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We have all heard of a phenomena called “Quantum tunneling” or simply “tunneling”… what is it?

To put it simply, if you remember from older posts that old friend Jim, who lived in the pacific 2 dimensional city, working in a 2 dimensional multinational from the 2 dimensional world … we announced the next: by folding his 2 dimensional world (the piece of paper where he lives) we would be creating a shorter route for him to go from his home to his workplace! (more time to sleep for Jim then!). Problem is: he would never know, since he would never grasp this extra dimension, hence he would never be able to jump, or “tunneling” till the other side in a whimp.

Now the point: tunneling can be understood in various ways: to move from one point to another in a route shorter than the shortest way in our 3 dimensional universe, or to upcome a potential wall without going over it.

What do I mean with the potential wall ? imagine you have a huge wall right in front of you, and you need to cross it to get to the other side, the only way to cross it is to jump it over, isn’t it? then tunneling would be to traspass it (nearly impossible if this wall is infinitely long and indestructable) to get to the other side.

Well then, even if it’s a relatively new concept, the first one to design it and demonstrate it’s existence was …. (drums…) … NEWTON!

Let me explain myself:

According to Newtons Law’s for the Classical Mechanics, you can simplify any body to a punctual particle in it’s mass center. According to that, let’s make the example of the wall again, but instead of a person, we’ll use a rope.

Imagine the rope stacked to the wall and the floor, moving like a wurm. If you think it calmly, the rope’s mass center won’t jump over the wall, but go through it!!!

That’s what this weird genious called Newton named as “tunneling effect”, though it’s kinda different of what we understand for it nowadays.