The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios

considering the array of abilities that the character Dr. Manhattan displays in the pages of Watchmen, there does appear to be some interesting physics at play.
    In addition to his now bright blue appearance, Osterman gained the ability to alter his size at will, to teleport himself and others instantly from one location to another, and to be aware of the future, that is, to experience time—past, present, and future—simultaneously. That is to say, following the removal of his intrinsic field and subsequent rebirth as Dr. Manhattan, Jon Osterman appears to have gained independent control over his quantum mechanical wave function.
    His quantum mechanical what? We have now reached the point in our amazing story where we consider what a wave function is, and why gaining control over it would be akin to possessing superpowers. Here’s the short answer: The quantum mechanical aspect of any object is reflected in its wave function. By performing simple mathematical operations on the wave function, one can calculate the probability density (that is, the probability per unit volume) of finding the object, whether it is an electron, an atom, or a large blue, naked physicist, at any point in space and time. If you could indeed alter your wave function at will, you would gain the ability to instantly appear at some distant location, without ever technically traveling between your initial and final points; you could change your size (from either very large to tiny); you could diffract into multiple versions of yourself; and you would be cognizant of your future evolution. And you’d likely give off a blue glow, though as we’ll see later, that is more a consequence of leaking high-energy electrons—a side effect of rebuilding yourself at the atomic level.

    While Jon Osterman is not a real person, nor is there a wave associated with an “intrinsic field,” nor any such thing as an “intrinsic field,” for that matter, the rest of the preceding discussion about the fundamental forces of nature (that is, electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces) was correct. The experiments described in Section 1 demonstrated that there is a wave associated with the motion of electrons and atoms, and in fact with the motion of any and all matter. The concept of a wave function, introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his “matter-wave equation,” is the key to understanding all atomic and molecular physics. It might as well be called the “intrinsic field” for the central role it plays in the understanding of chemical bonding, by which all matter is held together.
    At the start of the twentieth century, physicists debated whether the electrical charges in an atom were spread out throughout the atom, uniformly distributed in space, or existed as concentrated pointlike negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. A series of experiments by Ernest Rutherford, Ernest Marsden, and Hans Geiger convinced scientists by 1911 that atoms were comprised of massive, positively charged protons in a physically very small nucleus, toward which the lighter, negatively charged electrons are electrically attracted. This is the familiar “solar system” picture of the atom that you might remember from grade school. But an electrically charged solar-system atom has a big problem in stability.
    The Earth is pulled toward the sun by gravity, so what keeps our planet from falling into the sun? It turns out that this is a common misconception—the Earth is falling into the sun all the time! Don’t panic—we’re not on a death spiral to a fiery end. The Earth is moving at a high velocity at nearly a right angle to an imaginary line connecting us to the sun. The gravitational pull toward the sun deflects the Earth away from its straight-line path (an object in motion will remain in motion—unless acted upon by an outside force, such as gravity from the sun). The combination of the acceleration toward the sun, and the motion at a right