On this day in physics: 25 January 1839, Michael Faraday announces the first photographs have been taken during his Friday Night Discourse meeting. They were referred to as "Photogenic Drawings" and a paper revealing more about this process was published in the following weeks.
Word of the day- A Wave Function is a quantum mechanical property of everything that exists. A wave function of an object is the probability finding that object at any particular place at any particular time. If you calculate the wave function over all of space, the value will be 1, since there is a 100% chance of finding everything that exits somewhere in space at any given time. The wave function is critical in Schrodinger's Equation, which are most student's first introduction to the concept of a wave function. It is most usually described with the Greek letter phi. Let's go back to the word of the day a few days ago: electron. An electron which is in an atom's orbit has its wave function distributed around the atom, known as the electron shell. However, an electron's wave function is stretched across all space, and there is a very small chance of finding it somewhere else for a brief moment. Electrons "take advantage" of this wave function in a phenomenon known as tunneling. Consider it in this way. There is an electron on one side of a wall. There is a very small part of the electron's wave function on the other side of the wall, meaning there is a small small small chance that the electron's position will be on the other side of this wall. If the electron is to crash into the wall over and over, billions, and billions of times, sooner or later this probability becomes more of a certainty, and the electron is able to "tunnel" to the other side of the wall.
Killer Resource: Astronomy Picture Of The Day App.
Keywords: Wave, Function, Quantum, Mechanics
