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An Electron in the Mirror

Giovanni Merola, Francesca Camilla Petrocelli

Published Jan 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An Electron in the Mirror It was a morning in the microcosm of subatomic particles and a small electron woke up in a corner of the universe. Looking in the mirror, he saw just an empty reflection. His mind was full of questions “Who am I?”, and “What am I made of?”. “How do others see me in this vast world of particles?”. The electron felt lonely, a tiny particle among many others, apparently without any distinctive features. As he was meditating on his existence, an unexpected friend appeared: the photon. Being, as usual, bright and lively, he immediately noticed the gloomy mood of the electron. “Ele, why are you so sad?”, the photon asked, enlightening the surrounding environment with his bright light. “Don’t worry, I’m on it!” The photon gathered all of his energy and, with a spark of bright light, transferred part of his vitality to the electron. The electron was immediately filled with an overwhelming energy, similar to a rocket just launched into orbit. He quickly lifted up, surpassing other particles around him. As he was going up, the electron felt light-hearted, free, and full of life but, at a certain point, the force of attraction toward the nucleus prevailed and the electron started to fall back. However, this fall was not ordinary. It was as if he was sliding down a celestial descent, leaving behind a bright, green, and iridescent glow. While the electron was floating in space, he started to perceive a strange duality. He felt now diffused, as a wave of energy extending in all directions and then absorbed and contained, as a bright spot in a vast subatomic sky. Subsequently, like a green-colored comet, the electron landed gently in front of the mirror. He looked at himself, but now he saw a completely different reflection. It was a sparkling entity, a blaze of colors that radiated in every direction. “Wow!”, the electron exclaimed, still stunned by the transformation. “Thanks, my dear friend, I could never imagine I would be able to be so bright and vibrant.”. The photon smiled, glad to have brought joy to his friend. “ Remember, Ele, we are all connected in this subatomic universe”. Each particle has its uniqueness, its property to share with the others: “My dear friend”, the electron asked the photon, “Who am I, actually? Am I a spreading wave or a focused point?”. The photon replied: “Ele, like me, you are both. We particles are a wave and a point at the same time, and this duality is part of our quantum nature. Our existence is a dance between a wave-corpuscle dualism and it is exactly this duality that makes us special”. The electron reflected upon these words as he continued his subatomic dance. Now, he could spread like a wave, interacting with the other particles in a more subtle way, but at the same time, he was able to focus on a point, intensely affecting the environment. The understanding of this duality added a new dimension to his existence and the electron felt even more connected to the essence of the subatomic world. He danced between these dualities, embracing his quantum nature with grace and curiosity. The photon smiled, observing the electron moving through his new awareness: “You see, Ele, your essence is like a quantum symphony, a melody of waves and particles that intertwine harmoniously. Accept your duality and continue to shine in your uniqueness. Thus, the electron continued his dance in the microcosm, bringing with him the awareness of his quantum duality. Wave and particle, light and matter, the small electron became a harmonious expression of the complexity underlying the subatomic world.

