Lecture 1: Introduction to Superposition - Generated on 18/04/2025 - https://www.anthiago.

com

Lecture 1: Introduction to Superposition

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will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources
for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT
courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. ALLAN ADAMS: Hi everyone.
Welcome to 804 for spring 2013. This is the fourth, and presumably final time that I
will be teaching this class. So I'm pretty excited about it. So my name is Allan Adams.
I'll be lecturing the course. I'm an assistant professor in Course 8. I study string
theory and its applications to gravity, quantum gravity, and condensed matter
physics. Quantum mechanics, this is a course in quantam mechanics. Quantam
mechanics Is my daily language. Quantum mechanics is my old friend. I met
quantum mechanics 20 years ago. I just realized that last night. It was kind of
depressing. So, old friend. It's also my most powerful tool. So I'm pretty psyched
about it. Our recitation instructors are Barton Zwiebach, yea! And Matt Evans-- yea!
Matt's new to the department, so welcome him. Hi. So he just started his faculty
position, which is pretty awesome. And our TA is Paolo Glorioso. Paolo, are you here?
Yea! There you go. OK, so he's the person to send all complaints to. So just out of
curiosity, how many of you all are Course 8? Awesome. How many of you all are, I
don't know, 18? Solid. 6? Excellent. 9? No one? This is the first year we haven't had
anyone Course 9. That's a shame. Last year one of the best students was a Course 9
student. So two practical things to know. The first thing is everything that we put out
will be on the Stellar website. Lecture notes, homeworks, exams, everything is going
to be done through Stellar, including your grades. The second thing is that as you
may notice there are rather more lights than usual. I'm wearing a mic. And there are
these signs up. We're going to be videotaping this course for the lectures for OCW.
And if you're happy with that, cool. If not, just sit on the sides and you won't appear
anywhere on video. Sadly, I can't do that. But you're welcome to if you like. But
hopefully that should not play a meaningful role in any of the lectures. So the goal of
804 is for you to learn quantum mechanics. And by learn quantum mechanics, I don't
mean to learn how to do calculations, although that's an important and critical thing.
I mean learn some intuition. I want you to develop some intuition for quantum
phenomena. Now, quantam mechanics is not hard. It has a reputation for being a
hard topic. It is not a super hard topic. So in particular, everyone in this room, I'm
totally positive, can learn quantum mechanics. It does require concerted effort. It's
not a trivial topic. And in order to really develop a good intuition, the essential thing

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is to solve problems. So the way you develop a new intuition is by solving problems
and by dealing with new situations, new context, new regimes, which is what we're
going to do in 804. It's essential that you work hard on the problem sets. So your job
is to devote yourself to the problem sets. My job is to convince you at the end of
every lecture that the most interesting thing you could possibly do when you leave is
the problem set. So you decide who has the harder job. So the workload is not so
bad. So we have problem sets due, they're due in the physics box in the usual places,
by lecture, by 11 AM sharp on Tuesdays every week. Late work, no, not so much. But
we will drop one problem set to make up for unanticipated events. We'll return the
graded problem sets a week later in recitation. Should be easy. I strongly, strongly
encourage you to collaborate with other students on your problem sets. You will
learn more, they will learn more, it will be more efficient. Work together. However,
write your problem sets yourself. That's the best way for you to develop and test your
understanding. There will be two midterms, dates to be announced, and one final. I
guess we could have multiple, but that would be a little exciting. We're going to use
clickers, and clickers will be required. We're not going to take attendance, but they
will give a small contribution to your overall grade. And we'll use them most
importantly for non-graded but just participation concept questions and the
occasional in class quiz to probe your knowledge. This is mostly so that you have a
real time measure of your own conceptual understanding of the material. This has
been enormously valuable. And something I want to say just right off is that the way
I've organized this class is not so much based on the classes I was taught. It's based
to the degree possible on empirical lessons about what works in teaching, what
actually makes you learn better. And clickers are an excellent example of that. So this
is mostly a standard lecture course, but there will be clickers used. So by next week I
need you all to have clickers, and I need you to register them on the TSG website. I
haven't chosen a specific textbook. And this is discussed on the Stellar web page.
There are a set of textbooks, four textbooks that I strongly recommend, and a set of
others that are nice references. The reason for this is twofold. First off, there are two
languages that are canonically used for quantum mechanics. One is called wave
mechanics, and the language, the mathematical language is partial differential
equations. The other is a matrix mechanics. They have big names. And the language
there is linear algebra. And different books emphasize different aspects and use
different languages. And they also try to aim at different problems. Some books are
aimed towards people who are interested in materials science, some books that are
aimed towards people interested in philosophy. And depending on what you want,

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get the book that's suited to you. And every week I'll be providing with your problem
sets readings from each of the recommended texts. So what I really encourage you
to do is find a group of people to work with every week, and make sure that you've
got all the books covered between you. This'll give you as much access to the texts as
possible without forcing you to buy four books, which I would discourage you from
doing. So finally I guess the last thing to say is if this stuff were totally trivial, you
wouldn't need to be here. So ask questions. If you're confused about something, lots
of other people in the class are also going to be confused. And if I'm not answering
your question without you asking, then no one's getting the point, right? So ask
questions. Don't hesitate to interrupt. Just raise your hand, and I will do my best to
call on you. And this is true for both in lecture, also go to office hours and recitations.
Ask questions. I promise, there's no such thing as a terrible question. Someone else
will also be confused. So it's a very valuable to me and everyone else. So before I get
going on the actual physics content of the class, are there any other practical
questions? Yeah. AUDIENCE: You said there was a lateness policy. ALLAN ADAMS:
Lateness policy. No late work is accepted whatsoever. So the deal is given that every
once in a while, you know, you'll be walking to school and your leg is going to fall off,
or a dog's going to jump out and eat your person standing next to you, whatever.
Things happen. So we will drop your lowest problem set score without any questions.
At the end of the semester, we'll just dropped your lowest score. And if you turn
them all in, great, whatever your lowest score was, fine. If you missed one, then
gone. On the other hand, if you know next week, I'm going to be attacked by a rabid
squirrel, it's going to be horrible, I don't want to have to worry about my problem set.
Could we work this out? So if you know ahead of time, come to us. But you need to
do that well ahead of time. The night before doesn't count. OK? Yeah. AUDIENCE: Will
we be able to watch the videos? ALLAN ADAMS: You know, that's an excellent
question. I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's going to happen at the end of the
semester. Yeah. OK. So no, you'll be able to watch them later on the OCW website.
Other questions. Yeah. AUDIENCE: Are there any other videos that you'd recommend,
just like other courses on YouTube? ALLAN ADAMS: Oh. That's an interesting
question. I don't off the top of my head, but if you send me an email, I'll pursue it.
Because I do know several other lecture series that I like very much, but I don't know
if they're available on YouTube or publicly. So send me an email and I'll check. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So how about the reading assignments? ALLAN ADAMS: Reading
assignments on the problem set every week will be listed. There will be equivalent
reading from every textbook. And if there is something missing, like if no textbook

