Perhaps the weirdest thing about the quantum world is that the notion of an object falls apart. Outside the world of molecules, atoms, and elementary particles, we have a very clear picture of an object as a thing we can behold. This applies to a door, a car, a planet, and a grain of sand. Moving to smaller things, the concept still holds for a cell, a virus, and a largeBut it is here, at the level of molecules and of distances shorter than a billionth of a meter or so, that the problems begin. If we keep moving to smaller and smaller distances, and continue to ask what are the objects that exist, quantum physics kicks in. “Things” become fuzzy, their shapes unclear and their boundaries uncertain. Objects evaporate into clouds, as elusive in their contours as words are to describe them. We can still think of crystals as being made of atoms arranged in certain patterns — like our familiar kitchen salt, which is made of cubic lattices of sodium and chlorine atoms.
But dive into the atoms themselves, and simple pictures evaporate in a puff of puzzlement.
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