Yet as a whole they bear the hallmark of waves, forming an interference pattern. The individual particles hit the back screen one at a time as expected. If anything, they should just form two slit-shaped lines on the back screen. You wouldn’t expect the same pattern if you replaced a constant beam of light with electrons or any other particles fired one at a time. It is an interference pattern – a clear sign light is a wave. The resulting stripy pattern on the back screen is telling. The spreading light intermingles before hitting the second screen. When you do this, the light emerging from the slits spreads. Behind the screen sits a second one which can detect where the light that made it through the slits ends up. The experiment involves firing light at a screen containing two slits. It was the first evidence to prove light is a wave. In the early 19th century, Thomas Young carried out the forerunner to this test. The clearest evidence comes from the classic double slit experiment. Without laser light there would be no internet and no global telecommunications.īut what does wave–particle duality mean? Are fundamental particles like electrons really also waves and vice versa? If you go by decades of experimental results, the answer is typically quantum: yes and no. Among many other uses, lasers are the light sources that send messages down fibre optic cables. Similarly, describing light not as a familiar wave but as a particle – the photon – has given us the laser.
And packing millions of these transistors together builds the computer chip powering your phone and laptop.
Stacking this silicon up makes transistors on the nanometre scale. Being able to describe electrons as waves allows us to understand the electrical properties of silicon. This states that every particle may be partly described in terms of not only particle behaviour, but also wave behaviour. Let's look at the quantum phenomenon of wave–particle duality as an example. What is quantum mechanics? Why we replaced our view of the solid universe with uncertainties, split identities and bizarre behaviour
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