Jim Alcalailly, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Once upon a time when doing a lecture

at the Royal Institution, you spoke about the famous double split experiment, this strange quantum

phenomenon whereby something sort of appears to, light appears to act as a wave and a particle at the same time.

And you issued a challenge. You said, now, if anybody thinks that they can offer a common sensical explanation for this kind of thing, then do send me an email. How did that work out for you? I wish I hadn't done that. I'd forgotten that I wasn't just talking to the three or four hundred people in the audience at the Royal Institution.

But obviously it gets recorded and goes out on their YouTube channel.

To this day, I mean, that's about 10 years ago now.

To this day, I receive, on average, one or two emails a week from people saying,

I've solved the two slits mystery.

You know, where's my Nobel Prize?

No, we've tried that. Yeah. There's a lot that's strange about quantum mechanics. Maybe we'll get into a few more of those things later on. But

the American, the great American physicist Richard Feynman said that the two-slit experiment

is sort of encompasses the central mystery of quantum mechanics

that we know that if when you send light through to two slits and it's in you get interference

patterns light and dark fringes what's weird is that sending particles indeed even entire

atoms through you get the same wave-like behavior when you send

particles through. So I went through in this lecture, I went through how come, you know,

quantum mechanics is this wonderful, powerful theory that has revolutionized the world, helped

our understanding of the subatomic world, and yet at its heart

there's this counterintuitive idea manifesting in this two-slits experiment that we still can't

explain properly.

Yeah.

So quantum mechanics is stereotypically thought of as the sort of weird, spooky, kind of creepy, leaves room for

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