Seriously, the more I think I may understand, the less I really do.
Take this:
“A good working definition of quantum mechanics is that things are the exact opposite of what you thought they were. Empty space is full, particles are waves, and cats can be both alive and dead at the same time.”
So here we have, lets see
antitunneling
idealized assumptions
profit (?)
Idealized assumptions? What the hell are they supposed to be? And take this sentence which seems to be taken straight from the hitch-hiker trilogy
“In tunneling, the particle can do something the ball never does. Conversely, the particle might not do something the ball always does.”
What does that actually mean? Man, here I am, brain the size of a (minor) universe, and the more I try to educate myself, the less I understand.
Yes. Speaking as someone who is studying various aspects of quantum mechanics in two classes this semester, this shit is unfathomably weird. We are, obviously, used to thinking about things in terms of classical mechanics, which has no bearing whatsoever on the quantum world.
The thing that really bothers me is…you put a huge number of quantum particles together, and you get macroscopic stuff, which…follows the rules of classical mechanics.
To try to take a stab at answering your question…it means we can’t predict what the particle is going to do, because quantum particles (sometimes) don’t behave like particles but rather waves, but they’re waves that tend to stop being waves if we actually measure them as waves*. We can’t really pinpoint where exactly the particle/wave is, but we can get a general idea. The catch is, the greater certainty we have about where a particle is, the less certainty we have about what it’s doing and where it’s going.
Why? Hell if I know.
*I could be misunderstanding this, so please don’t take my word for it.
Whoever wrote that could have phrased it a lot better.
“Tunneling” means, roughly, if a particle runs into a wall there’s a chance it will pass through the wall instead of bouncing off. (By “wall” I really many “potential barrier”, but “wall” gives the general idea.)
Incidentally, a lot of the seemingly weird aspects of quantum mechanics only seem really weird if you’re still picturing the quantum particles as little classical billiard balls. If you think of them as more like waves, it’s not so weird. Superposition, interference, diffraction, even an uncertainty principle . . . all of these occur even in classical (i.e., non-quantum) wave mechanics.
Other aspects like indistinguishable particles, nonlocality, and the measurement problem are just plain weird, as far as I can tell.
I advocate just getting the whole wave/particle thing out of your head – a lot of confusion about QM seems to stem from the idea that a particle is a wave, except when it’s not, or the other way 'round, when it really is neither: it’s a quantum object. There’s no reason to expect it to either behave like a wave or a particle; instead, we should expect it to behave like a quantum object, which it does very nicely.
Conversely, ‘anti-tunneling’ means roughly that when a particle encounters a ‘valley’, it may be reflected at the edge instead of rolling into it. Although I may be missing something in the article, since that doesn’t strike me as a very deep or even new discovery at all…
