Skip to content

Explaining why we need wave functions and what they are.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

jakeneenan/waves

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

16 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

What's in a wave?

I found studying physics in college profound at times. I like how unintuitive the machinations of reality can be, so I made a little explainer about wave functions and the wave nature of matter. It's super accessible and errs on the side of including too little math rather than too much. You can check it out here.

Data analysis process

I made use of two great packages for visualizing optics and quantum objects:

Diffractio - I used diffractio to create the intensity distrubutions and diffraction patterns from the piece. The package allows you to simulate the classic double slit experiment (and others), control every aspect of the set up, and observe the results.

QMsolve - I used this to create the header gif, but I played around with it much more to jog my memory. You can do some really cool things with it that I couldn't justify putting in an entry-level explainer.

New skills

I used Adobe Illustrator and ai2html to clean up the graphics. Practicing with that has been really helpful. The real work here was presenting information I'm familiar with to an audience that probably has no exposure to it, which is a pretty good exercise for an aspiring reporter.

Further work

Did you find this interesting? Helpful? Completely incoherent? I'd like to know! I might like to make something that builds off this in the future.

About

Explaining why we need wave functions and what they are.

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published