Internet-science Memes

Someone just casually recreated the double-slit experiment on a global scale and got the entire world to participate as photons. You know, that famous quantum physics experiment where shooting light through two slits creates an interference pattern? Well, apparently random people on the internet decided Iran would be their aperture, and the result is this beautiful wave-like distribution of responses clustered around the region. The double-slit experiment is one of quantum mechanics' greatest hits—it shows that particles like photons behave as both particles AND waves, creating those characteristic interference patterns. Here, instead of light waves, we've got human curiosity waves rippling outward from Iran's location. The pattern isn't quite as clean as what you'd get in a physics lab (people aren't exactly coherent light sources), but the clustering is chef's kiss. Props to whoever convinced hundreds of strangers to unknowingly cosplay as quantum particles. This is what happens when physics nerds have too much time and access to the internet.