Hello, it’s been a while!
News: Jiangmin has decided to settle as a freelance writer and will be publishing only on an occasional basis from now on.
If you can still remember me from my long absence, then great! I can happily say that my Advanced Higher exams are done and dusted, and I very recently graduated from high school. This Autumn I’ll be starting an Integrated Masters degree in Theoretical Physics…somewhere, I’ll update you on that one in August.
As you may know, I took Advanced Higher Physics this year and around 30% of the qualification is made up of a research project which must be based on a topic of the course. For the previous qualifications, it was required to do your project on a pre-selected topic, which consequently took away the fun, because the topics selected were either classical mechanics or electricity, I.e. not modern physics. But with this? I thought, QUANTUM IT IS.
One of the most amazing things in the course is the de Broglie hypothesis of Quantum mechanics which I very quickly made my project title.
Some background on the de Broglie Hypothesis
In the 20s, the early stages of the construction of quantum theory, a physicist Louis de Broglie postulated the wave particle duality of nature suggesting that all matter had both wave and particle properties.
Particles and waves are very different things. Particles are localised – they are in one place at one time and therefore can have a precise position. Particles have mass, they can bounce off one another and transfer energy through collision. Waves, on the other hand, are delocalised – to assign a “position” to a wave doesn’t really make much sense, waves can carry energy without the net transfer of mass, capable of interference, diffraction, reflection and so on.
Passion For STEM 