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- JimTrebek, on 10/09/2009, -0/+15My best attempt at putting this in lay terms:
Chaos is when a very small change can make completely different things happen. Imagine dropping a bouncy ball on the ground. Even if you try to drop it at the same place, you really have no idea where it's going to end up because it's not physically possible to drop it the exact same way. If you could, however, then you should expect the exact same thing to happen since the laws of classical physics didn't change.
The problem with setting this up with really, really small (i.e. quantum) things is that you have no idea where anything exactly "is", so everything is basically random as far as they know. Somehow, they figured out how to spin this atom really precisely, so they could try to see if they could get the exact same results with the exact same beginning, and then change it a little bit, and see if became completely different.
Some parts were "stable", meaning that if you change it a little bit, the results are the same. Going back to the example, imagine that have a perfectly flat spot on the ground next to a rocky part of the ground. If we drop the ball on different parts of the ground, the exactly flat spot should do about the same thing as the flat spot slightly next to it since it will just bounce straight up and down, but if you do it on the rocky part, it could be completely different.
They noticed that when they spun it in the unstable space, the atoms became "entangled", which means that they basically do similar things even when they're far apart. It's like having two coins. Normally, you always know that there's a 50/50 chance for both coins, so even if one coin is heads, the other one has the same random chance of being heads or tails. The reason why entanglement is so spooky is that when you flip one coin, you then know what the other one is going to be, no matter how far apart they are. So now we know something new about it.
*brain asplode* - Gndoab, on 10/09/2009, -0/+4in lay terms?
- cuoops, on 10/09/2009, -0/+3source - http://uanews.org/node/27826
- ducksgoquak, on 10/09/2009, -0/+1Thanks:)
- kaosethema, on 10/10/2009, -0/+1Thank You
- mark076h, on 10/09/2009, -4/+1I was wondering about this just today actually, i knew Classical Chaos occurred the quantum world!
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