Chapter 3: What Is a Particle?

Subatomic particles, according to Richard Feynman, "do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen." So I am confused; what on earth do subatomic particles act like? I don't really know, and it seems that Richard Feynman thinks its ok for me to feel this way.

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw however, are attempting to explain to me exactly how subatomic particles act in this chapter. The craziest piece of knowledge that I gained from this chapter is that quantum particles can be in many places all at once. 

An important part of this chapter is the famous double slit experiment. Here is what is said about the path of an electron traveling in an electron wave through the double slits onto a screen.

The correct answer to the question 'how did that electron get to the screen' is 'it traveled by an infinity of possible routes, some of which went through the upper slit and some of which went through the lower one'.

So essentially, quantum particles can be in more than one place at a time and electrons can travel many different paths at once. My mind is yet again blown. This stuff is pretty cool (and cool is not a very good adjective to describe this).

Here's one more great quote from this chapter:

Nature really does use random numbers, and the loss of certainty in predicting the positions of particles in an intrinsic property of the physical world: probabilities are the best we can do.