xkcd #3141: Mantle Model

Title text:

Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3141/

explainxkcd for #3141

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    10 hours ago

    Also also: this isn’t just photons, everything is like this. It may not align with how we observe things on a microscopic scale, but this is fundamentally how the universe works.

    Wow, I think this answered my question before I asked it. So yeah, I was wondering about that double slit experiment, I’ve seen it demonstrated with photons and visible light, but do the principles demonstrated by the experiment actually apply to other particles? In the right environments, do atoms behave similarly?

    • OboTheHobo@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      So the thing that gets weird is that the heavier the particle is the more likely it is to interact with the slits themselves on the way through, in which case the wavefunction will collapse and it will seem to go through only one slit. Also, as the other person stated, even a hydrogen atom is really 4 fundamental particles that can interact with eachother. I’m not totally sure if double slit has been demonstrated with atoms but I do know it’s been done many times with electrons.

      Edit: its actually totally possible to do it with much, much larger things. From wikipedia:

      The experiment can be done with entities much larger than electrons and photons, although it becomes more difficult as size increases. The largest entities for which the double-slit experiment has been performed were molecules that each comprised 2000 atoms

      And here’s the study that did it: https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fs41567-019-0663-9

    • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago

      In theory yes, but once you have multiple particles interacting things get really complicated really fast and nice tidy interference patterns like in the double slit experiment become much less common.

      All atoms are multiple particles at quantum scales, even a single hydrogen atom is comprised of four.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        All atoms are multiple particles at quantum scales, even a single hydrogen atom is comprised of four.

        And I imagine we don’t have great methods for manipulating subatomic particles… Quarks and such don’t have magnetic charges, they’re probably hard to control as well as probably unstable on their own. So as a result I’d wager it’s hard to run experiments with those.