I've blogged before about the physics of bouncing a particle like a neutron on a table or other similar surface. Well, someone at the University of Arkansas has made an animation of how the spread of said particle over space evolves in time if it starts out in a "Gaussian wavepacket," which is a fancy way of saying that the neutron starts out looking more like a particle than a wave by being localized in space. The animation is here, while the full page containing the full Quicktime movie is here.
The red dot is a classical bouncing ball evolving over time (it's pretty boring comparatively). On the left is a plot of the probability of finding the particle at a certain height (the vertical axis) at any given time of the movie. The quantum particle does sort of bounce, become kind of wavy and messy, and then bounces again, but out of phase with the classical ball.
TL;DR: Cool animation of doing mundane physics with a quantum system with results that are anything but mundane. Click the links to have your mind blown.
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