Team Labs Tokyo Quotes

So, to recap, we seem to have light vacillating between a parti-clelike existence and a wavelike one. As a particle, the light is emitted and detected. As a wave, it goes through both slits at once. Lest you discount this as just some weird property of light and not of matter, consider this: the identical experiment can be done with electrons. They, too, depart the source (an electron microscope, in work by a team at Hitachi research labs and Gakushuin University in Tokyo) as particles. They land on the detector—a scintillation plate, like the front of a television screen, which records each electron arrival as a minuscule dot—as particles. But in between they act as waves, producing an interference pattern almost identical to that drawn by the photons. Dark stripes alternate with bright ones. Again, the only way single electrons can produce an interference pattern is by acting as waves, passing through both slits at once just as the photons apparently did. Electrons—a form of matter—can behave as waves. A single electron can take two different paths from source to detector and interfere with itself: during its travels it can be in two places at once. The same experiments have been performed with larger particles, such as ions, with the identical results. And ions, as we saw back in Chapter 3, are the currency of the brain, the particles whose movements are the basis for the action potential by which neurons communicate. They are also, in the case of calcium ions, the key to triggering neurotransmitter release. This is a crucial point: ions are subject to all of the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics.