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One of the most amazing facts
in physics is this:
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everything in the universe, from light
to electrons to atoms,
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behaves like both a particle and a wave
at the same time.
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All of the other weird stuff you might
have heard about quantum physics,
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Schrodinger's Cat, God playing dice,
spooky action at a distance,
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all of it follows directly from the fact
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that everything has both
particle and wave nature.
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This might sound crazy.
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If you look around, you'll see waves
in water and particles of rock,
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and they're nothing alike.
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So why would you think to combine them?
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Physicists didn't just decide to mash
these things together out of no where.
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Rather, they were led to
the dual nature of the universe
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through a process of small steps,
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fitting together lots of bits of evidence,
like pieces in a puzzle.
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The first person to seriously
suggest the dual nature of light
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was Albert Einstein in 1905,
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but he was picking up an
earlier idea from Max Planck.
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Planck explained the colors of light
emitted by hot objects,
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like the filament in a light bulb,
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but to do it, he needed a desperate trick:
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he said the object was
made up of oscillators
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that could only emit light
in discrete chunks,
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units of energy that depend on
the frequency of the light.
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Planck was never really happy with this,
but Einstein picked it up and ran with it.
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He applied Planck's idea to light itself,
saying that light,
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which everybody knew was a wave,
is really a stream of photons,
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each with a discrete amount of energy.
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Einstein himself called this
the only truly revolutionary thing he did,
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but it explains the way light shining on
a metal surface knocks loose electrons.
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Even people who hated the idea
had to agree that it works brilliantly.
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The next puzzle piece came from
Ernest Rutherford in England.
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In 1909, Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger,
working for Rutherford,
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shot alpha particles at gold atoms
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and were stunned to find that some
bounced straight backwards.
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This showed that most of the mass of the
atom is concentrated in a tiny nucleus.
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The cartoon atom you learn
in grade school,
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with electrons orbiting
like a miniature solar system,
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that's Rutherford's.
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There's one little problem with
Rutherford's atom: it can't work.
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Classical physics tells us
that an electron
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whipping around in a circle emits light,
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and we use this all the time
to generate radio waves and X-rays.
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Rutherford's atoms should spray X-rays
in all directions for a brief instant
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before the electron spirals in
to crash into the nucleus.
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But Niels Bohr, a Danish theoretical
physicist working with Rutherford,
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pointed out that atoms obviously exist,
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so maybe the rules of physics
needed to change.
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Bohr proposed that an electron
in certain special orbits
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doesn't emit any light at all.
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Atoms absorb and emit light
only when electrons change orbits,
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and the frequency of the light
depends on the energy difference
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in just the way Planck
and Einstein introduced.
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Bohr's atom fixes Rutherford's problem
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and explains why atoms emit only
very specific colors of light.
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Each element has its own special orbits,
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and thus its own unique
set of frequencies.
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The Bohr model has one tiny problem:
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there's no reason for
those orbits to be special.
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But Louis de Broglie,
a French PhD student,
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brought everything full circle.
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He pointed out that if light,
which everyone knew is a wave,
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behaves like a particle,
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maybe the electron,
which everyone knew is a particle,
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behaves like a wave.
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And if electrons are waves,
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it's easy to explain Bohr's rule
for picking out the special orbits.
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Once you have the idea that
electrons behave like waves,
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you can go look for it.
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And within a few years,
scientists in the US and UK
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had observed wave behavior from electrons.
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These days we have a wonderfully clear
demonstration of this:
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shooting single electrons at a barrier
with slits cut in it.
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Each electron is detected
at a specific place at a specific time,
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like a particle.
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But when you repeat the experiment
many times,
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all the individual electrons trace out
a pattern of stripes,
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characteristic of wave behavior.
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The idea that particles behave like waves,
and vice versa,
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is one of the strangest
and most powerful in physics.
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Richard Feynman famously said
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that this illustrates the central mystery
of quantum mechanics.
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Everything else follows from this,
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like pieces of a puzzle
falling into place.