E-raamat: Through Two Doors at Once

The award-winning author of The Man Who Wasnt There traces the story of the double-slit experiment that demonstrated how a sunbeam split into two paths and challenged 19th-century understandings about light and the nature of reality, triggering debates that continue today. Its the story of quantum mechanics told through the lens of the double-slit experiment, showing how light passing through two slits cut into a cardboard sheet first challenged our understanding of light and the nature of reality almost two hundred years ago--and continues to do so-- Traces the story of the double-slit experiment that demonstrated how a sunbeam split into two paths, which challenged nineteenth-century understandings about light and the nature of reality, triggering debates that continue today. The intellectual adventure story of the double-slit experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost 200 years later.Many of the greatest scientific minds have grappled with this experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newtons view that light is made of particles. But then Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles. Quantum mechanics was born. This led to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality--subatomic bits of matter and its interaction with light--again as revealed by the double-slit experiment. Richard Feynman held that it embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe.How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality, as the textbook Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to suggest? How can particles influence each other faster than the speed of light? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if theres no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double-slit?Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.