We like to imagine that "empty space" is empty. It's not. Empty space is full of energy. And, randomly, a pair of particles will pop into existence out of that energy. One of those particles is made of matter, and one of them is made of antimatter. Antimatter is a confusing subject too, with many explanations available online, but for now all you need to know is that if they touch each other, then they explode and disappear. A billionth of a second or so after they appear, virtual particles will crash into each other and cease to exist. Virtual particles appear to violate a big assumption from classical philosophy and from common sense: everything that exists needs to have a cause. Still, that is not the only assumption that we have had to throw out the window because of quantum physics...
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Just like superposition, big things are much less likely to teleport than small things. When something randomly jumps from one side of a barrier to the other between measurements, we call that "quantum tunneling."
Let's talk about the person in the dark room again. That person can be in different places every time you turn on the light. But if you walled off the corner of the room, then they could still appear in that corner if you flipped the light switch enough times. Even though they are usually on one side of the wall, they are sometimes on the other side. From your perspective, it looks like the person teleported through the wall! |
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