Category: questions

How can electrons turn into waves and pop out of them?

In Millie's stories, electrons are sometimes particles and sometimes waves. This dual nature is called wave-particle duality. It's a typical quantum property that doesn't exist in our everyday life. Unfortunately, nobody fully understands how the transformation between particle and wave behavior...…
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How can electrons turn into waves and pop out of them?

Wave or particle?

Thomas Young, a British scientist, was one of the first to explore this question. He invented the double-slit experiment to determine whether light behaves as a wave or as a collection of particles. The basic idea is to study a beam of objects whose nature is unknown and observe how they behave. T...…
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Wave or particle?

What's the real shape of an electron?

In Millie's stories, electrons look like little spheres with a funny pointy hat. But in real life, nobody knows what they really look like because they’re so tiny that we can’t see them. Some scientists think they might be like tiny spheres, others think they’re like little clouds, and some say they...…
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What's the real shape of an electron?

What's an electron made of?

An electron is so tiny that we can't see it, even with the best microscopes. If you check out the article What is an elementary particle?, you'll learn that an electron isn’t made of smaller pieces — it’s one of the smallest building blocks of everything, called an elementary particle. In B...…
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What's an electron made of?

Are there East-West magnets instead of North-South?

In the Magnetic poles' article we learnt that magnets have two special ends called poles, and we call them the North pole and the South pole. These names come from how magnets behave when you let them move freely, like in a compass. A long time ago, people discovered that one end of a fr...…
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Are there East-West magnets instead of North-South?

Does a magnet work under water?

Water does not block or weaken a magnetic field, so the magnet will attract objects as usual underwater. That's why Magnet fishing is possible. Materials like wood, plastic, glass, and rubber let the magnetic field pass through them without weakening it. All these materials do not interact mu...…
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Does a magnet work under water?

Why some materials don't stick to a magnet?

Some materials don't stick to a magnet because they aren't magnetic. The article Magnetic materials explains the difference between magnetic and non-magnetic materials. Most magnetic materials contain iron, nickel, or cobalt. In these materials, some electrons have their spins naturally alig...…
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Why some materials don't stick to a magnet?

Why magnets can push and pull something without touching it?

Magnets can push and pull things without touching them because they are surrounded by an invisible magnetic field. In Book 2 the electrons explain to Millie how it works. The article about Magnetism shows us that the magnetic field spreads out around the magnet. It can be visualized with i...…
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Why magnets can push and pull something without touching it?