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A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom
sciencehabit writes "Physicists have, for the first time, been able to image the quantum workings of electrons in hydrogen atoms, an advance that could open the door to a deeper understanding of the quantum world (abstract). Building on a 1981 proposal by three Russian theorists and more recent work that brought that proposal into the realm of possibility, the team first fired two lasers at hydrogen atoms inside a chamber, kicking off electrons at speeds and directions that depended on their underlying wave functions. A strong electric field inside the chamber guided the electrons to positions on a planar detector that depended on their initial velocities rather than on their initial positions. So the distribution of electrons striking the detector matched the wave function the electrons had at the moment they left their hydrogen nuclei behind. There may be practical applications in the future—a commentary accompanying the paper suggests that the method could aid in the development of technologies such as molecular wires, atom-thick conductors that could help shrink electronic devices—but that their result concerns 'extremely fundamental' physics that might be just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists."
Pics or it didn't happen!
Burn FAT not OIL
...or it might or might not have happened (or maybe both)
--- Mercutio was right.
Now this would have been a fundamental breakthrough if it would have been done many decades ago. These days, we have extremely high confidence in our theoretical/computational models of the wavefunction of atoms and molecules. "Just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists?" Naah, this stuff has been well-known since before most of us were born.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle this accomplishment - it's all kinds of cool that they pulled off this experiment in the first place, and notwithstanding the huge body of other experimental evidence, it's a beautiful direct confirmation of longstanding quantum mechanics theory. And as mentioned in TFA, provided they can scale this up to larger and less well-understood systems than the hydrogen atom, it might make it possible to obtain unique data on nontrivial materials like molecular wires. The only problem I have is that the Science editor is overselling it a bit; at the end of the day, it's not going to change our quantum mechanical worldview the slightest.
Watch the appearance and disappearance of the big circles in this picture:
http://i.imgur.com/AUXb2N9.gif
If you could only detect the big circles as matter, then matter is created and destroyed, seemingly randomly jumping around according to some probability function. This is what you see in Quantum Physics models.
Not only that, watch the energy flow, sometimes there are 5 big circles, sometimes 1, matter (big circles) is being 'converted' from energy (the flow) to matter and matter to energy all the time. In aggregate there is the same amount of 'matter' and constants flow, but at the quantum level, it converts from one form to another all the time (sometimes matter sometimes energy). Yet the big circles, the matter, aren't there. They're a function of our model of the universe. We defined matter and so the wave function either fits that model or fits energy, and appears to switch between the two states, but in fact it simply fits out model of matter (is a big circle) or fits our model of energy (the flow) but never actually changes its nature at all. It's ALWAYS the flow.
Caesium-133 transitions between two energy states at 9192631770 cycles per second. Why? It's just matter, matter is just some wave function of the flow of stuff. If the stuff was more concentrated, the matter-energy transitions would be faster. Circles would be more frequent and overlap more. The energy transitions would be 'faster'.
It isn't that there's matter, and the concentration of matter distorts space and time, as per General Relativity.
It's that matter is a function of the milling around of the stuff of the universe, and it isn't that time is a function of the milling around of the universe.
Matter is not the cause of the distortion of space time, its a SYMPTOM of the distortion, a wave function in the stuff, the more distorted the universe-stuff is, the more the 'big circles appear' and the more matter there is.
Likewise the transitions from energy to matter, the more distorted and concentrated the stuff is, the more of them there are, the faster the energy transitions, the faster time appears to be. Time is a SYMPTOM of the concentration of stuff, a perceive effect of it.