Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-quantum-physics-complicated.html
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Quantum Physics Just got less Complicated
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @08:36AM
Reducing two mysteries to one? More like 100 to 99!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @08:41AM
And you won't be 1!
(Score: 5, Funny) by dyingtolive on Saturday December 20 2014, @09:15AM
I feel bad for the infinite other universes where quantum physics got harder.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @08:45AM
The mostly hairless apes have measured the mantissa already. Should have used long double.
(Score: 1) by nivieru on Saturday December 20 2014, @10:25AM
That's nothing new, really.
when quantum mechanics was first studied about a hundred years ago, many seemingly different "weirdnesses" appeared.
wave-particle duality was one of the first concepts of the developing theory, trying to explain certain measurments in a consistent way.
The uncertainty principle came a bit later from a the mathematics describing the theory.
but once we developed a complete mathematical description of QM, we see that all the "weirdness" actually comes from a few simple axioms.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 20 2014, @04:53PM
But with such statements, you don't get an article in Nature.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:43AM
I am not an expert on quantum theory. I took a total of two classes in college that dealt significantly in quantum theory. I had always assumed that wave-particle duality was due to the uncertainty in position of particles. It's entirely logical- but then, perhaps my attempts to use logic are why I always found quantum mechanics so difficult. I guess I lucked out this time.