Quantum tunneling for Dummies

Quantum tunneling is the kind of phenomenon which practically defies everything you’ve ever believed in. well, not practically, theoretically. The very basic fundamental principle of a solid is its…solidness? Precisely. If there’s a wall in front of you, you can’t go through it, you need a door. According to quantum tunneling, if you hit a tennis ball for long enough at a wall, sooner or (most probably) later, it’ll finally pass through the wall without damaging it.

Yes folks, this is the time you look at me in a weird ways and say, “yeah right, I believe that”, but BELIEVE it! Well, maybe not for such macroscopic particles, but this is happening every day. Technically speaking, the sun doesn’t have enough heat or energy to fuse two hydrogen molecules into an alpha particle (yes, 6000®C isn’t enough and we dream of nuclear fusion. What a joke), yet it does. And the reason? It’s the miniscule possibility that a particle will appear where it is not supposed to, or rather, where the possibility of its being is negligible AND create what is the basis of life on earth (bringing us to a lot of philosophical if life is all but a coincidence and if this coincidence has a chance of being repeated somewhere else in our cosmos and blah blah).

Consider a ball rolling off into a valley, bound on the other side by a higher hill. Classic physics states that the ball cannot have sufficient energy to roll over from the other side of the higher hill unless an external velocity is imparted on this ball, but according to quantum tunneling, there is the minute possibility that this ball will turn out to be that one coincidence out of a million and DIG THROUGH the hill instead of rolling over.

 This brings us onto a whole new dimension to explore. Owing to the wave motion of particles, we could be TELEPORTING matter through solids! Electrons are, through this principle, occasionally calculated to be INSIDE the nucleus of an atom, trapped among the protons and neutrons! They stand stilled a beam of light by passing it through Bose-Einstein condensate, old story. But passing photons through cesium gas at sub zero temperatures, it was noticed that some particles passed through BEFORE they’d been released! THAT’S quantum tunneling to you.