Hey guys. I think I have portrayed to you already that Quantum Physics is really strange. As in, not even quantum physicists understand it. Particles disappear and reappear through apparently solid barriers; particles and waves are interchangeable and zombie-living cats apparently exist (don’t worry, none of them have escaped into the world…yet). So welcome to another edition of: Quantum Physics is weird brought to you by The Aftermatter.

Today, we are going to be talking about electrons. The little charged guys that wizz around the atom and lead to the properties of ever material we will ever see:

Schrödinger’s cat is one of the most famous physics thought experiments. In this post, I will explain what the thought experiment is, the weird phenomenon it seeks to express and the origins of it.

So lets start with what Schrödinger’s cat really is. Erwin Schrödinger was a fantastic physicist in the 20th century. His influence spread across numerous fields, but he is best known for his work in quantum mechanics, even forming a whole new part, involving waves and which spawned the second most famous physical idea with his name associated with it, Schrödinger’s wave equation. But that isn’t what we are talking about today. Quantum physics is a very strange subject, we have talked about it before so I’m not going to go into much detail, but because of its complexity, there are many ways to interpret it. At Schrödinger’s time, the most popular was something called the Copenhagen interpretation.

The universe is made of matter. Everything we see is matter. All we touch, smell and feel is matter. I’ve talked before about how matter is only 8% of all the stuff in our universe, but this week I’m going down a different route. Have you ever heard of antimatter? Well, antimatter makes up a fraction of a percent of all the stuff in the universe. However, it shouldn’t, in fact, there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter, but there isn’t. So what is going on here?

Firstly, lets define some things. What is matter? This, surprising, is pretty tricky to define. Matter is the name we give to parts of space with properties such as mass, in other words particles. However, not all particles are matter, and here we can describe antimatter.

This week, we asked you to tweet us or send us a message on Facebook with questions you had about physics and maths. They could be anything, a term you had heard someone use before and didn’t understand or just something that had been puzzling you. You guys sent us a load and today we are going to answer some of them. Please keep the questions coming as we will continue to do question posts from time to time.

What is Quantum Physics?

(Asked by: Olivia Astles)

This seems to be a very common question when I tell people that I am interested in, and write a blog about, physics. Most people are familiar with the most basic physics. You drop something and it falls is an easy example we can give of physics in action, but once we add a fancy adjective, no one seems to have any idea. So let me give you the short and simple answer, before I go and tell you the long, complicated and definitely the more exciting one: Quantum Physics is the study of small things. Really it is called Quantum Mechanics, because it is the study, no not of small mechanics, but of the movement of small things. But isn’t the movement of small things pretty much the same as the movement of large things? If I throw a table-tennis ball, it will fall to the ground in the same way as a football would, after all.

So in school you learn atoms are the smallest particles, but then you find out that this can be broken down into protons, neutrons and electrons. However even those can be broken down further, but to what?

We live in an age where development in particle physics is powering along. Facilities like the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Switzerland, are, as I write, colliding Protons together and analyzing the particles that are produced. So what are the looking for? Well firstly lets get a sense of scale. In the full stop at the end of this sentence, there are 7.5 trillion atoms. 99.9999999999999% of atoms are just empty space, so the particles we are going to be looking at can be 10^-20 meters small, so small in fact that we cannot even imagine being able to see them individually in a microscope for years. So now that we know that lets move onto the particles:

Neutrinos going faster than the speed of light? Is it possible and, if it is true, what are the implications?