The Attribute of Light Science Still Can't Explain

宇宙を理解するために不可欠であるにもかかわらず、光は依然として謎に満ちています。 観察すると異なる挙動を示し、波状と粒子状の両方の特性を示します。 アイザック・ニュートンは光が粒子で構成されていると提案しましたが、トーマス・ヤングの二重スリット実験によりその波の性質が明らかになりました。 アルバート・アインシュタインは後に、光子の概念を導入して光電効果を説明しました。 しかし、単一の光子がスリットを通過すると、波の挙動を示唆する干渉パターンが現れます。 光の挙動は観察によって影響され、検出されない場合は波として動作しますが、観察される場合は粒子として動作します。 光の確率的な性質とその離散的な動作は、私たちの現実の理解に疑問を投げかけます。 これは物質粒子にも当てはまり、量子スケールではすべてが基本的に確率的であることを示しています。 光の謎と、それが現実の性質に及ぼす影響は、科学者を困惑させ続けています。(English) Despite being essential for understanding the universe, light remains enigmatic. It behaves differently when observed and displays both wave-like and particle-like characteristics. Isaac Newton proposed that light consisted of particles, but Thomas Young's double-slit experiment revealed its wave nature. Albert Einstein later explained the photoelectric effect by introducing the concept of photons. However, when a single photon passes through the slits, it exhibits interference patterns, suggesting wave behaviour. Light's behaviour is influenced by observation, behaving as a wave when undetected but as a particle when observed. Light's probabilistic nature and its discrete behaviour challenge our understanding of reality. This also extends to matter particles, indicating that everything is fundamentally probabilistic at a quantum scale. The mysteries of light and its implications for the nature of reality continue to perplex scientists.

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What is light? In early 1700, Isaac Newton theorised that light was made up of tiny little particles that he called "corpuscules" However, in 1801 – nearly 100 years later - a man named Thomas Young discovered that light must be more wave-like than particle-like. He proved this using a robust method known as the double-slit experiment. He set up a light source and shone it through two narrow slits onto a board.

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Young noticed that rather than getting two bands of light on the other side of the slits, a strange striped pattern was forming. This was an interference pattern and incontrovertible proof that "Light" had travelled as a wave. Why? Let's talk about waves for a moment. When waves travel, they oscillate up and down.

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But when two waves try to oscillate at the same point in space simultaneously, you get something known as interference. Imagine you had a bathtub with a rubber duck sitting on the surface. Two waves reach the duck at once. One tide raises the duck while the other tries to drop it down. What happens? Provided the locks are of the same magnitude and are perfectly out of phase, they will cancel each other out, and the duck will not move. This is called destructive interference.

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Similarly, if the waves both tried to raise the duck simultaneously, the duck would be raised twice as high. This is known as constructive interference. Because waves tend to expand in a circle, two waves next to each other will start to constructively and destructively interfere with each other. Here are two waves in water.

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See these lines? These calmer patches are where the waves cancel each other out: This is the effect we see with light travelling through the two slits. As the light from one slit propagates, it cancels out the other wave at specific points, creating the interference pattern Young noticed on the board. So, the mystery was solved. The light was a wave and not a particle.

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Except, there is more to this experiment than meets the eye. Let's fast forward another 100 years to 1905. Scientists around this time had become puzzled by the photoelectric effect. It turned out that when you shone a light on a metal surface, electron-like particles were coming off it. This was deduced because electrons in the metal were getting knocked off it by the light's increased energy.

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Imagine it like fruit on a tr e. If you pull the fruit off the tree, you need to use a certain amount of energy. Once the power exceeds the strength of the fruit's connection to the branch, the fruit pops off. This was happening with the light and the electrons. Once the light hit an electron and gave it enough energy to pass the threshold, it broke free from the metal.

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However, scientists were surprised that if you increased the light's intensity, they expected the electrons to be knocked away faster. If you pulled the fruit off the tree harder, it would come off more quickly. More energy = more departing kinetic energy. However, this did not appear to be the case.

