Everything is connected as shown by this very interesting analysis of how different the duality of light truly is when viewed as a particle (photon) or as a wave depending on how the experiment is configured. Interesting to say the least.
The process is most often described in terms of the particle nature of light. An atom or molecule in a fluorescent tube enters an excited state when it’s heated, and spontaneously decays to a lower energy state, releasing a photon — the fundamental particle of light. When the photon enters your eye, something similar happens, but in reverse. The photon is absorbed by a molecule in the retina, and its energy boosts the molecule into an excited state.
But light is both a particle and a wave, and this duality is fundamental to the physics that rules the world of atoms and molecules. Despite this significance, the wave nature of light was often ignored, until recently.
It gets better.
According to Murch, all that a photon detector can tell you about spontaneous emission is whether an atom is in its excited state or its ground state. On the other hand, interferometers can catch the atom diffusing through a quantum “state space” made up of all the possible combinations of its two energy states.
What they discovered was really strange. When viewing light in its wave nature, the researchers observed that the artificial atom could move from a lower energy state to a higher one even as it decayed.
Why?
By one of the weirdest of all quantum effects — entanglement. According to quantum physics, when an atom emits light, the light and the atoms must become connected, or entangled, so that measuring a property of one instantly reveals the value of that property for the other, no matter how far away it is.
The Way of Tao rules, everything is connected, something known for over 3000 years.
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