For scientists and reviewers
Quantum Playground is a public-engagement piece, not a research artifact — but it was built to hold up under a scientist's scrutiny, not just a general audience's. This page states the method plainly and lists every primary source behind it.
What the demos are, and aren't
Each of the ten topics pairs a small interactive visualization with the physics behind it. The visualizations are deliberately schematic — glowing orbs standing in for particles, canvases standing in for laboratory apparatus — and none of them numerically simulates the underlying wave equation. They are teaching aids, not simulations.
Where a demo simplifies, or where the standard picture is still debated among physicists, that gap is flagged directly in its explanation and in the "A bit of the math" panel for that topic — not smoothed over.
Standards this build holds to
- Checked against primary literature. Every claim was verified against the original papers or an authoritative secondary source, not restated from memory or general pop-science summaries.
- Popular shorthand is labeled as such. Where a common explanation is known to be an oversimplification — the "virtual particle pairs" picture of Hawking radiation, for instance — the page says so explicitly and explains the better-supported mechanism alongside it.
- Speculative ideas are attributed, not presented as settled. "Quantum foam" is credited to John Wheeler's 1955 conjecture and marked as still experimentally unconfirmed, rather than presented as established physics.
- Open interpretational questions are named as open. The measurement problem, for example, distinguishes the experimentally solid Born-rule statistics from the philosophically unresolved question of what "collapse" physically is.
Build Your Own Experiment
A small online lab: a two-qubit circuit you build by hand, no code required. Pick a piece of equipment from the toolbar, place it on a wire, and run the experiment to see the resulting quantum state — exactly the state-vector math the rest of this site describes, computed live in your browser.
This lab computes exact statevector math (complex 4×4 matrices, live, entirely in your browser) — it's a real quantum-circuit simulator, just a minimal one: two qubits, six steps, no noise model. For anything larger, IBM Quantum Composer and QuTiP are real circuit-level and open-quantum-systems toolkits worth graduating to.
Citing this project
This is a public-engagement piece, not a peer-reviewed publication — but if you want to reference it (a talk, a syllabus, a blog post), here's a suggested informal citation:
References
The primary papers and results the physics on this site is drawn from, in the order they're first used across the ten topics.
- Feynman, R.P. (1948). Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. Reviews of Modern Physics, 20(2), 367–387. — path integral, Topic 1.
- Kennard, E.H. (1927). Zur Quantenmechanik einfacher Bewegungstypen. Zeitschrift für Physik, 44, 326–352; Robertson, H.P. (1929). The Uncertainty Principle. Physical Review, 34(1), 163–164. — rigorous form of Δx·Δp ≥ ħ/2, Topic 5.
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser & Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities." The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. — rules out local hidden-variable explanations, Topics 2 & 4.
- Merli, P.G., Missiroli, G.F. & Pozzi, G. On the statistical aspect of electron interference phenomena. American Journal of Physics, 44(3), 306–307 (experiment run 1974, published 1976); Tonomura, A., Endo, J., Matsuda, T., Kawasaki, T. & Ezawa, H. (1989). Demonstration of single-electron buildup of an interference pattern. American Journal of Physics, 57(2), 117–120. — single-particle double-slit interference, Topic 3.
- Bennett, C.H. & Brassard, G. (1984). Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computers, Systems and Signal Processing, Bangalore, 175–179. — the BB84 protocol, Topic 8.
- Grover, L.K. (1996). A Fast Quantum Mechanical Algorithm for Database Search. Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC '96), 212–219; Bennett, C.H., Bernstein, E., Brassard, G. & Vazirani, U. (1997). Strengths and Weaknesses of Quantum Computing. SIAM Journal on Computing, 26(5), 1510–1523. — Grover's algorithm and its proven optimality, Topic 7.
- Hawking, S.W. (1975). Particle Creation by Black Holes. Communications in Mathematical Physics, 43(3), 199–220; Unruh, W.G. (1976). Notes on Black-Hole Evaporation. Physical Review D, 14(4), 870–892. — black hole evaporation and its link to the Unruh effect, Topic 9.
- Wheeler, J.A. (1955). Geons. Physical Review, 97(2), 511–536. — the original, still-speculative "quantum foam" conjecture, Topic 10.
Every "A bit of the math" panel throughout the interactive build carries its own caveats and citation notes closer to the specific claim they support — this list gathers the primary sources behind them in one place. Corrections are welcome — see Contact.