Ok, so I am driving down a two-lane road and I see another car coming down the road in the other lane. If I at the last second swerve in to the other lane and head directly at the other car and this other car does not have time to get out of the way, is there a chance that I will drive right through this other car? It is my understanding that the probability of doing this is extremely low, but is not zero. So is it possible that my car and everything inside it will pass through the other car and everything inside it?
If you’re speaking of quantum tunnelling, and I believe that you are, then yes, there is a very very very very small probability that your car will pass unfettered through the other one. I don’t know the exact probability, but I suspect it would be orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed before this might reasonably be expected to occur.
Wouldn’t the chance have something to do with the amount of matter that the two cars are comprised of? My knowledge of quantum physics is all-around very limited
Whoa, I’ve never heard of this before. Could someone please elaborate?
It’s a bit complex, but in a nutshell, it’s called quantum tunneling. When a particle strikes a barrier, there is a small, but real, probability of it appearing on the other side of it. The more massive a particle is, the less likely this is to occur. since we can, according to quantum theory, consider a car to be a VERY large particle, the chance of this happening is nearly, but not quite, zero.
Try reading From the Corner of His Eye by dean koontz for a very fictitious and novelized explanation. For more technical reading… ummm… Lothar Schäfer/Schaefer (how does he spell it?) is the only author I can remember who writes about it in a non-fiction POV… there are definitely others… ::Cues QED::