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covers something, I'll post a separate reading. Every once in a while, I'll post auxiliary
readings, and they'll be available on the Stellar website. So for example, in your
problem set, first one was posted, will be available immediately after lecture on the
Stellar website. There are three papers that it refers to, or two, and they are posted
on the Stellar website and linked from the problem set. Others? OK. So the first
lecture. The content of the physics of the first lecture is relatively standalone. It's
going to be an introduction to a basic idea then is going to haunt, plague, and charm
us through the rest of the semester. The logic of this lecture is based on a very
beautiful discussion in the first few chapters of a book by David Albert called
Quantum Mechanics and Experience. It's a book for philosophers. But the first few
chapters, a really lovely introduction at a non-technical level. And I encourage you to
take a look at them, because they're very lovely. But it's to be sure straight up
physics. Ready? I love this stuff. today I want to describe to you a particular set of
experiments. Now, to my mind, these are the most unsettling experiments ever
done. These experiments involve electrons. They have been performed, and the
results as I will describe them are true. I'm going to focus on two properties of
electrons. I will call them color and hardness. And these are not the technical names.
We'll learn the technical names for these properties later on in the semester. But to
avoid distracting you by preconceived notions of what these things mean, I'm going
to use ambiguous labels, color and hardness. And the empirical fact is that every
electron, every electron that's ever been observed is either black or white and no
other color. We've never seen a blue electron. There are no green electrons. No one
has ever found a fluorescent electron. They're either black, or they are white. It is a
binary property. Secondly, their hardness is either hard or soft. They're never
squishy. No one's ever found one that dribbles. They are either hard, or they are soft.
Binary properties. OK? Now, what I mean by this is that it is possible to build a device
which measures the color and the hardness. In particular, it is possible to build a box,
which I will call a color box, that measures the color. And the way it works is this. It
has three apertures, an in port and two out ports, one which sends out black
electrons and one which sends out white electrons. And the utility of this box is that
the color can be inferred from the position. If you find the particle, the electron over
here, it is a white electron. If you find the electron here, it is a black electron. Cool?
Similarly, we can build a hardness box, which again has three apertures, an in port.
And hard electrons come out this port, and soft electrons come out this port. Now, if
you want, you're free to imagine that these boxes are built by putting a monkey
inside. And you send in an electron, and the monkey, you know, with the ears, looks

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at the electron, and says it's a hard electron, it sends it out one way, or it's a soft
electron, it sends it out the other. The workings inside do not matter. And in
particular, later in the semester I will describe in considerable detail the workings
inside this apparatus. And here's something I want to emphasize to you. It can be
built in principle using monkeys, hyper intelligent monkeys that can see electrons. It
could also be built using magnets and silver atoms. It could be done with neutrons. It
could be done with all sorts of different technologies. And they all give precisely the
same results as I'm about to describe. They all give precisely the same results. So it
does not matter what's inside. But if you want a little idea, you could imagine putting
a monkey inside, a hyper intelligent monkey. I know, it sounds good. So a key
property of these hardness boxes and color boxes is that they are repeatable. And
here's what I mean by that. If I send in an electron, and I find that it comes out of a
color box black, and then I send it in again, then if I send it into another color box, it
comes out black again. So in diagrams, if I send in some random electron to a color
box, and I discover that it comes out, let's say, the white aperture. And so here's dot
dot dot, and I take the ones that come out the white aperture, and I send them into a
color box again. Then with 100% confidence, 100% of the time, the electron coming
out of the white port incident on the color box will come out the white aperture
again. And 0% of the time will it come out the black aperture. So this is a persistent
property. You notice that it's white. You measure it again, it's still white. Do a little bit
later, it's still white. OK? It's a persistent property. Ditto the hardness. If I send in a
bunch of electrons in to a hardness box, here is an important thing. Well, send them
into a hardness box, and I take out the ones that come out soft. And I send them
again into a hardness box, and they come out soft. They will come out soft with 100%
confidence, 100% of the time. Never do they come out the hard aperture. Any
questions at this point? So here's a natural question. Might the color and the
hardness of an electron be related? And more precisely, might they be correlated?
Might knowing the color infer something about the hardness? So for example, so
being male and being a bachelor are correlated properties, because if you're male,
you don't know if you're a bachelor or not, but if you're a bachelor, you're male.
That's the definition of the word. So is it possible that color and hardness are
similarly correlated? So, I don't know, there are lots of good examples, like wearing a
red shirt and beaming down to the surface and making it back to the Enterprise later
after the away team returns. Correlated, right? Negatively, but correlated. So the
question is, suppose, e.g., suppose we know that an electron is white. Does that
determine the hardness? So we can answer this question by using our boxes. So

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here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take some random set of electrons. That's
not random. Random. And I'm going to send them in to a color box. And I'm going to
take the electrons that come out the white aperture. And here's a useful fact. When I
say random, here's operationally what I mean. I take some piece of material, I scrape
it, I pull off some electrons, and they're totally randomly chosen from the material.
And I send them in. If I send a random pile of electrons into a color box, useful thing
to know, they come out about half and half. It's just some random assortment. Some
of them are white, some of them come out black. Suppose I send some random
collection of electrons into a color box. And I take those which come out the white
aperture. And I want to know, does white determine hardness. So I can do that,
check, by then sending these white electrons into a hardness box and seeing what
comes out. Hard, soft. And what we find is that 50% of those electrons incident on
the hardness box come out hard, and 50% come out soft. OK? And ditto if we reverse
this. If we take hardness, and take, for example, a soft electron and send it into a
color box, we again get 50-50. So if you take a white electron, you send it into a
hardness box, you're at even odds, you're at chance as to whether it's going to come
out hard or soft. And similarly, if you send a soft electron into a color box, even odds
it's going to come out black or white. So knowing the hardness does not give you any
information about the color, and knowing the color does not give you any
information about the hardness. cool? These are independent facts, independent
properties. They're not correlated in this sense, in precisely this operational sense.
Cool? Questions? OK. So measuring the color give zero predictive power for the
hardness, and measuring the hardness gives zero predictive power for the color. And
from that, I will say that these properties are correlated. So H, hardness, and color
are in this sense uncorrelated. So using these properties of the color and hardness
boxes, I want to run a few more experiment's. I want to probe these properties of
color and hardness a little more. And in particular, knowing these results allows us to
make predictions, to predict the results for set a very simple experiments. Now, what
we're going to do for the next bit is we're going to run some simple experiments.
And we're going to make predictions. And then those simple experiments are going
to lead us to more complicated experiments. But let's make sure we understand the
simple ones first. So for example, let's take this last experiment, color and hardness,
and let's add a color box. One more monkey. So color in, and we take those that
come out the white aperture. And we send them into a hardness box. Hard, soft. And
we take those electrons which come out the soft aperture. And now let's send these
again into a color box. So it's easy to see what to predict. Black, white. So you can

