Philip Ball

 In a review of science writer Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality, science writer Philip Ball captured the essence of the sheer oddity of quantum mechanics: What’s odd is that the interference pattern remains — accumulating over many particle impacts — even if particles go through the slits one at a time. The particles seem to interfere with themselves. Odder, the pattern vanishes if we use a detector to measure which slit the particle goes through: it’s truly particle-like, with no more waviness. Oddest of all, that remains true if we delay the measurement until after the particle has traversed the slits (but before it hits the screen). Read More ›