“Do quantum thingies follow the same rules that birds do, Uncle Sy?”

“Mostly not, Teena.  Some quantum rules are simple, others are complicated and many are weird.”

“Tell me a simple one and a weird one.”

“Hm… the Principle of Correspondence is simple.  It says if you’ve got a lot of quantum things acting together, the whole mishmash acts by the same rules that a regular-sized thing that size would follow.  If all those birds flew in every direction there’s no flock to talk about, but if they fly by flock rules we can talk about how wind affects the flock’s motion.”

“It’s a murmuration, Uncle Sy.”

“Correction noted, Sweetie.”

“Now tell me a weird one.”

“There’s the rule that a quantum thing acts like it’s in a specific place when you look at it but it’s spread out when you’re not looking.”

“Kittie does that!  She’s never where you look for her.”

“Mm, that’s kind of in the other direction.  We see quantum particles in specific somewheres, not specific nowheres.  The rule is called wave-particle duality and people have been trying to figure out how it works for a hundred years.  Let’s try this.  Put your thumb and forefinger up to your eye and look between them at the blue sky.  Hold your fingers very close together but don’t let them touch.  What do you see?”

“Ooo, there’s stripes in between!  It looks like my finger’s going right into my thumb, but I can feel they’re not touching.  Hey, it works with my other fingers, too, but it hurts if I try it with my pinkie.”

“Then don’t do it with your pinkie, silly.  The stripes are called ‘interference’ and only waves do that.  You’ve watched how water waves go up and down, right?”

“Sure!”

“When the high part of one wave meets the low part of another wave, what happens?”

“I guess high and low make middle.”

“Good guess, that’s exactly right.  That little teeny space between your fingers lets through only certain waves.  You see light where the highs and lows are, dark where the waves middle out.”

“So light’s made out of waves, huh?”

“Well, except that scientists have done lots of experiments where light behaves like it’s made out of little particles called photons.  The funny thing is, light always acts like a wave when it’s traveling from one place to another, but at both ends of the trip it always acts like photons.  That’s the big mystery — how does it do that?”

“You know how it works, don’tcha, Uncle Sy?”

“Only kinda sorta, Teena.  I think it has to do with the idea of big things made out of little things made out of littler things.  Einstein — wait, you know who Einstein was, right?”

“He was the famous scientist with the big hair.”

“That’s right.  He and another scientist had a big debate over 80 years ago.  The other scientist said that when quantum things make patterns, like those stripes you’re looking at, the patterns are all we can know about them.  Einstein said that there has to be something deeper down that drives the patterns.”

“Who won the debate?”

“At the time most people thought that the other man had, but philosophies change.  Since that time lots of people have followed Einstein’s thinking.  Some of the theories are pretty silly, I think, but I’m betting on birds made out of birds.”

“That’s silly, too, Uncle Sy.”

“Maybe, maybe not, we’ll see some day.  It starts with what you might call ‘the smallness quantum,’ though it’s also called ‘the Planck length‘ after Mr Planck who helped invent quantum mechanics.  The Planck length is awesomely small.  It’s as much smaller than us as we are smaller than the whole universe.”

“But there’s lots of things bigger than we are.”

“Exactly.  We’re smaller than whales, they’re smaller than planets, planets are smaller than suns, and galaxies, and on up.  But we don’t know near as many size scales in the other direction – us and bacteria and atoms and protons and that’s about it.  I think there’s plenty of room down there for structures and chaos we’ve not thought of yet.”

“Like birds in murmurations.”

“Mm-hmm.”

~~ Rich Olcott