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imagine a monkey inside this, going, aha. You look at it, you inspect, it comes out
white. Here you look at it and inspect, it comes out soft. And you send it into the color
box, and what do you expect to happen? Well, let's think about the logic here.
Anything reaching the hardness box must have been measured to be white. And we
just did the experiment that if you send a white electron into a hardness box, 50% of
the time it comes out a hard aperture and 50% of the time it comes out the soft
aperture. So now we take that 50% of electrons that comes out the soft aperture,
which had previously been observed to be white and soft. And then we send them
into a color box, and what happens? Well, since colors are repeatable, the natural
expectation is that, of course, it comes out white. So our prediction, our natural
prediction here is that of those electrons that are incident on this color box, 100%
should come out white, and 0% should come out black. That seem like a reasonable--
let's just make sure that we're all agreeing. So let's vote. How many people think this
is probably correct? OK, good. How many people think this probably wrong? OK,
good. That's reassuring. Except you're all wrong. Right? In fact, what happens is half
of these electrons exit white, 50%. And 50% percent exit black. So let's think about
what's going on here. This is really kind of troubling. We've said already that knowing
the color doesn't predict the hardness. And yet, this electron, which was previously
measured to be white, now when subsequently measured sometimes it comes out
white, sometimes it comes out black, 50-50% of the time. So that's surprising. What
that tells you is you can't think of the electron as a little ball that has black and soft
written on it, right? You can't, because apparently that black and soft isn't a
persistent thing, although it's persistent in the sense that once it's black, it stays
black. So what's going on here? Now, I should emphasize that the same thing
happens if I had changed this to taking the black electrons and throwing in a
hardness and picking soft and then measuring the color, or if I had used the hard
electrons. Any of those combinations, any of these ports would have given the same
results, 50-50. Is not persistent in this sense. Apparently the presence of the
hardness box tampers with the color somehow. So it's not quite as trivial is that
hyper intelligent monkey. Something else is going on here. So this is suspicious. So
here's the first natural move. The first natural move is, oh, look, surely there's some
additional property of the electron that we just haven't measured yet that
determines whether it comes out the second color box black or white. There's got be
some property that determines this. And so people have spent a tremendous amount
of time and energy looking at these initial electrons and looking with great care to
see whether there's any sort of feature of these incident electrons which determines

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which port they come out of. And the shocker is no one's ever found such a property.
No one has ever found a property which determines which port it comes out of. As
far as we can tell, it is completely random. Those that flip and those that don't are
indistinguishable at beginning. And let me just emphasize, if anyone found such a--
it's not like we're not looking, right? If anyone found such a property, fame, notoriety,
subverting quantum mechanics, Nobel Prize. People have looked. And there is none
that anyone's been able to find. And as we'll see later on, using Bell's inequality, we
can more or less nail that such things don't exist, such a fact doesn't exist. But this
tells us something really disturbing. This tells us, and this is the first real shocker, that
there is something intrinsically unpredictable, non-deterministic, and random about
physical processes that we observe in a laboratory. There's no way to determine a
priori whether it will come out black or white from the second box. Probability in this
experiment, it's forced upon us by observations. OK, well, there's another way to
come at this. You could say, look, you ran this experiment, that's fine. But look, I've
met the guy who built these boxes, and look, he's just some guy, right? And he just
didn't do a very good job. The boxes are just badly built. So here's the way to defeat
that argument. No, we've built these things out of different materials, using different
technologies, using electrons, using neutrons, using bucky-balls, C60, seriously, it's
been done. We've done this experiment, and this property does not change. It is
persistent. And the thing that's most upsetting to me is that not only do we get the
same results independent of what objects we use to run the experiment, we cannot
change the probability away from 50-50 at all. Within experimental tolerances, we
cannot change, no matter how we build the boxes, we cannot change the probability
by part in 100. 50-50. And to anyone who grew up with determinism from Newton,
this should hurt. This should feel wrong. But it's a property of the real world. And our
job is going to be to deal with it. Rather, your job is going to be to deal with it,
because I went through this already. So here's a curious consequence-- oh, any
questions before I cruise? OK. So here's a curious consequence of this series of
experiments. Here's something you can't do. Are you guys old enough for you can't
do this on television? This is so sad. OK, so here's something you can't do. We cannot
build, it is impossible to build, a reliable color and hardness box. We've built a box
that tells you what color it is. We've built a box that tells you what hardness it is. But
you cannot build a meaningful box that tells you what color and hardness an electron
is. So in particular, what would this magical box be? It would have four ports. And its
ports would say, well, one is white and hard, and one is white and soft, one is black
and hard, and one is black and soft. So you can imagine how you might try to build a

