Quantum Misconceptions 1

Quantum Mechanical Misconceptions

Nicholas Brown

Research Mrs. Graves January 26, 2014

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What I Already Knew/What I Want to Know In elementary/middle school, you were probably taught that is a string of words that has been uttered by my science teachers far too often. The problem is not those words alone, but the statements that come after them. They tend to send the message, what you have been taught up to this point is wrong and what is say now is what you should believe is true. I always got rather annoyed thinking about this and the fact that I am taught oversimplified and even false information as a child, just to make class easier for my teacher for a day or two. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this must happen a lot in school. The curriculum in science classes must be confusing to students at times given that it tends to be many new topics to its audience, so topics that overlap with other subjects must be hard to fully teach without first teaching the basics of the other subject. Occasionally, this can be solved with an overnight reading of some background research. Sometimes, when small topics of a complex subject seep into beginner topics, such as in the case of quantum mechanics being part of some physical science teachings in primary schools, teachers must bend some of the concepts for simplicity sake. Since I hope to one day go into the field of quantum mechanics, which has shown to be a complex and often confusing topic, I figured that there are probably some misconceptions in the field of quantum mechanics that I should get to the bottom of. Going into this research, I had to have a mindset that involved knowing two things. The first was that quantum mechanics are complicated confusing. The second was that everything I knew about quantum mechanics may or may not be true. Once I understood this, I could move on. Since I did not want to go too far in depth on wave functions and the exact mathematics of quantum tunneling, I decided to just go through the same basic questions, but with a few misconceptions. I would find out what the misconception is, what the truth is, and what is the probable cause of the misconception was. I also want to figure out what is the main cause of misconceptions about quantum mechanics. The Story of My Search My search was both very simple and very complicated. It was simple in the sense that the research was not much more than internet research. Originally, it was also going to involve performing an interview with a senior student from my school, but the time and date were not settled upon in time. My intention for the interview was to get some direction for my research. This student had just finished his senior project on particle physics, so I saw him as exactly the source that I needed. I suspected that there were going to be some bumps in the transition between high school level quantum mechanics and that of a college level, bumps being situations similar to the scenario that I described in the beginning. Since I was never able to perform the interview, I was left to use the only other resources left at my disposal within the remaining time: books and Google.

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With something so complicated as quantum mechanics (QM) and so misunderstood as misconceptions, it was no surprise to me when my search led to long hours on the computer surfing the internet. There were two major barriers for me when I was searching for answers to my questions. The first was that, due to the advanced levels of topics that make up QM, it was hard to find reliable sources that presented their information in a way that was comprehensible to me as a 15-year-old student. The second problem was that, because I was looking into common misconceptions, I had to check many sources to make sure that one of them had not fallen victim to the myth. These two complications combined resulted in a lot of commitment to my research.

The Search Results For my first misconception, I choose the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. One of the mythical versions of this claims that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) says that it is impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at a single instant. This is implying that the laws of the universe prohibit simultaneous measurements. Another version that I have heard of is that neither position nor momentum if a single particle at a single instant can be known above a certain degree of precision. This seems to mean that there is a limit on instruments of measurement. I would just like to say that this first myth is complete nonsense when you think about it. Take a wall for example, I can see that it is stationary (motion of 0) and that it is positioned right in front of me. While these measurements are very rough, the momentum and the position of the wall at a single moment were still known. Since the wall is made of particles, these measurements can be applied to the individual particles. So just with my eyes, I was able to, with very low precision albeit, know both the position and the momentum of a particle at a single instant. As to the other myth, this is not what the HUP is. It is possible to precisely know the location of a particle or determine the precise momentum. There are limits to how detailed a measurement can be (i.e. how many decimal places you can have), but these are based on Planks constant (h) and are not directly stated in the HUP. Another thing about these limits is that they do not just limit measurements, but they also limit the number of places matter could exist in a given space. [1] The actual Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle describes the inverse relation between the uncertainty of the measurement of a particle's position and the uncertainty of the measurement of that same particle's momentum at the same instant. The more precise you know one property of a particle; the more uncertain you have to be about the other property of the particle. [2] I suspect that the cause of the first myth is just oversimplification. When the myth is taken in context, the faults are not as obvious. When working at the subatomic level, duel measurements are permitted within parameters, but are much more difficult. Thus measuring one property at a time is much more common. This leads to teaching this myth, instead of the truth,

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being considered acceptable. In addition, the idea of inversely proportional uncertainties is a little hard to understand at a middle school level. The second misconception that I researched was quantum entanglement. Therefore, to get an understanding of the confusion, imagine that two particles are emitted from a source so that they have opposite spins, up and down, but their individual spins are unknown so they are in opposing superpositions, a "relationship" known as quantum entanglement. This means that each particle is considered to have a spin of both up and down until they are measured. When the particles are emitted, they are sent in opposite directions. Since it is known that there is a particle with a spin "up" traveling away from the source at a known speed (light speed if these are photons) but the particle's direction is not known, the particle's path is expressed in a wave function that radiates out from the source. The same is done with the "down" spin particle. Then when one of the particles is measured and found to have a spin "up", the "up" particle wave function collapses. Since it is know that the other particle has the opposite spin, the "down" particle wave function also collapses. This means that a measurement at one point in space caused the collapse of the wave function of a particle that was some distance away instantly. Thus affecting that other particle's spin (that was in a superposition before) faster than the speed of light. [2] Now stop imagining this, because most of the statements made in the previous paragraph are false. This is incorrect and the speed of light is never broken in this situation. There is no action going on between the first particle or any observer of the first particle and the second particle. The collapsing of the "down" particle wave function does not break the speed of light because there is no wave function. A wave function is not a physical thing but a mathematical representation. The measuring of the first particle's spin did not influence the second particle's spin. Each particle only ever had one spin and those spins remained unaltered the whole time. Quantum entanglement is not an interaction in itself. A correlation was created by an interaction that occurred at one point in space and time. [3] The cause of this is lack of understanding, further lack of understanding, and Einstein. The first "lack of understanding" is just general confusion and people not properly understanding what they read. The second reason is that some people, even physicists, do not understand quantum mechanics enough to interpret some of its concepts. When they see that the properties of two particles are "dependent" on one another, they can only see is as some sort of physical interaction going on between the two. This myth is also partly fueled because Albert Einstein uttered the following words when he first saw the correlation between entangled particles: "spooky action at a distance." [2] The media just took it from there. Throughout all of my research on these topics, I noticed that the causes for the misconceptions are not due to rumors so much as they are just people not understanding fully the information. When someone takes in new information, their brain tries to relate it to what they already know. In the case of quantum mechanics, which is often like a foreign language to

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people, they might try to make the information align with classical physics thinking in ways it does not. My Growth as a Researcher Even though my paper was on quantum mechanics (QM), I probably learned just as much (significance wise) about researching as I did about QM. I discovered that if my research plans involve contacting other people in some way (such as an interview), I should expect the worse from people and always have a plan B that does not involve meeting or contacting someone. Another big rule I learned is that I should always check multiple sources. Just because a website has .edu at the end of its homepage URL, it does not mean that everything on that website is 100% true.

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References 1. Hawking S. lecturer. Does god play dice? [Lecture]; 1999. 2. Pickover C. The physics book: from the big bang to quantum resurrection, 250 milestones in the history of physics. New York (NY): Sterling Pub.; 2011 3. Motl L. why quantum entanglement is considered to be active link between particles? In: Stack Exchange: physics [discussion list on the Internet]. 2011 Jan 17, 3:35 pm [cited 2014 Jan 19]; [about 36 lines]. Available from: [Link]