Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2) Read Free Page A

send light, say a laser beam, at a narrow slit you will find that the beam spreads out on the other side of the slit, just like the waves in water do when they come through a narrow opening in a breakwater.” Ell was proud to have recognized that this analogy would be readily understood by people in this coastal town. “If you send that beam so that it hits two neighboring slits it will spread out from each slit and create an ‘interference’ pattern where the waves double up in some areas and block each other out in others. So light must consist of waves right? Well yes light does act like a wave. However, light also acts like a particle. You can slow down your light emitting device until it is only emitting one ‘quanta’ of these particles or “photons” at a time. Then they show up at the detector as a single spot, kind of like a bullet hitting a target, and just like a particle would, they leave a mark at that one spot. And you can send those particles through the two slits one at a time and see each one appear on the other side of the slits one at a time, each arriving as a single little spot on your detector. Just like a particle should arrive. That’s not very wavelike! But after thousands of your photon particles have gone through the two slits, one at a time, you will find that they have arrived at the target, distributed in that same wave interference pattern! It’s as if the particles act like waves even when they are traveling all by themselves, one at a time! It’s freaking bizarre, but true.
    “This phenomenon has given physicists headaches for decades and has led to weird terms like ‘wavicles’ to try to describe this tendency to act like both a wave and a particle at the same time. So I present this to you as a challenge. Figure this out! Or at least ponder it. You probably thought I would give a long winded speech or try to inspire you with stories of how hard I worked to achieve what I’ve done in gymnastics. Instead I’m telling you what I want to do. I want to figure this ‘wavicle’ thing out.
    “The way I see it, there are two possibilities. First, light is neither a wave, nor a particle, nor a wavicle, but instead something completely different from either one and we need to come up with a different descriptive model than either a particle or a wave for what light really is. Or, my current pet theory, which is that light is made of single photon particles that can actually spread out like a bunch of particles. In other words, each particle can spread out like a ‘wave’ of particles and that all these spread out ‘subphotons’ are actually connected to one another through a 5th dimension that we can’t see, feel, or touch. Then when the photon arrives at its destination, having traveled like a wave of subphotons, it coalesces through that 5th dimension to become a single complete photon at the one point where we detect it at our receptor apparatus.
    “I’m particularly excited to have invented a math that seems to fit known experimental data correctly for such subphotons and a 5th dimension, at least so far. I could be proved wrong any moment now! I want to go to grad school to work on experiments suggested by that math, to see if my math continues to agree with even newer experimental results. But, it’s important that you realize that it is very likely that I will turn out to be wrong! And so there is room for millions of bright young minds like yours to contemplate other ways that light could travel, neither as a wave, nor as a particle and yet behave like it does in the double slit experiment.
    “Or, if you don’t want to work on that, there are thousands of other problems out there, from physics to fisheries, from photons to farms, that all need solutions. So I urge you to go forth and seek not just work, but seek to find solutions to problems!
    “Finally, I know that one or maybe two of you are disappointed to have heard a talk about physics, so this is for