Double Slit Experiment -- Electron Interference

Factual Questions
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Stephen Hawking [heavenly choir sings] Stephen Hawking [/heavenly choir]–who IS a quantum physicist–says (in I forget which book), that he doesn’t attempt to explain why these things happen. He makes up math that can accurately describe what happens and calls it good enough.

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  1. When we fire an electron ‘stream’ at a target that records or ‘lights up’ when it is ‘hit’ by an electron. It seems that it is ‘like’ the real world analogue of shooting a stream of bb pellets at a target.

  2. When we put up a slit for the ‘stream’ to pass through, the stream is diffracted a bit, judging by the diffusement of the recording of where the electrons are ‘hitting.’ Hmmm… maybe the electrons are traveling in waves, and not like pellets. Let’s try two slits.

  3. When we put up two slits for the ‘stream’ to pass through, we now record that the hits show an interference pattern. So yes, the stream is a wave, but they lare anding like particles. That’s odd. Which is it? Let’s just shoot one at a time.

  4. We shoot one particle. We know it’s one particle because with any less energy, nothing comes out (there are no hits) and with too much energy, we get more than one ‘hits.’ So, just one particle at a time. Hmmm… it’s landing randomly, not in the same place. And over a long period of time, we see a pattern in the landings: it’s the same pattern of interference as if we were shooting out many at the same time and they were interfering with each other. But, we only shot out one at a time… what was it interfering with? Itself?

Conclusion: The electrons were acting like particles in some cases and waves in others. We even have one particle acting like two simultaneous waves. Therefore we can conclude:

Electrons are neither waves nor particles. They are not like anything we know of in our large, macroscopic world. We only have mathematical descriptions of their movements which deal with probabistic existences of particle-like entities smeared out into waves of probabilistic energy, which is unlike anything we experience in normal life.

Luckily for us, when enough of them get together, their probabilties combine and reinforce eachother into acting like stable, non-probabilistic forms of energy and matter at the macroscopic level.

Peace.

“I’m holding pure energy in one of my hands, guess which one.”