Sam's Odyssey 101

August 13, 2026

At the UChicago Precollege, Adrien and I teamed up to give a presentation on “Double-Slit Experiments and Quantum Mechanics.”

We learned about the Schroedinger equation and qubits, but I didn’t really understand what they meant. While preparing for the presentation, I realized the Schroedinger equation describes the electron as a wave, and this is possible because the electron is actually a wave. An amazing confirmation of this can be made using the famous double-slit experiment.

Thomas Young proved that light is a wave by showing the interference fringes the light makes after passing through the double-slit. Centuries later, people saw interference fringes for electrons in the same experiment! One can send electrons through the double-slit one by one, and the screen shows a clear interference pattern when enough data are gathered. I think this is amazing. Because the electron is a wave, it shows an interference pattern as a result of the superposition of waves.

A qubit, like |0> + |1>, can be understood as a superposition of the two electron waves, one from each slit, as we can see from this double-slit experiment. The double-slit experiment helps me a lot to understand quantum mechanics and qubits.

I will probably forget this soon unless I write it down here.

(Images from the internet)