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Instead, increasing the frequency of the light increased the velocity of the departing electrons. The intensity of the light didn't affect the departing electrons' velocity at all but did affect the number of electrons being emitted. This was a bit of a puzzler. Albert Einstein was the man who solved the puzzle. He deduced that light must travel in little packets of energy, so sending more of them – increasing the frequency – was the only way to increase the power going to the electrons.

He called these packets photons and later earned a Nobel prize for his work. Light, it seemed, was more like a particle again. Or both a wave and a particle at once? Of course, even this is not the whole picture. We aren't entirely sure about the entire picture even now.

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Instead, we have more results that are contradictory. Let's go back to the double-slit experiment. Armed with the knowledge of photons, physicists once again looked at the double-slit investigation. Experimental techniques have improved in the last 100 years, and it is now possible to emit a single photon of light at a time. So, the double-slit experiment was done again.

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This time, only a single photon would be sent through the slit onto a detector on the far side. When this was done, the sensor registered the photon's arrival at a single point. So, the light behaved like a particle again. But then, why had it interfered with itself in the previous version of the experiment? Scientists had an idea.

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They sent through multiple photons, one at a time, and plotted the results on the detector. And this is where the result became extraordinary. Once again, the sensor started seeing the photons arriving at single points, one at a time. But bafflingly, the arriving photons began creating a pattern: It was the interference pattern. The proof that light behaved like a wave.

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But strangely enough, this was occurring only when a single photon was going through at a time. Somehow, the single photon – which was leaving the detector like a particle and was arriving at its destination as a particle - was apparently in some way travelling through both slits at once, enough to then interfere with itself on the other side, like a wave.

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If the light were just a particle, you wouldn't see this pattern when it went through the slits. You would see only two blobs of light - one for particles that went through the one slit and one for particles that went through the other. And yet, here was the interference pattern with its multiple lines of light, disproving that. Scientists tried to pin light down.

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They set up the experiment, but this time with two more detectors at the slit, so scientists could observe whether it was passing through both simultaneously. It didn't. But simultaneously, it stopped creating an interference pattern on the furthermost detector. And from this, scientists began to realise something. Light cared about being observed.

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To be clear, it didn't matter whether a human eye or a machine observed it. The moment the light was interacted with in some way by any particle - which is the only way we can detect light; there's no other way to observe it - it started behaving differently than if it hadn't been seen.

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It was as if the light was snapping into focus any time the universe asked it where exactly it was when without that scrutiny, it appeared to relax into something more nebulous. Bizarrely enough, this seems to imply that light is more like a wave of probability than any discrete particle or wave. Any time it was asked where it was, it confidently provided a definitive answer – it WAS at this point on the detector, NOT at any other issue.

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But with no one checking up on it, light seems to be travelling in all directions at once, by specific probabilities. If you run the experiment multiple times, you could quantify those probabilities, discovering that it was more likely to be on the interference pattern bands and less likely to be in the gaps. But any time a single photon of light was asked, it gave an answer that was 100% concrete.

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This is highlighted through something known as the three-polariser paradox. Consider for a moment a pair of polarising sunglasses. These reduce the amount of light that can pass through them, usually by about 50%, depending on the lens type and wavelength.

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They work by being formed of thin chains of molecules that run lengthways across the lens. Any light that oscillates in the same orientation as this lens gets absorbed. Any that is perpendicular to the chains can pass through without trouble. The interesting case occurs when a single photon is passed through in a diagonal orientation to the lens. In this case, you don't get half a photon going through.

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You can't just absorb the part of the oscillation parallel to the lines and let it through the perpendicular position. Instead, the photon "snaps" into either the orientation or the other. It either is wholly absorbed or passes through entirely - but now, with a new, perpendicular polarisation to match what it would have had to have been to pass through easily.

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How do we know that the photon wasn't in this orientation? Because of what happens when you start adding more lenses. When you place a second lens behind the first, you can block out the light entirely, provided the two polarisations are perpendicular to each other. Let's say we rotate the second lens 90 degrees compared to the first.

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Any light that gets through the first lens has a 0% chance of getting through the second, like trying to post a letter through a chain-linked fence. As a result, we only see black. But add a third lens, and place it at a 45-degree angle between the other two, and bizarrely light starts making it through all three lenses again. This may seem counter-intuitive - how does adding more blockages increase the amount of light that makes it through?

