Freaky Fzx Friday - Quantum Tunneling

Here's the family atop Rocky Mountain National Park in 2012.

LittleBoy was only 9 months old.

Taken from the same point.

Looking up from Shadow Mountain Recreation Area

We camped at 5000 ft in Loveland, CO and climbed past Estes Park to the peak at 12,000 ft.  Since it'll be years until we do it again, we descended to the Shadow Mountain Recreation Area and climbed back over to finish off the day back at camp.

Southeast of the park are Boulder and Denver

It was a long climb but it must have seemed far longer for the cyclists we passed on the way up.  It was a couple weeks before Sturgis so we saw a bunch of Harleys crusing the climb too.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally

Avoid the Black Hills of South Dakota around the first week of August unless you like black leather and unnecessarily loud cruisers.

Early settlers looking for the Pacific ocean had to cross the Rockies to get there.  Scouts found passable passes but it was never easy and many died.

We dig out routes to make them easier or make tunnels.  Pittsburgh is famously a city with 4,000 bridges but we have plenty of tunnels too.  They cost a lot to maintain.

Entrance and exit are stacked city side.

If you ever head out the Turnpike toward Philadelphia or NYC you'll see plenty of windmills and pass through a few tunnels.

Teeny tiny particles do the same as we do but they have to climb energy mountains

Imagine all the protons and neutrons in a nucleus.  It's a violent place but even though the protons should repel each other with impressive force, they require large amounts of energy to be removed.  They have to climb energy mountains to get out

Devil's Tower, WY

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

but they exit the nucleus anyway even though never have nearly enough energy to get over that mountain.  It's called radioactivity.  That's where Wave-Particle Duality and Heisenberg's Uncertainty come in.

The particle, acting as a wave, is uncertain of its own position and sometimes does what we would never expect.  It appears on the other side of the energy hill without ever having enough energy to climb it.

There are many other applications of quantum tunneling.  Sun Power is one I didn't know about until recently.  Just remember that tiny things don't just act like little baseballs.  They follow the very different rules of quantum mechanics and wave function probability.