EPISODE PREVIEW
Commencing with a visit to an ancient Polish salt mine, Dr Bronowski looks at the world inside the atom, tracing the history of ideas that have made 20th-century physics "the greatest achievement of the humans imagination."
© 1974, British Broadcasting Company
Read and think about this poem.
Quanta (like photons of light, or electrons, or atoms) behave very strangely, and all of the strangeness is manifested in a seemingly simply phenomenon called the double slit experiment. Read a description of the experiment in the first few paragraphs about it HERE.
I found a way to do a very simple double slit experiment with nothing but a laser pointer and a needle. Here is the result:
Click the picture to expand it. Notice the small interference spots (called fringes) on either side of the central spot. Can you imagine how this experiment might be somewhat analogous to the two-slit experiment?