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color and hardness box. So for example, here's something you might imagine. Take
your incident electrons, and first send them into a color box. And take those white
electrons, and send them into a hardness box. And take those electrons, and this is
going to be white and hard, and this is going to be white and soft. And similarly, send
these black electrons into the hardness box, and here's hard and black, and here's
soft and back. Everybody cool with that? So this seems to do the thing I wanted. It
measures both the hardness and the color. What's the problem with it? AUDIENCE:
ALLAN ADAMS: Yeah, exactly. So the color is not persistent. So you tell me this is a
soft and black electron, right? That's what you told me. Here's the box. But if I put a
color box here, that's the experiment we just ran. And what happens? Does this come
out black? No, this is a crappy source of black electrons. It's 50/50 black and white. So
this box can't be built. And the reason, and I want to emphasize this, the reason we
cannot build this box is not because our experiments are crude. And it's not because
I can't build things, although that's true. I was banned from a lab one day after
joining it, actually. So I really can't build, but other people can. And that's not why. We
can't because of something much more fundamental, something deeper, something
in principle, which is encoded in this awesome experiment. This can be done. It does
not mean anything, as a consequence. It does not mean anything to say this electron
is white and hard, because if you tell me it's white and hard, and I measure the white,
well, I know if it's hard, it's going to come out 50-50. It does not mean anything. So
this is an important idea. This is an idea which is enshrined in physics with a term
which comes with capital letters, the Uncertainty Principle. And the Uncertainty
Principle says basically that, look, there's some observable, measurable properties of
a system which are incompatible with each other in precisely this way, incompatible
with each other in the sense not that you can't know, because you can't know
whether it's hard and soft simultaneously, deeper. It is not hard and white
simultaneously. It cannot be. It does not mean anything to say it is hard and white
simultaneously. That is uncertainty. And again, uncertainty is an idea we're going to
come back to over and over in the class. But every time you think about it, this should
be the first place you start for the next few weeks. Yeah. Questions. No questions?
OK. So at this point, it's really tempting to think yeah, OK, this is just about the
hardness and the color of electrons. It's just a weird thing about electrons. It's not a
weird thing about the rest of the world. The rest of the world's completely
reasonable. And no, that's absolutely wrong. Every object in the world has the same
properties. If you take bucky-balls, and you send them through the analogous
experiment-- and I will show you the data, I think tomorrow, but soon, I will show you

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the data. When you take bucky-balls and run it through a similar experiment, you get
the same effect. Now, bucky-balls are huge, right, 60 carbon atoms. But, OK, OK, at
that point, you're saying, dude, come on, huge, 60 carbon atoms. So there is a
pendulum, depending on how you define building, in this building, a pendulum
which is used, in principle which is used to improve detectors to detect gravitational
waves. There's a pendulum with a, I think it's 20 kilo mirror. And that pendulum
exhibits the same sort of effects here. We can see these quantum mechanical effects
in those mirrors. And this is in breathtakingly awesome experiments done by Nergis
Malvalvala, whose name I can never pronounce, but who is totally awesome. She's an
amazing physicist. And she can get these kind of quantum effects out of a 20 kilo
mirror. So before you say something silly, like, oh, it's just electrons, it's 20 kilo
mirrors. And if I could put you on a pendulum that accurate, it would be you. OK?
These are properties of everything around you. The miracle is not that electrons
behave oddly. The miracle is that when you take 10 to the 27 electrons, they behave
like cheese. That's the miracle. This is the underlying correct thing. OK, so this is so
far so good. But let's go deeper. Let's push it. And to push it, I want to design for you
a slightly more elaborate apparatus, a slightly more elaborate experimental
apparatus. And for this, I want you to consider the following device. I'm going to
need to introduce a couple of new features for you. Here's a hardness box. And it has
an in port. And the hardness box has a hard aperture, and it has a soft aperture. And
now, in addition to this hardness box, I'm going to introduce two elements. First,
mirrors. And what these mirrors do is they take the incident electrons and, nothing
else, they change the direction of motion, change the direction of motion. And here's
what I mean by doing nothing else. If I take one of these mirrors, and I take, for
example, a color box. And I take the white electrons that come out, and I bounce it
off the mirror, and then I send these into a color box, then they come out white 100%
of the time. It does not change the observable color. Cool? All it does is change the
direction. Similarly, with the hardness box, it doesn't change the hardness. It just
changes the direction of motion. And every experiment we've ever done on these,
guys, changes in no way whatsoever the color or the hardness by subsequent
measurement. Cool? Just changes the direction of motion. And then I'm going to add
another mirror. It's actually a slightly fancy set of mirrors. All they do is they join
these beams together into a single beam. And again, this doesn't change the color.
You send in a white electron, you get out, and you measure the color on the other
side, you get a white electron. You send in a black electron from here, and you
measure the color, you get a black electron again out. Cool? So here's my apparatus.

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And I'm going to put this inside a big box. And I want to run some experiments with
this apparatus. Everyone cool with the basic design? Any questions before I cruise
on? This part's fun. So what I want to do now is I want to run some simple
experiments before we get to fancy stuff. And the simple experiments are just going
to warm you up. They're going to prepare you to make some predictions and some
calculations. And eventually we'd like to lead back to this guy. So the first experiment,
I'm going to send in white electrons. Whoops. Im. I'm going to send in white
electrons. And I'm going to measure at the end, and in particular at the output, the
hardness. So I'm going to send in white electrons. And I'm going to measure the
hardness. So this is my apparatus. I'm going to measure the hardness at the output.
And what I mean by measure the hardness is I throw these electrons into a hardness
box and see what comes out. So this is experiment 1. And let me draw this, let me
biggen the diagram. So you send white into-- so the mechanism is a hardness box.
Mirror, mirror, mirrors, and now we're measuring the hardness out. And the
question I want to ask is how many electrons come out the hard aperture, and how
many electrons come out the soft aperture of this final hardness box. So I'd like to
know what fraction come out hard, and what fraction come out soft. I send an initial
white electron, for example I took a color box and took the white output, send them
into the hardness box, mirror, mirror, hard, hard, soft. And what fraction come out
hard, and what fraction come out soft. So just think about it for a minute. And when
you have a prediction in your head, raise your hand. All right, good. Walk me through
your prediction. AUDIENCE: I think it should be 50-50. ALLAN ADAMS: 50-50. How
come? AUDIENCE: color doesn't have any bearing on hardness. ALLAN ADAMS:
Awesome. So let me say that again. So we've done the experiment, you send a white
electron into the hardness box, and we know that it's non-predictive, 50-50. So if you
take a white electron and you send it into the hardness box, 50% of the time it will
come out the hard aperture, and 50% of the time it will come out the soft aperture.
Now if you take the one that comes out the hard aperture, then you send it up here
or send it up here, we know that these mirrors do nothing to the hardness of the
electron except change the direction of motion. We've already done that experiment.
So you measure the hardness at the output, what do you get? Hard, because it came
out hard, mirror, mirror, hardness, hard. But it only came out hard 50% of the time
because we sent in initially white electron. Yeah? What about the other 50%? Well, the
other 50% of the time, it comes out the soft aperture and follows what I'll call the soft
path to the mirror, mirror, hardness. And with soft, mirror, mirror, hardness, you
know it comes out soft. 50% of the time it comes out this way, and then it will come

