Similarly, if you place an electron in a trap shaped like a tiny champagne flute, hemming in its position with barriers on all sides, you would expect that it too would remain in place. Indeed, most of the time the electron does. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the electron disappears from the trap and rematerializes outside it. Surprising as such a Houdini-like move may be for us, in quantum mechanics it is business as usual. Using Schrödinger’s equation, we can calculate the probability that an electron will be found in this or that location, such as on the inside or on the outside of
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