Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Book cover, In My Time of Dyiing Why would a war correspondent prove to be an excellent guide to quantum theory? Sebastian Junger’s success in In My Time of Dying (Simon & Schuster, May 2024) may lie in his life-and-death urgency. I’ve never found quantum theory easy to understand intuitively because the physics it describes are not those of the visible world. For example, in the visible world, I know that a tether ball circumventing a pole will follow either a circular or elliptical path.
If given the right information (force applied, angle of application, weight of ball, length of rope, wind resistance, and maybe a few other factors), anyone with a reasonably-informed understanding of math can calculate the ball’s path and exactly where it will be along it at any given moment. Paths of momentum are less predictable inside atoms. As Werner Heisenberg made clear with his uncertainty principle, when circumventing the neutron of an atom, the position of an electron can only be expressed in terms of the probability of finding it at any given point.
There is no certainty. And then there’s the matter of “spin.” Decades ago, my high school Chemistry teacher patiently explained to my class that, as electrons orbit nuclei, they “spin” positively or negatively.
As it turns out, electrons don’t spin . Scientists use the terms “spinning” or “spin angular momentum” to refer to electrons’ magnetic pull. Even .