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out hard. 50% it follows the soft path, and then it will come out soft. Was this the
logic? Good. How many people agree with this? Solid. How many people disagree? No
abstention. OK. So here's a prediction. Oh, yep. AUDIENCE: Just a question. Could you
justify that prediction without talking about oh, well, half the electrons were initially
measured to be hard, and half were initially measured to be soft, by just saying, well,
we have a hardness box, and then we joined these electrons together again, so we
don't know anything about it. So it's just like sending white electrons into one
hardness box instead of two. ALLAN ADAMS: Yeah, that's a really tempting argument,
isn't it? So let's see. We're going to see in a few minutes whether that kind of an
argument is reliable or not. But so far we've been given two different arguments that
lead to the same prediction, 50-50. Yeah? Question. AUDIENCE: Are the electrons
interacting between themselves? Like when you get them to where-- ALLAN ADAMS:
Yeah. This is a very good question. So here's a question look you're sending a bunch
of electrons into this apparatus. But if I take-- look, I took 802. You take two electrons
and you put them close to each other, what do they do? Pyewww. Right? They
interact with each other through a potential, right? So yeah, we're being a little bold
here, throwing a bunch of electrons in and saying, oh, they're independent. So I'm
going to do one better. I will send them in one at a time. One electron through the
apparatus. And then I will wait for six weeks. See, you guys laugh, you think that's
funny. But there's a famous story about a guy who did a similar experiment with
photons, French guy. And, I mean, the French, they know what they're doing. So he
wanted to do the same experiment with photons. But the problem is if you take a
laser and you shined it into your apparatus, there there are like, 10 to the 18 photons
in there at any given moment. And the photons, who knows what they're doing with
each other, right? So I want to send in one photon, but the problem is, it's very hard
to get a single photon, very hard. So what he did, I kid you not, he took an opaque
barrier, I don't remember what it was, it was some sort of film on top of glass, I think
it was some sort of oil-tar film. Barton, do you remember what he used? So he takes a
film, and it has this opaque property, such that the photons that are incident upon it
get absorbed. Once in a blue moon a photon manages to make its way through.
Literally, like once every couple of days, or a couple of hours, I think. So it's going to
take a long time to get any sort of statistics. But he this advantage, that once every
couple of hours or whatever a photon makes its way through. That means inside the
apparatus, if it takes a pico-second to cross, triumph, right? That's the week I was
talking about. So he does this experiment. But as you can tell, you start the
experiment, you press go, and then you wait for six months. Side note on this guy,

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liked boats, really liked yachts. So he had six months to wait before doing a beautiful
experiment and having the results. So what did he do? Went on a world tour in his
yacht. Comes back, collects the data, and declares victory, because indeed, he saw
the effect he wanted. So I was not kidding. We really do wait. So I will take your
challenge. And single electron, throw it in, let it go through the apparatus, takes
mere moments. Wait for a week, send in another electron. No electrons are
interacting with each other. Just a single electron at a time going through this
apparatus. Other complaints? AUDIENCE: More stories? ALLAN ADAMS: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: More stories? ALLAN ADAMS: Oh, you'll get them. I have a hard time
resisting. So here's a prediction, 50-50. We now have two arguments for this. So
again, let's vote after the second argument. 50-50, how many people? You sure?
Positive? How many people don't think so? Very small dust. OK. It's correct. Yea. So,
good. I like messing with you guys. So remember, we're going to go through a few
experiments first where it's going to be very easy to predict the results. We've got
four experiments like this to do. And then we'll go on to the interesting examples. But
we need to go through them so we know what happens, so we can make an
empirical argument rather than an in principle argument. So there's the first
experiment. Now, I want to run the second experiment. And the second experiment,
same as the first, a little bit louder, a little bit worse. Sorry. The second experiment,
we're going to send in hard electrons, and we're going to measure color at out. So
again, let's look at the apparatus. We send in hard electrons. And our apparatus is
hardness box with a hard and a soft aperture. And now we're going to measure the
color at the output. Color, what have I been doing? And now I want to know what
fraction come out black, and what fraction come out white. We're using lots of
monkeys in this process. OK, so this is not rocket science. Rocket science isn't that
complicated. Neuroscience is much harder. This is not neuroscience. So let's figure
out what this is. Predictions. So again, think about your prediction your head, come
to a conclusion, raise your hand when you have an idea. And just because you don't
raise your hand doesn't mean I won't call on you. AUDIENCE: 50-50 black and white.
ALLAN ADAMS: 50-50 black and white. I like it. Tell me why. AUDIENCE: It's gone
through a hardness box, which scrambled the color, and therefore has to be ALLAN
ADAMS: Great. So the statement, I'm going to say that slightly more slowly. That was
an excellent argument. We have a hard electron. We know that hardness boxes are
persistent. If you send a hard electron in, it comes out hard. So every electron
incident upon our apparatus will transit across the hard trajectory. It will bounce, it
will bounce, but it is still hard, because we've already done that experiment. The

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mirrors do nothing to the hardness. So we send a hard electron into the color box,
and what comes out? Well, we've done that experiment, too. Hard into color, 50-50.
So the prediction is 50-50. This is your prediction. Is that correct? Awesome. OK, let us
vote. How many people think this is correct? Gusto, I like it. How many people think
it's not? All right. Yay, this is correct. Third experiment, slightly more complicated. But
we have to go through these to get to the good stuff, so humor me for a moment.
Third, let's send in white electrons, and then measure the color at the output port. So
now we send in white electrons, same beast. And our apparatus is a hardness box
with a hard path and a soft path. Do-do-do, mirror, do-do-do, mirror, box, join
together into our out. And now we send those out electrons into a color box. And our
color box, black and white. And now the question is how many come out black, and
how many come out white. Again, think through the logic, follow the electrons, come
up with a prediction. Raise your hand when you have a prediction. AUDIENCE: Well,
earlier we showed that so it'll take those paths equally-- ALLAN ADAMS: With equal
probability. Good. AUDIENCE: Yeah. And then it'll go back into the color box. But
earlier when we did the same thing without the weird path-changing, it came out
50-50 still. So I would say still 50-50. ALLAN ADAMS: Great. So let me say that again,
out loud. And tell me if this is an accurate extension of what you said. I'm just going
to use more words. But it's, I think, the same logic. We have a white electron, initially
white electron. We send it into a hardness box. When we send a white electron into a
hardness box, we know what happens. 50% of the time it comes out hard, the hard
aperture, 50% of the time it comes out the soft aperture. Consider those electrons
that came out the hard aperture. Those electrons that came out the hard aperture
will then transit across the system, preserving their hardness by virtue of the fact
that these mirrors preserve hardness, and end up at a color box. When they end at
the color box, when that electron, the single electron in the system ends at this color
box, then we know that a hard electron entering a color box comes out black or white
50% of the time. We've done that experiment, too. So for those 50% that came out
hard, we get 50/50. Now consider the other 50%. The other half of the time, the
single electron in the system will come out the soft aperture. It will then proceed
along the soft trajectory, bounce, bounce, not changing its hardness, and is then a
soft electron incident on the color box. But we've also done that experiment, and we
get 50-50 out, black and white. So those electrons that came out hard come out
50-50, and those electrons that come out soft come out 50/50. And the logic then
leads to 50-50, twice, 50-50. Was that an accurate statement? Good. It's a pretty
reasonable extension. OK, let's vote. How many people agree with this one? OK, and

