What If You Entered The Quantum Realm? | Unveiled

What If You Entered the Quantum Realm?

It’s a popular theme in film and TV sci-fi, usually painted as some sort of psychedelic world. But is that how it really works? What’s actually going on at the quantum level? This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if you entered the quantum realm? To understand the general strangeness of quantum mechanics we first need to think about light. Scientists were long baffled by light, unable to decide whether it was made up of waves or particles. Isaac Newton was one of the earliest to claim that light was made of particles, but countless others sought to prove that light had wave-like properties too… until Albert Einstein finally laid the matter to rest in the early 1900s, showing that light was both a wave (spreading in all directions) and a particle (moving in one). That light was measured in tiny pockets of energy called Quanta or, today, photons. But it only became stranger from there. Despite Einstein himself reportedly remaining sceptical about the theory, quantum mechanics - analysing subatomic particles - was born out of these new schools of thought. Einstein’s issue with quantum theory was that he believed the world should be objective and, in some way, predictable and observable. But, when we zoom into the quantum realm, it’s full of crazy, strange phenomena that look as if they have no place in science at all. Here, all of our preconceived notions of what’s real and possible, the known laws of regular, classical mechanics, fall apart. In quantum mechanics everything exists in a cloud of probabilities, operating as though within a constant “what if?” hypothetical. Particles spin in two directions at the same time. Matter passes through solid barriers like a ghost. Two particles become entangled and their fates are then entwined. They could theoretically wind up on opposite sides of the universe, but they’d still somehow communicate instantly. Even temperature behaves in different ways, leaving cold spots where standard thermodynamics says there should be heat. One thing is certain; you would have to be incredibly small to enter such a place. Scientists distinguish something as quantum when it’s at it’s very smallest part, with distances in the quantum realm typically measuring less than 100 nanometers - with a nanometer equalling one billionth of a meter. Beyond that, it’s almost impossible to predict what the quantum realm would specifically look like. At this size, all objects lose any sense of shape. You’d exist amongst blurry, blobbish atoms and particles, drifting through infinitely vast expanses of apparent emptiness - so, in some ways, it’d feel as though you’d been abandoned in an exceptionally weird stretch of outer space. Crucially, the particles that do cross your path would seem to flash in and out of existence. They’d solidify only when you looked at them and exist like a shadow in the corner of your eye whenever you glanced away. In this way, quantum physics feeds into philosophical debate, seeming to redefine the relationship between matter and people. Schrodinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger about Quantum theory. It posits that there’s a cat in a sealed box, with a vial of poison that’s set to randomly release at any time, killing the cat when it does. From our position outside the box, we can’t know whether the poison has been released yet, and so don’t know the cat’s fate. But, quantum mechanics says the cat is both alive and dead, much as a quantum particle is real and isn’t, and it’s only when we look inside the box that the reality will be confirmed. Another study proved something similar with light itself; the Double-slit experiment. Using a screen with two vertical slits cut into it, and shining light onto a canvas behind, scientists found an expected wave-like pattern with bright and dim strips. But, when they isolated the particles so that just a single photon passed through the slits at any one time, impossibly it still produced wave-like behaviour. But then, right when testers set up a detector to actually see how this was happening, the screen changed again, and the light started acting like a particle. More broadly speaking, the universe acts in one way, but right when we observe it, it somehow changes - so what we see could seriously be considered “an illusion”. And this would be happening all the time could we view the universe at quantum level. If the quantum realm somehow leaked into our everyday life, it clearly wouldn’t follow the traditional laws of nature or even basic logic. Your very presence and perspective would constantly influence the behaviour of everything you could comprehend. It’d be as though you had a piece of pizza with every topping imaginable all at the same time, but right when you decide you want pepperoni, it becomes pepperoni. Or as though you’d forgotten where you parked your car; the car would then exist as a cloud of probability, simultaneously being in every space that you could think of, and only choosing where it actually was when you began looking. So, in the quantum realm, everything would be constantly shifting, only settling into place when you actually observe it. In fact, even your own body would effectively scatter across all of existence until you actually looked down to view it - despite that being impossible in our own reality. Say you yourself were a quantum particle, though. There’s a high - even inevitable - chance that you’d get yourself entangled with someone else by merely bumping into each other, just as particles do. Actions then performed by that other “particle person” would affect your own experience, and decisions would suddenly be split between the both of you. In effect, if you decided to bike to work, your entangled partner would choose to drive. If you went to bed early, they’d stay up all night. If you span clockwise, they’d spin counter-clockwise. Were you to enter the quantum realm but retain knowledge of your past life as a full-size person, life would undoubtedly be tricky - if not impossible - to get used to. You could never be certain about anything, but could also be certain about everything, safe in the knowledge that nature responds to your own observations. Convince yourself you adopted a puppy, and you might just find one pawing at your feet. Believe you can walk through a wall, and you will. Hey, you might even be able to teleport. You, like all the particles around you, now exist in all possible places at once… So, if you close your eyes and picture yourself on a desert island, you’d feasibly end up there. It’d be a unique, colourful and endless chaos crammed with apparently impossible phenomena, to the point where you’d be asking yourself what’s real, or if real even exists anymore. And that’s what would happen if you entered the quantum realm.