Shining Light Through Solid Balls Using Quantum Mechanics—Poisson's Spot Experiment

Hello everyone, today I will show you how to shine

light

directly through

solid

objects

using

the laws of

quantum

mechanics

. Now, the particle theory of

light

introduced by Descartes and also taught by Newton was that it always moves in a straight line because it is actually made of small particles and those particles, like any other particle, can only move directly from where they shoot out. , so basically the reason you can't see me when I move this basketball in front of my face is because there is light coming from my face, the cameras directly in front of my face, so the only way the light can Getting from my face to the camera is in a straight line, so if I move the basketball in front of my face, the ball has to block that light and then there's no way you can see my face because the basketball hits it. is blocking and that's the particle theory of light, but it turns out that's not exactly true.

We know that light is made of particles like things called photons, but it turns out that these photons don't always behave like particles, they also have a certain wave nature and in that case that means that these particles won't always move in a straight line. Now these light particles are called photons. they have wave properties, but what is really waving if you have a photon? How can it also be a wave? Well, nothing is actually waving in the photon. What it actually means is that between the light coming from my face and the measurement. In the camera, the particle behaves as a probability, meaning that we only have a certain probability of discovering that photon somewhere else in space.

Now, obviously, the highest probability of finding a photon is usually directly in front of where it was shot, so in most cases, when I hold this basketball in front of my face, you don't see me because we had the highest probability of finding a photon. block photons when we have a ball directly in front of where they shoot out, but this is where things get weird according to the wave nature of light, the highest probability is that the location where I can find a photon coming from my face when I hold this basketball in front of me be directly in the center of the basketball, so it may sound weird what I'm telling you is you should be able to see me directly in the center of this basketball you should be able to see my face through it but why don't you see me well it turns out that it's only true for things that are very soft, so, for example, let me grab a softer ball like this metallic sphere here.

If I hold this metallic sphere in front of my face, I tell you that, according to the wave nature of light, you should be able to see directly through this ball in my face when I hold it between me and the camera but I still don't notice. You see for some reason this should sound absurd at this point I'm telling you that light should pass directly through The center of any sphere, no matter what it's made of,

solid

steel or anything that has light in it, must pass directly through out of it and out the other end, but I just showed you two examples where you can't see light coming through a sphere. ball, but why doesn't it mean that light actually has no wave nature?

Well, no, the reason is that this ball is too big because, according to mathematics, the larger the sphere, the lower the probability of finding a photon directly on that path in the center, so let's take a smaller ball and Let's see what we can see. Now I have a small ball and we can use a light source like my face or even a flashlight, but now the light source is bigger than the ball itself, so we're going to have to get a smaller light source as well. So for this to really work, what you need is a point source of light and you can simulate a point source of light

using

a laser pointer, so I'm going to use my laser pointer and shine it here on the back wall and then I'm going to place a little sphere in the middle, but it turns out that little laser pointer dot on the back wall is there.

Still smaller than my sphere, so I need to spread the light a little bit so there's a larger area of ​​light here on my back wall and I'll do that by just using a lens to spread the light. I can use a magnifying glass, but I only have a smaller lens here with higher power, so I'm just going to use this lens here to extend my laser light to make it look bigger on my back wall, here for example, this is how big . now so we're lighting it here now we have a big

spot

on my back wall so all that's done is extend the area of ​​light here so I've got my laser on the table there now all I need to do is place a little ball directly in its path and that's exactly what it is so I just have a magnetic sphere hanging from a metal wire here and this will be directly in the path of the laser so now we'll just see the shadow of the ball on the back wall here now if everything goes well we should see that the shadow that this ball forms on the back wall in the center will be the brightest part now let's see if this actually works well, let's turn on my laser, okay?

I have a big dot on the back wall, you know, let's put my sphere directly in the path, okay, now it shines on the ball and we can see the shadow back there, let's take a closer look at the shadow, okay, here we go, here it is the shadow is now looking directly at the center of the shadow you can see the brightest

spot

that shadow is directly in the center and that's so weird that spot right there is actually called poison spot and the reason why it's called spa poisonous is because poison was a scientist who didn't really believe in the wave nature of life, he thought it was just made of particles and that's why he mockingly said that if it was actually made of waves according to mathematics, that would mean that if you had a perfectly spherical object, then directly in the center would be the brightest part of the shadow and it turns out that that is actually true, but it is a difficult

experiment

to perform because to do it you must have a very spiritual object. and you have to have a point source of light like a laser, so the question is what does it look like if you are directly in the center of this sphere, so now to show you something even cooler, the center of the ball is where it is . brighter, but I made a hole for it to shine back, which is the center of that ball, so that's the center of the shadow here, so now if we look through this hole in the back, you can see that I see the laser light up there and there's no ball blocking it so basically in the center of the shadow is where it looks like there's no ball in front of the laser that's crazy so basically it's like the light came directly through it.

So what really happens is that when the light comes from behind the sphere, the entire circumference of the sphere now acts as if it has a bunch of point sources around it, and when the light hits all of those point sources, they all they constructively interfere directly in the center. of it so you can see when you add up all the waves from the individual point sources around the sphere that the direct center is the place where it has the highest amplitude, which means the highest probability of finding a photon where all the waves add up. , so In this graph here you can see how when light hits a spherical surface like this, those waves can actually interfere constructively so that the center becomes the brightest point.

Now it turns out that you can talk about balance on the spot without even mentioning the particle nature of light, but the reason I mentioned the particle nature of light because in general it's incomplete to call light waves or particles, you have to talk about both. all the time now in this

experiment

the light was not actually passing through the object that was What was happening is that that object was causing a change in the wave properties of that light such that it caused a constructive interference of the light or caused the nature wave-like probabilistic nature of light would constructively interfere directly at the center so that we would have a higher probability of finding photons there, so we didn't bend the light, but we bent its wave property so that it went around it and we could still see what was behind the sphere, so that somehow the light could pass through it. without reviewing it now thanks for watching another episode of action lab.

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