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how many people disagree? Yeah, OK. So vast majority agree. And the answer is no,
this is wrong. In fact, all of these, 100% come out white and 0 come out black. Never
ever does an electron come out the black aperture. I would like to quote what a
student just said, because it's actually the next line in my notes, which is what the hell
is going on? So let's the series of follow up experiments to tease out what's going on
here. So something very strange, let's just all agree, something very strange just
happened. We sent a single electron in. And that single electron comes out the
hardness box, well, it either came out the hard aperture or the soft aperture. And if it
came out the hard, we know what happens, if it came out the soft, we know what
happens. And it's not 50-50. So we need to improve the situation. Hold on a sec. Hold
on one sec. Well, OK, go ahead. AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's just a question about the setup.
So with the second hardness box, are we collecting both the soft and hard outputs?
ALLAN ADAMS: The second, you mean the first hardness box? AUDIENCE: The one--
are we getting-- no, the-- ALLAN ADAMS: Which one, sorry? This guy? Oh, that's a
mirror, not a hardness box. Oh, thanks for asking. Yeah, sorry. I wish I had a better
notation for this, but I don't. There's a classic-- well, I'm not going to go into it.
Remember that thing where I can't stop myself from telling stories? So all this does,
it's just a set of mirrors. It's a set of fancy mirrors. And all it does is it takes an
electron coming this way or an electron coming this way, and both of them get sent
out in the same direction. It's like a beam joiner, right? It's like a y junction. That's all
it is. So if you will, imagine the box is a box, and you take, I don't know, Professor
Zwiebach, and you put him inside. And every time an electron comes up this way, he
throws it out that way, and every time it comes in this way, he throws it out that way.
And he'd be really ticked at you for putting him in a box, but he'd do the job well.
Yeah. AUDIENCE: And this also works if you go one electron at a time? ALLAN ADAMS:
This works if you go one electron at a time, this works if you go 14 electrons at a
time, it works. It works reliably. Yeah. AUDIENCE: Just, maybe but what's the
difference between this experiment and that one? ALLAN ADAMS: Yeah, I know.
Right? Right? So the question was, what's the difference between this experiment
and the last one. Yeah, good question. So we're going to have to answer that. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Well, you're mixing again the hardness. So it's like as you weren't
measuring it at all, right? ALLAN ADAMS: Apparently it's a lot we weren't measuring
it, right? Because we send in the white electron, and at the end we get out that it's
still white. So somehow this is like not doing anything. But how does that work? So
that's an excellent observation. And I'm going to build you now a couple of
experiments that tease out what's going on. And you're not going to like the answer.

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Yeah. AUDIENCE: How were the white electrons generated in this experiment? ALLAN
ADAMS: The white electrons were generated in the following way. I take a random
source of electrons, I rub a cat against a balloon and I charge up the balloon. And so I
take those random electrons, and I send them into a color box. And we have
previously observed that if you take random electrons and throw them into a color
box and pull out the electrons that come out the white aperture, if you then send
them into a color box again, they're still white. So that's how I've generated them. I
could have done it by rubbing the cat against glass, or rubbing it against me, right,
just stroke the cat. Any randomly selected set of electrons sent into a color box, and
then from which you take the white electrons. AUDIENCE: So how is it different from
the experiment up there? ALLAN ADAMS: Yeah. Uh-huh. Exactly. Yeah. AUDIENCE: Is
the difference that you never actually know whether the electron's hard or soft?
ALLAN ADAMS: That's a really good question. So here's something I'm going to be
very careful not to say in this class to the degree possible. I'm not going to use the
word to know. AUDIENCE: Well, to measure. ALLAN ADAMS: Good. Measure is a very
slippery word, too. I've used it here because I couldn't really get away with not using
it. But we'll talk about that in some detail later on in the course. For the moment, I
want to emphasize that it's tempting but dangerous at this point to talk about
whether you know or don't know, or whether someone knows or doesn't know, for
example, the monkey inside knows or doesn't know. So let's try to avoid that, and
focus on just operational questions of what are the things that go in, what are the
things that come out, and with what probabilities. And the reason that's so useful is
that it's something that you can just do. There's no ambiguity about whether you've
caught a white electron in a particular spot. Now in particular, the reason these
boxes are such a powerful tool is that you don't measure the electron, you measure
the position of the electron. You get hit by the electron or you don't. And by using
these boxes we can infer from their position the color or the hardness. And that's the
reason these boxes are so useful. So we're inferring from the position, which is easy
to measure, you get beaned or you don't, we're inferring the property that we're
interested in. It's a really good question, though. Keep it in the back of your mind.
And we'll talk about it on and off for the rest of the semester. Yeah. AUDIENCE: So
what happens if you have this setup, and you just take away the bottom right mirror?
ALLAN ADAMS: Perfect question. This leads me into the next experiment. So here's
the modification. But thank you, that's a great question. Here's the modification of
this experiment. So let's rig up a small-- hold on, I want to go through the next series
of experiments, and then I'll come back to questions. And these are great questions.

