Absolutely Small

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Schrödinger’s Cat

WHY ARE CHERRIES RED and blueberries blue? What is the meaning of size? These two questions seem to be totally unrelated. But, in fact, the second question doesn’t seem to be a question at all. Don’t we all know the meaning of size? Some things are big, and some things are small. But, the development of quantum theory showed that the first two questions are intimately related and that we had a completely false concept of size until a couple of decades into the twentieth century. Our ideas about size, if we thought about size at all, worked just fine in our everyday lives. But beginning in approximately 1900, the physics that was used to describe all of nature, and the physics that still works remarkably well for landing a ...