Photons:

That light was measured in tiny pockets of energy called Quanta or, today, photons.

But it only became stranger from there. Despite Einstein himself reportedly remaining sceptical about the theory, quantum mechanics

- analysing subatomic particles - was born out of these new schools of thought. Einstein’s issue with quantum theory was that he believed the world should be objective and, in some way, predictable and observable.

But, when we zoom into the quantum realm, it’s full of crazy, strange phenomena that look as if they have no place in science at all.

Here, all of our preconceived notions of what’s real and possible, the known laws of regular, classical mechanics, fall apart.

Quantum Mechanics:

In quantum mechanics everything exists in a cloud of probabilities, operating as though

within a constant “what if?” hypothetical.

• Particles spin in two directions at the same time.
• Matter passes through solid barriers like a ghost.
• Two particles become entangled and their fates are then entwined.

They could theoretically wind up on opposite sides of the universe, but they’d still somehow communicate instantly. Even temperature behaves in different ways, leaving cold spots where standard thermodynamics says there should be heat.

One thing is certain; you would have to be incredibly small to enter such a place.

Scientists distinguish something as quantum when it’s at it’s very smallest part, with distances in the quantum realm typically measuring less than 100 nanometers - with a nanometer equalling one billionth of a meter. Beyond that, it’s almost impossible to predict what the quantum realm would specifically look like. At this size, all objects lose any sense of shape. You’d exist amongst blurry, blobbish atoms and particles, drifting through infinitely vast expanses of apparent emptiness - so, in some ways, it’d feel as though you’d been abandoned in an exceptionally weird stretch of outer space.

Crucially, the particles that do cross your path would seem to flash in and out of existence. They’d solidify only when you looked at them and exist like a shadow in the corner of your eye whenever you glanced away.

In this way, quantum physics feeds into philosophical debate, seeming to redefine the relationship between matter and people.