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So I want to rig up a small movable wall, a small movable barrier. And here's what
this movable barrier will do. If I put the barrier in, so this would be in the soft path,
when I put the barrier in the soft path, it absorbs all electrons incident upon it and
impedes them from proceeding. So you put a barrier in here, put a barrier in the soft
path, no electrons continue through. An electron incident cannot continue through.
When I say that the barrier is out, what I mean is it's not in the way. I've moved it out
of the way. Cool? So I want to run the same experiment. And I want to run this
experiment using the barriers to tease out how the electrons transit through our
apparatus. So experiment four. Let's send in a white electron again. I want to do the
same experiment we just did. And color at out, but now with the wall in the soft path.
Wall in soft. So that's this experiment. So we send in white electrons, and at the
output we measure the color as before. And the question is what fraction come out
black, and what fraction come out white. So again, everyone think through it for a
second. Just take a second. And this one's a little sneaky. So feel free to discuss it with
the person sitting next to you. ALLAN ADAMS: All right. All right, now that everyone
has had a quick second to think through this one, let me just talk through what I'd
expect from the point of these experiments. And then we'll talk about whether this is
reasonable. So the first thing I expect is that, look, if I send in a white electron and I
put it into a hardness pass, I know that 50% of the time it goes out hard, and 50% of
the time it goes out soft. If it goes out the soft aperture, it's going to get eaten by the
barrier, right? It's going to get eaten by the barrier. So first thing I predict is that the
output should be down by 50%. However, here's an important bit of physics. And this
comes to the idea of locality. I didn't tell you this, but these armlinks in the
experiment I did, 3,000 kilometers long. 3,000 kilometers long. That's too minor. 10
million kilometers long. Really long. Very long. Now, imagine an electron that enters
this, an initially white electron. If we had the barriers out, if the barrier was out, what
do we get? 100% white, right? We just did this experiment, to our surprise. So if we
did this, we get 100%. And that means an electron, any electron, going along the soft
path comes out white. Any electron going along the hard path goes out white. They
all come out white. So now, imagine I do this. Imagine we put a barrier in here 2
million miles away from this path. How does a hard electron along this path know
that I put the barrier there? And I'm going to make it even more sneaky for you. I'm
going to insert the barrier along the path after I launched the electron into the
apparatus. And when I send in the electron, I will not know at that moment, nor will
the electron know, because, you know, they're not very smart, whether the barrier is
in place. And this is going to be millions of miles away from this guy. So an electron

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out here can't know. It hasn't been there. It just hasn't been there. It can't know. But
we know that when we ran this apparatus without the barrier in there, they came out
100% white. But it can't possibly know whether the barrier's in there or not, right? It's
over here. So what this tells us is that we should expect the output to be down by
50%. But all the electrons that do make it through must come out white, because
they didn't know that there was a barrier there. They didn't go along that path. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Not trying to be wise, but why are you using the word know? ALLAN
ADAMS: Oh, sorry, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, that was a slip of the
tongue. I was making fun of the electron. So in that particular case, I was not
referring to my or your knowledge. I was referring to the electron's tragically
impoverished knowledge. Yeah. AUDIENCE: But if they come out one at a time white,
then wouldn't we know then with certainty that that electron is both hard and white,
which is like a violation? ALLAN ADAMS: Well, here's the more troubling thing.
Imagine it didn't come out 100% white. Then the electron would have demonstrably
not go along the soft path. It would have demonstrably gone through the hard path,
because that's the only path available to it. And yet, it would still have known that
millions of miles away, there's a barrier on a path it didn't take. So which one's more
upsetting to you? And personally, I find this one the less upsetting of the two. So the
prediction is our output should down by 50%, because a half of them get eaten. But
they should all come out white, because those that didn't get eaten can't possibly
know that there was a barrier here, millions of miles away. So we run this
experiment. And here's the experimental result. In fact, the experimental result is
yes, the output is down by 50%. But no, not 100% white, 50% white. 50% white. The
barrier, if we put the barrier in the hardness path. If we put the barrier in the
hardness path, still down by 50%, and it's at odds, 50-50. How could the electron
know? I'm making fun of it. Yeah. AUDIENCE: So I guess my question is before we ask
how it knows that there's a block in one of the paths, how does it know, before, over
there, that there were two paths, and combine again? ALLAN ADAMS: Excellent.
Exactly. So actually, this problem was there already in the experiment we did. All
we've done here is tease out something that was existing in the experiment,
something that was disturbing. The presence of those mirrors, and the option of
taking two paths, somehow changed the way the electron behaved. How is that
possible? And here, we're seeing that very sharply. Thank you for that excellent
observation. Yeah. AUDIENCE: What if you replaced the two mirrors with color boxes,
so that both color boxes ALLAN ADAMS: Yeah. So the question is basically, let's take
this experiment, and let's make it even more intricate by, for example, replacing

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these mirrors by color boxes. So here's the thing I want to emphasize. I strongly
encourage you to think through that example. And in particular, think through that
example, come to my office hours, and ask me about it. So that's going to be setting
a different experiment. And different experiments are going to have different results.
So we're going to have to deal with that on a case by case basis. It's an interesting
example, but it's going to take us a bit afar from where we are right now. But after
we get to the punchline from this, come to my office hours and ask me exactly that
question. Yeah. AUDIENCE: So we had a color box, we put in white electrons and we
got 50-50, like random. How do you know the boxes work? ALLAN ADAMS: How do I
know the boxes work? These are the same boxes we used from the beginning. We
tested them over and over. AUDIENCE: How did you first check that it was working?
ALLAN ADAMS: How to say-- there's no other way to build a box that does the
properties that we want, which is that you send in color and it comes out color again,
and the mirrors behave this way. Any box that does those first set of things, which is
what I will call a color box, does this, too. There's no other way to do it. I don't mean
just because like, no one's tested-- AUDIENCE: Because you can't actually check it,
you can't actually you know which one is white. ALLAN ADAMS: Oh, sure, you can.
You take the electron that came out of the color box. That's what we mean by saying
it's white. AUDIENCE: ALLAN ADAMS: But that's what it means to say the electron is
white. It's like, how do you know that my name is Allan? You say, Allan, and I go,
what? Right? But you're like, look that's not a test of whether I'm Allan. It's like, well,
what is the test? That's how you test. What's your name? I'm Allan. Oh, great, that's
your name. So that's what I mean by white. Now you might quibble that that's a
stupid thing to call an electron. And I grant you that. But it is nonetheless a property
that I can empirically engage. OK, so I've been told that I never ask questions from
the people on the right. Yeah. AUDIENCE: Is it important whether the experimenter
knows if the wall is there or not? ALLAN ADAMS: No. This experiment has been done
again by some French guys. The French, look, dude. So there's this guy, Alain Aspect,
ahh, great experimentalist, great physicist. And he's done lots of beautiful
experiments on exactly this topic. And send me an email, and I'll post some example
papers and reviews by him-- and he's a great writer-- on the web page. So just send
me an email to remind me of that. OK, so we're lowish on time, so let me move on. So
what I want to do now is I want to take the lesson of this experiment and the
observation that was made a minute ago, that in fact the same problem was present
when we ran this experiment and go 100%. We should have been freaked out
already. And I want to think through what that's telling us about the electron, the

