Question: What’s the weirdest fact about atoms and stuff like that you know?

Sam Godwood answered on 16 Jun 2025:

I’m probably a bit biased because it’s my area of research, but the weirdest fact has to come from quantum mechanics—that’s the science of how tiny things like atoms actually behave. There’s loads of strange stuff, but one of the weirdest is something called superposition.

It means a particle—like an atom or an electron—can be in multiple ‘places’ or states at once. When it’s left alone, it’s not just in one place—it’s kind of in all the possible places at the same time. But as soon as we measure it, it ‘chooses’ one place and ends up there. Until then, all we can do is calculate the probability of where it might be.

It sounds crazy, but it’s real—and it’s one of the key ideas behind how quantum computers work. If that sounds interesting, definitely check out some YouTube videos on it, doing that was one of the reasons I became interested in physics.