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The Most Important Thing You Can Understand About Quantum Physics
This piece will teach you the single most crucial insight into quantum physics — truly, it’s the most important takeaway. But first, let’s discuss Lego bricks.
Lego, really?
When you build with Lego, it’s obvious how things fit together: bricks snap, towers need wide bases, and angled structures provide stability.
But have you ever wondered where these rules come from?
Are they built into the material itself? If you melted down Lego bricks into a puddle of plastic, would you find instructions floating inside the liquid, telling it how to snap together?
No. The chemistry of plastic sets the stage — strength, flexibility, and so on — but it doesn’t dictate how you should arrange bricks to form a castle or spaceship.
The concept of “snapping together” doesn’t exist at the level of polymer molecules. At that microscopic scale, it’s all about molecular bonds and electron clouds. We can, in principle, say that these fundamental molecular rules allow the plastic to form Lego bricks that “snap,” but you can’t look at a single polymer chain and see any sign of that snapping behavior.
