Hacker News Reader

Comment by cvoss | Hacker News Reader

Common sense cannot be trusted on matters like these. Common sense is calibrated for reasoning over matters encountered in daily life. The further away we get from that, into more and more exotic phenomena, the less common sense can apply. Black holes are very far from the domain of common sense.

View on HN

I always suggest looking at the quantum eraser experiment to see how bad common sense works with quantum mechanics. It's fairly simple but intuition fails most people when it comes to explaining how it works.

No need for funky stuff, just do the classic (lol) Young's slits experiment which should be more than enough oddness for anyone.

I was shown it at school, using microscope glass slides that we waved over a Bunsen burner running cold, to coat with soot. We then carefully etched parallel lines with a compass by hand. Our (~17 y/o) efforts were a bit random but we did get some smudgy banding results on the screen.

Using a compass is interesting, use two razor blades taped together is much easier and it’s close enough to perfect parallel lines.

It was the '80s so safety razor blades were available but in a posh public school (UK version) aged ~17, compasses were everywhere and large old style razor blades were not - the modern style razor with one or two thin blades was a thing. We could have probably got some needles from matron for a finer point, than a compass.

Your pair of razor blades is a great solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com