Quantum physics Facebook group

Dylan VanAllen - Moderator/Author

This paper was written and reviewed by the moderators of the Quantum Physics Facebook group to
demystify some of the common misconceptions of quantum theory for the members. I will begin by first
citing some of the phrases you might have heard about quantum mechanics.
• ”Things don’t exist until you observe it”.
• ”The conscious observer collapses the wave function”
• ”The Planck length is the smallest possible distance”

• ”Quantum mechanics says that you can decide which reality you are in”
It is likely that the people perpetuating the spread of these misconceptions were not doing so knowingly.
The many popularizations of quantum theory are riddled with this stuff because it is so hard to talk about
quantum mechanics in a simple way without being lazy and letting some details slip. For this reason I will
not do this. This is a page for quantum physics and I hope the reader will not shy away from the complexity.
So, what is quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics is the theory that describes the interactions of particles, which make up all things.
The term quantum came about when Max Planck attempted to fit the data for the blackbody radiation
spectrum, or in simpler terms, he was trying to come up with an equation that accurately described the heat
glow of objects. As it turned out, the equation that worked predicted that the energy emitted by a body
was quantized, or in discrete packets. For detail, I will include the equation only for those who like to be
meticulous:

2hν 3 ( khνT )−1

Units of distance, time, and mass, and temperature can be derived from the constant he introduced to the
equation h. This does not mean that the units derived from this constant are the ”smallest possible quanta”
of distance, time, mass, and temperature.
An experiment done by Thomas Young in 1803 showed that particles would act in a way that only waves
would when passing through two slits. Like with a wave, a diffraction pattern would form on the screen
behind the slits. It was as if the particles passed through both slits at the same time. Surely, this is a mistake
right? Well what happens if we put a detector on one slit so we know which one the light went through?
The diffraction pattern disappears, and the results are exactly as expected if the particle did not act like a
wave. Only when the measurement apparatus was not measuring which slit it went through did the pattern
appear. This is amazing. How on earth do we make sense of it?
Well the first thing all good physicists do is try to write an equation that predicts whats happening. This
was done by Erwin Schrödinger around 1925, with an equation that describes the rate at which the wave
function ψ evolves through time. Again for those interested in the details, in its general form it is

∂
ih |ψ⟩ = Ĥ|ψ⟩ (2)
∂t
The Schödinger equation

What is the wave function ψ? That is the function that describes everything we think we know about a
particle. You give it some time, and some other parameter such as position, and it spits back some value.
This value squared is the probability that you might find the particle as having the value of such parameter.
So there you go. You have a wave function that tells you the probability distribution of the some observable
quantity of a particle, and an equation that tells you how your function changes with time. But what exactly
does it mean? Well, we know that the wave function and the Schr ”odinger equation are verifiably correct.
But it predicts that particles can exist in multiple different states at once, which is preposterously at odds
with what we see. There are numerous fundamentally different interpretations of quantum mechanics that
each give their own explanation on why we see things as particles when we know they act as waves. The
following is a list of more popular interprations:

• The Copenhagen interpretation states that what the particle does between measurement and observa-
tion is not of concern, and that upon observation the wave function collapses into a point.
• The hidden variables interpretation states that the particle acts classically, but seems to act quantum
because of hidden information.

• The many worlds interpretation states that the wave function never collapses, and that when a mea-
surement is made the observer gets entangled with the particle where there are now many different
worlds where the observer saw the particle in each of its possible states.
• Quantum bayesianism - or QBism - is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that treats an observer
as a more subjective agent than one that objectively changes the wave function

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So what have we learned?
• We learned that each particle has a minimum possible energy described by Planck’s constant. This
gives convenient units of distance and time but these units are not the minimum amount possible.
• We have learned that a particle is described by its wave function ψ. This wave function evolves
smoothly through time as according to the Schrodinger equation until a measurement is made. At
that point the wave function then describes a localized particle. The reasons for this sudden change
are still highly debated, but the consensus is always that ψ existed before observation, not that the
particle only came into existence when it was observed.
I hope after reading this document you understand a little more that:

• Natural units - or ’Planck’ units - do not describe an indivisible quanta of those units. A Planck length
is not the smallest distance possible. It is only the smallest distance measurable.
• Particles exist as a wave function of probability before obervation (and perhaps after). Observation
does not make them real.
• The wave function may or may not be affected by observation - this is still up for debate.

References:
1. The Theory of Heat Radiation. Planck, Max 1914, pp.168 https://archive.org/details/theoryofheatradi00planrich
2. Schrodinger Equation, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/schr.html

3. Quantization: Planck, Einstein, Energy, and Photons. University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 24 May
2020, https://chem.libretexts.org/@go/page/52778.