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Observations Are Not Gentle In The Quantum World

A lesson into how merely observing or measuring properties alters quantum entities.

Dr. Ashish Bamania
Into Quantum

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I have been writing a Quantum Computing publication called Into Quantum, and here is one of the fundamental lessons you need to learn in Quantum mechanics before understanding how Quantum computers work.

Most of the physics you learned until now applies to the macroscopic world.

Your car stays at the same spot where you left it.

You can precisely measure how fast to drive your car and when to brake it to avoid a collision.

You also can measure the speed of other cars around you without causing real damage to them.

Unfortunately, as you move towards the microscopic world in the subatomic realm, things start to differ, and sometimes they make no sense at all.

A particle is no longer definite and can exist in multiple states.

More precisely, it can exist in a combination of multiple states simultaneously. This is called Superposition.

Mathematically, the state of a quantum system is represented by a wave function or ψ (psi).

The quantum state is the probability distribution of a quantum system's possible states (called Eigenstates).

What Happens When You Measure The Quantum State?

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