DOI
10.1002/chemv.202400027

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The Quantum theory deals with the microscopic structure of the Universe that describes the finer details of nature at the subatomic domain.To a physicist, quantum mechanics is one of the three great pillars supporting our intuition of evocative, bewildering and fascinating natural World as we continuously struggle with the inescapable strangeness of the subatomic domain as if something strange is always afoot.It is well accepted fact that quantum mechanics is a physical theory that describes the way things behave at subatomic level which is quite dazzling in its precision and explanatory power.A test of quantum electrodynamics, the oldest and best understood of the modern quantum theory that involves measuring the way an electron behaves in the vicinity of a magnetic force. Many of the technological and social changes that have revolutionized our lives have actually risen out of the fundamental theoretical research carried out with only motivation to understand the World in a better way than ever. For example, the invention of transistor actually came with the fundamental theoretical research on the Uncertainty Principle which states that the uncertainty of the position of a particle times the uncertainty of its velocity is always a constant. If we double the certainty of the position of the particle, we have to make half the certainty of its velocity and vice versa. Quantum theory is perhaps the prime example of the infinitely esoteric in the sense that it describes a World in which a particle really can be in several places at once and it moves from one place to another by exploring the entire Universe simultaneously-the theory of simultaneity. The diverse and complex Universe is actually made of a few tiny particles according to the rules of quantum theory which is so simple that can be summarized on the back of an envelope. The more we understand about the elemental nature of the Universe, the simpler it looks. We have already discovered that everything in the diverse and complex Universe is nothing but the different assemblies of atoms, and the wide variety of atoms are constructed using the three building blocks at the sub-atomic domain i.e. subatomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. We have also discovered that protons and neutrons ate made up of combination of three entities called quarks. And that is where things stop as far as recent discovery is concerned. But the recent progress in particle physics inspiring the quest for the ultimate unified theory of physics that can describe everything in the Universe in one go. The discovery of Boson particle certainty will revolutionaries the Newton's mass concept and gravity into whole new looks. To an optimistic point of view, we must hope the best out of the progress in physics.
In the context of this book, composed of a series of quantum and artistic reflections, the concept of mirroring plays a unique role. Quantum mirroring, viewed through an artistic lens, carries a poetic yet complex simplicity. Like many quantum phenomena, it reignites curiosity about how we as humans engage with the world. The phenomenon occurs when an electron or photon sees itself reflected in the mirror-like surface of mercury. 1 The self-awareness of a submolecular particle continues the theme of the dual-slit experiment. In this case, we encounter a form of narcissism at the quantum level. We’ve already touched on the flâneur, but now we turn to the electron or photon, which, once observed, changes from a wave to a particle. However, when it appears as a reflection in mercury, it creates a constant oscillation between wave and particle duality.
Anatomy of an atom In the second half of my story, the three strands of relativity, quantization and symmetry will be braided together. Before we embark on this journey, let us take a rest and consider some ways in which the properties of the small-scale quantum world govern our world at large. Most people wonder about the relevance of subatomic studies for our understanding of ourselves. Quite a few popular accounts of particle physics contain a heavy dose of reflections upon Larger Issues and related Deep Thoughts. I will try to avoid that, but it cannot be denied that the connections between the subatomic scale and our daily world are strong and direct, albeit invisible to our large-scale senses. Let us first consider atoms, the building blocks that have the most direct significance in our daily lives (in the remaining chapters we will discuss the structure of the particles of which atoms are made). For simplicity and definiteness, and because we have encountered it in previous discussions, I will mainly speak of the hydrogen atom. Its nucleus is a proton, having one unit of positive electric charge. A neutral hydrogen atom is formed when an electron, bearing one negative unit of electric charge, binds to it. The binding makes the atom electrically neutral.
1.1 Waves and particles in quantum mechanics In spite of the fact that the extraordinary progress of experimental techniques make us able to manipulate at will systems made of any small and well defined number of atoms, electrons and photons making therefore possible the actual performance of the gedankenexperimente that Einstein and Bohr had imagined to support their opposite views on the physical properties of the wavelike/particlelike objects (quantons) of the quantum world it does not seem that, after more than eighty years, a unanimous consensus has been reached in the physicist's community on how to understand their strange properties. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether Feynman would still insist in maintaining his famous sentence It is fair to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. We can only discuss if, almost thirty years after his death, some progress towards this goal has been made. I believe that this is the case. I will show in fact that, by following the suggestions of Feynman himself, some clarification of the old puzzles can be achieved. This chapter therefore by no means is intended to provide an impartial review of the present status of the question but is focused on the exposure of the results of more than twenty years of research of my group in Rome, which in my opinion provide a possible way of connecting together at the same time the random nature of the events at the atomic level of reality and the completeness of their probabilistic representation by the principles of Quantum Mechanics.
Story/Game Duality At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: waves and particles were the same thing, both manifestations of a singular phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite as well as we had thought.
At the atomic scale, the distinction between particles and waves breaks down. The realization, early in the twentieth century, that light consists of discrete packages, or “photons,” prompted the converse suggestion that particles could behave like waves. Confirmation of this idea came in 1927, from an experiment involving the scattering of electrons from a crystal. Today, “wave-particle duality” is central to quantum mechanics, and the wave properties of subatomic particles are widely used in microscopy and crystallography. Electron diffraction techniques are widely used to characterize atomic arrangements on solid surfaces and inside thin films, and to investigate the structures of molecules in gases. The dual nature of waves and particles is part of the “spookiness” of quantum mechanics, which cannot be explained in any classical way. It used to be that one could only imagine an experiment that would simultaneously demonstrate the particle and wave nature of electrons.