An Ask The Experts question in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American has been intriguing me since I read it. The question was “Do the virtual particles in quantum mechanics really exist? The answer was - they are indeed real. This is strange enough, virtual particles are real? But the reason is even more mind bending. It seems that Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways.
In the Quantum world there is no conservation of energy law. Remember that law from high school science - energy can not be created or destroyed. Well it seems that one particle can become two heaver particles. Even as briefly as this occurs matter has been created.
The essential particles that make up everything are popping in and out of different states, so what is real and what is virtual?
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