Book

For more than a hundred years, the double-slit experiment has stood at the heart of physics. Send a single particle toward two narrow slits, and it leaves the pattern of a wave. Some of the greatest minds in history, Einstein, Bohr and many who followed, worked to understand what this means. Their work built quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories ever developed, and the experiment has been repeated with care in laboratories around the world. Yet the question of why a particle behaves this way remains open. The One Variable looks at one detail in that long history. Every one of these experiments takes place in a vacuum, built as carefully as the technology of its time allowed. Even so, in a typical high vacuum, 85 to 90 percent of what remains is water. It clings to the walls, it returns after pumping and baking, and it stays as ice on frozen surfaces. It is a well-known fact of vacuum engineering, and it has been present in these experiments from the start. This book asks what role that water might play. It follows the question through the double slit, interference and entanglement, and it offers a new way of seeing the space we call empty. It was nobody's oversight. It was simply the one variable left to examine.