I think there is a lot of beautiful wisdom in the bible that sticks with me, but usually it only comes out when I (way more often that I’d like) hear someone who claims to be Christian acting in a way that is completely antithetical to what is in the bible.
Great bot! But please see the edit to my post
It’s unintuitive, but super cool! There’s a great video by Physics Girl and Veritasium that explain it better than I ever could here.
First, the wavelength of the laser (think of it as the “color” of the laser) is chosen such that the energy of the photons is just under the energy state of the atoms that you are trying to cool.
Now, when the atom is moving toward the source of the laser, this causes the atom to “see” a higher energy. This is called Doppler shift and is a very well-known effect in anything that emits waves and is moving. In fact, you’ve experienced it before when you hear a car horn – as it moves towards you it has a higher pitch and as it moves away from you it has a lower pitch.
So, for atoms moving toward the source the see the energy rise just enough to absorb the photon and move to a higher energy state. Inevitably, the atom will want to move to a lower energy state (as all matter does) and will end up ejecting a new photon in a random direction. In order to maintain the conservation of momentum, this means that the photon will likely be ejected in a way that counteracts the direction it was previously moving, effectively slowing it down. Since heat is a measure of how fast atoms are moving, this means that atom has cooled down.
For atoms moving away from the laser source, they are unable to absorb the photons because the Doppler shift acts in the opposite direction, and they are completely unable to absorb the photons.
So as a result of all this, it is possible to slow down atoms moving in a very specific direction, without affecting the other atoms. This means you can systematically slow atoms down which means you can systematically cool things down.
Edit: Here’s a piped link to the youtube video above in case you’re privacy-conscious, however, Dianna (aka Physics Girl) has been bed-ridden with Long COVID for a while now so it would be great if you could contribute to her Patreon in lieu of the ad revenue
It was theorized that light could be a wave way before the double slit experiment. Like, a century before. So no, it wasn’t “assumed light is 100%” quantized before that experiment.
Anything that is a wave can be cancelled, so this idea was baked right into the wave theory of light, they just didn’t have the ability to control light precisely enough to prove it until the double slit experiment. You don’t need quantum mechanics to explain wave theory, it just happened that the double slit experiment, while proving that light behaved like a wave, also showed other characteristics that it was also behaving in a quantized fashion. The fact that light is quantized into photons has nothing to do with the fact that they cancel so you really don’t need quantum mechanics to explain it. The reason light can be cancelled is exactly the same as every other thing in physics that behaves like a wave.
The word quantum comes from the word quantization not “quantify”. Those two words mean different things
Light is a wave. It also happens to be a particle. So the “existence of waves” is not a different subject. It’s exactly this subject
Edit: Love the snarky edit to a post full of being confidently wrong. I’m going to go engage with others. Good day, sir/ma’am!
I completely agree with your third point where you said “in most cases”.
It was your first two points trying to create an analogy with light that I was responding to
Neither EM wave interference nor noise cancelling headphones are quantum mechanics. It’s not nitpicking.
This is fundamentally not true.
Light is made of electromagnetic waves. If you can control the timing of those waves precisely enough, you can add another light with the opposite phase (an inverted wave) that will cancel out the other light.
This is what happens in the famous “double slit experiment”. It’s also the same principal as noise cancelling headphones albeit with sound pressure waves instead of EM waves.
Scientists have actually cooled atoms very close to absolute zero by shining a laser at them
I’m curious how that could possibly be the case…
You said in another comment that you were both making $45k. According to this table from the IRS you would each be paying $3,743 as single filers and $7,483 filling jointly. That adds up to a $3 savings when you get married. Not too mention a $6k difference is 80% of the total taxes owed so it would be wild to see that big of a variation caused by filling jointly.
Perhaps there was some tax break or credit you got when you were single that you lost when you got married? In that case, couldn’t you just file your taxes separately if there really was a significant difference from filing jointly?