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But this result rules out the possibility that the light has a fixed orientation. It must be snapping into focus at each new lens, rolling a quantum dice each time to see if it was the correct orientation all along or not. If it makes it through the first lens (a 50% chance), it only did so because it was oriented perfectly perpendicular to the lens's polarisation. This means once it reaches the second, it's coming at it from a diagonal polarisation. So, once again, there is a 50:50 chance it will make it through.

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It rolls its quantum dice again and has a 50:50 chance of proceeding. If it gets through this hurdle, it again snaps to the new orientation, as if it were that new orientation all along (which it wasn't). This means it's now polarised diagonally relative to the third lens, meaning it has a final 50% chance of getting through.

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Of course, some photons do not make it through all 3 of these probabilistic gauntlets. Only about 12.5% of them make it. But that's more than 0%, which is what was happening previously when you had only two lenses. Light likes to behave in discrete quantities. It is "quantum". It seemingly snaps to a discrete value when observed. And honestly, we don't know why.

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If you think about a wave, there is no reason why you couldn't simply have half a lock. You could halve it repeatedly an infinite number of times and still have an answer that makes mathematical sense. And yet you can't split light past a certain point down on a low enough quantum scale.

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You can't have half a photon or even one and a half photons. And if you try to do so, the photon instead snaps to one or the other nearest integer, based on probabilities: but only when it's asked. Otherwise, it's content to exist probabilistically, interfering with itself like a wave as it travels along before jumping to an answer when later asked precisely where it is.

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What is going on here? This is still being theorised about. The closest comparison we have to it is harmonics, where only a certain number of waves can exist on a bounded string. On a guitar string, you can have one lock, two, or more, but never any number that isn't a whole number.

It seems that light works in the same way. Perhaps something pinches the beginnings, and the end of the path light travels down - although what this might be and what mechanisms drive it are unknown now. Fundamentally, though, perhaps the craziest thing about all of this is that this isn't just about light.

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Although we've focused on light behaving like a wave and behaving probabilistically, all matter particles do the same. Light is another form of energy, and energy and matter are linked. Particles of matter - atoms and even complex molecules - have been shown to have wavelengths. Electrons are just as quantifiable and driven by probabilities as photons. We are all driven by likelihood if you scale things down small enough.

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So, what is everything genuinely made of? What makes up energy and matter that causes it to behave as it does? What Is going on under the hood of reality? Why is the universe acting differently when looked at compared to when not? And what does it imply to think that even you are on some level probabilistic? What this all means is anyone's guess.

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The person who figures it out will be the Einstein of our time. But for now, all we can say is that it seems the universe is playing dice when it comes to reality. You and the world around you might be much less confident than you thought. 

The Attribute of Light Science Still Can't Explain 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfwaEhNg9Oc

State-of-the-art technology! Approaching the secret of the superconducting quantum computer developed by RIKEN!

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Is there a "quantum energy template" invisible to living things? Quantum mechanics of living organisms studied in the former Soviet Union and Germany

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[Brief explanation] Mechanism of quantum computer that can be understood even from zero knowledge! IBM's quantum computer, "IBM Quantum System One," landed in Japan. Scheduled to start operation in 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZawPH3B9poo&t=6s

First, the idea of quantum computers was proposed about 40 years ago. Research and development have progressed, and quantum computers are being developed, although they are still at the toy level compared to the practical level.

One of the properties of quantum in quantum computers is the property of "superposition". One experiment that can observe this is the "double-slit experiment". The building blocks of modern computers are bits and logic operations. A bit is the smallest unit of information, containing either 0 or 1. Logical operations convert bits. Quantum computers can process data by superimposing 0s and 1s using quantum bits and quantum logic operations.

Several patterns have been discovered that reduce the number of computations compared to conventional computers by being able to process in the "superposition state". If quantum computers become practical, it is expected that the search for optimisation patterns and simulations for the development of new materials and new drugs will become more efficient, and there is a possibility that they will be applied to other fields as well.