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2 months agoYou got it pretty much on point. Shooting a laser at atoms is like shooting a machine gun at an indestructible target. If it moves towards you, you can slow it down. But preventing it from accelerating when the target is stationary is where quantum mechanics comes in. That is your explanation: The laser light only acts as a force when the light is resonant with the atom and the Doppler effect means that the resonance condition changes depending on the speed of the atoms.
It’s really useful for programming. It’s not always right but it has good approaches and you can ask it to write tedious parts of your code like long switch statements. Most of my programming problems were solved because I just explained the problem like Rubber Duck Debugging.