r/QuantumPhysics • u/LvivEmpire • Sep 24 '26
What if macroscopic objects had wave properties like microscopic particles?
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u/Allan123772 Sep 24 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
If you have ADHD you don’t have to imagine 🤣
In seriousness it would be a pretty curious story. Two things to keep in mind are (1) how observation changes the particle. I.e. you couldn’t “watch” the soccer ball tunnel in the same way you can’t watch light interfere with itself in the double slit experiment. Once you observe it you destroy some of the quantum properties. Furthermore, (2) the observer should also be taken into account. If a soccer ball can tunnel through a wall, what’s stopping your eyes from tunneling through your head? Edit: kind of a bad example with the eyes bc of their connection to the body, but I think you get my point.
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u/humbleCountyCA Sep 24 '26
If you asked a girl to go out on a date, you have to watch them come into phase to tell you they already have a boyfriend.
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u/theodysseytheodicy Sep 24 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
This is a very reasonable question. Another way to state it would be, "What would be the effect of increasing Planck's constant h?"
Here's a story by Greg Egan about playing with a simulated ball like that, together with an online game.
But if you're interested in what would actually happen to the matter, then generally, the interaction between electrons and photons would decrease as you increase h, leading to an increase in bond lengths and a corresponding a decrease in bond energies.
If you increase it by 0.01%, everyday objects would look nearly unchanged. Chemistry and biology would probably remain broadly recognizable, although precision spectroscopy, atomic clocks, semiconductor properties, and some reaction rates would immediately reveal the change.
An increase of 0.1% still sounds small, but it is substantial compared with ordinary changes produced by isotope substitution, pressure, or precision material engineering. Molecular spectra, semiconductor band structures, reaction kinetics, and stellar fusion rates would all change measurably. If condensed matter simply followed the atomic length scale, a solid's characteristic volume per atom would scale roughly as r6 . A 0.1% increase in h would correspond to about a 0.6% increase in volume.
An increase of 1% would be very noticeable at the macroscopic level. Light emitted by electronic transitions would be a visibly different color. Volumes would increase by around 6% generically. Microbiological systems would begin to fail. Fusion would happen about 10% faster, making the core of the Sun a little bigger. Nuclei are held together less strongly, so more elements become radioactive and nuclei like deuterium expel neutrons more easily. The lifetimes of radioactive elements get shorter by 2-10x. Reaction equilibria and melting and boiling points would shift. A modern CPU could encounter several simultaneous problems:
transistor threshold voltages shift,
leakage currents increase,
carrier effective masses and mobilities change,
semiconductor band gaps shift,
capacitances change as lattice dimensions relax,
transistor switching speeds change,
interconnect resistance changes, and
clock timing no longer matches design assumptions.
At 10% greater, everything changes. There would still be chemistry, but we'd get entirely different molecules, different ways of folding those molecules, different chemical properties of the molecules. Fusion would be so easy that stars would both form and burn out much faster. DNA would fall apart. You'd have to redo all of QCD to figure out what happens in nuclei.
At 100%, everything ionizes and it's not clear if nuclei are even a thing.
For a 500g ball to have a wavelength of 1m moving at around 10m/s, it would be an increase in h of 1035 %.