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single electron, as it transits the apparatus. The thing is, at this point we're in real
trouble. And here's the reason. Consider a single electron inside the apparatus. And I
want to think about the electron inside the apparatus while all walls are out. So it's
this experiment. Consider the single electron. We know, with total confidence, with
complete reliability, that every electron will exit this color box out the white aperture.
We've done this experiment. We know it will come out white. Yes? Here's my
question. Which route did it take? AUDIENCE: Spoiler. ALLAN ADAMS: Not a spoiler.
Which route did it take? AUDIENCE: Why do we care what route? ALLAN ADAMS: I'm
asking you the question. That's why you care. I'm the professor here. What is this?
Come on. Which route did it take? OK, let's think through the possibilities. Grapple
with this question in your belly. Let's think through the possibilities. First off, did it
take the hardness path? So as it transits through, the single electron transiting
through this apparatus, did it take the hard path or did it take the soft? These are
millions of miles long, millions of miles apart. This is not a ridiculous question. Did it
go millions of miles in that direction, or millions of miles in that direction? Did it take
the hardness path? Ladies and gentlemen, did it take the hard path? AUDIENCE: Yes.
ALLAN ADAMS: Well, we ran this experiment by putting a wall in the soft path. And if
we put a wall in the soft path, then we know it took the hard path, because no other
electrons come out except those that went through the hard path. Correct? On the
other hand, if it went through the hard path, it would come out 50% of the time white
and 50% of the time black. But in fact, in this apparatus it comes out always 100%
white. It cannot have taken the hard path. No. Did it take the soft path? Same
argument, different side, right? No. Well, this is not looking good. Well, look, this was
suggested. Maybe it took both. Maybe electrons are sneaky little devils that split in
two, and part of it goes one way and part of it goes the other. Maybe it took both
paths. So this is easy. We can test this one. And here is how I'm going to test this one.
Oh, sorry. Actually, I'm not going to do that yet. So we can test this one. So if it took
both paths, here's what you should be able to do. You should be able to put a
detector along each path, and you'd be able to follow, if you've got half an electron
on one side and half an electron on the other, or maybe two electrons, one on each
side and one on the other. So this is the thing that you'd predict if you said it went
both. So here's what we'll do. We will take detectors. We will put one along the hard
path and one along the soft path. We will run the experiment and then observe
whether, and ask whether, we see two electrons, we see half and half, what do we
see. The answer is you always, always see one electron on one of the paths. You
never see half an electron. You never see a squishy electron. You see one electron on

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one path, period. It did not take both. You never see an electron split in two, divided,
confused. No. Well, it didn't take the hard path, didn't take the soft path, it didn't take
both. There's one option left. Neither. Well, I say neither. But what about neither?
And that's easy. Let's put a barrier in both paths. And then what happens? Nothing
comes out. So no. So now, to repeat an earlier prescient remark from one of the
students, what the hell? So here's the world we're facing. I want you to think about
this. Take this seriously. Here's the world we're facing. And when I say, here's the
world we're facing, I don't mean just these experiments. I mean the world around
you, 20 kilo mirrors, bucky-balls, here is what they do. When you send them through
an apparatus like this, every single object that goes through this apparatus does not
take the hard path, it does not take the soft path, it doesn't take both, and it does not
take neither. And that pretty much exhausts the set of logical possibilities. So what
are electrons doing when they're inside the apparatus? How do you describe that
electron inside the apparatus? You can't say it's on one path, you can't say it's on the
other, it's not on both, and it's not on neither. What is it doing halfway through this
experiment? So if our experiments are accurate, and to the best of our ability to
determine, they are, and if our arguments are correct, and that's on me, then they're
doing something, these electrons are doing something we've just never thought of
before, something we've never dreamt of before, something for which we don't really
have good words in the English language. Apparently, empirically, electrons have a
way of moving, electrons have a way of being which is unlike anything that we're
used to thinking about. And so do molecules. And so do bacteria. So does chalk. It's
just harder to detect in those objects. So physicists have a name for this new mode of
being. And we call it superposition. Now, at the moment, superposition is code for I
have no idea what's going on. Usage of the word superposition would go something
like this. An initially white electron inside this apparatus with the walls out is neither
hard, nor soft, nor both, nor neither. It is, in fact, in a superposition of being hard and
of being soft. This is why we can't meaningfully say this electron is some color and
some hardness. Not because our boxes are crude, and not because we're ignorant,
though our boxes are crude and we are ignorant. It's deeper. Having a definite color
means not having a definite hardness, but rather being in a superposition of being
hard and being soft. Every electron exits a hardness box either hard or soft. But not
every electron is hard or soft. It can also be a superposition of being hard or being
soft. The probability that we subsequently measure it to be hard or soft depends on
precisely what superposition it is. For example, we know that if an electron is in the
superposition corresponding to being white then there are even odds of it being

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subsequently measured be hard or to be soft. So to build a better definition of

superposition than I have no idea what's going on is going to require a new
language. And that language is quantum mechanics. And the underpinnings of this
language are the topic of the course. And developing a better understanding of this
idea of superposition is what you have to do over the next three months. Now, if all
of this troubles your intuition, well, that shouldn't be too surprising. Your intuition
was developed by throwing spears, and running from tigers, and catching toast as it
jumps out of the toaster, all of which involves things so big and with so much energy
that quantum effects are negligible. As a friend of mine likes to say, you don't need to
know quantum mechanics to make chicken soup. However, when we work in very
different regimes, when we work with atoms, when we work with molecules, when
we work in the regime of very low energies and very small objects, your intuition is
just not a reasonable guide. It's not that the electrons-- and I cannot emphasize this
strongly enough-- it is not that the electrons are weird. The electrons do what
electrons do. This is what they do. And it violates your intuition, but it's true. The
thing that's surprising is that lots of electrons behave like this. Lots of electrons
behave like cheese and chalk. And that's the goal of 804, to step beyond your daily
experience and your familiar intuition and to develop an intuition for this idea of
superposition. And we'll start in the next lecture. I'll see you on Thursday.

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