this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
6 points (100.0% liked)

Science Memes

10970 readers
2069 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
6
The duality of particles (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It’s almost impossible to make sense of it from a “particle with wave properties” view.

"I want to emphasize that light comes in this form-particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave- like particles."

Richard Feynman, "QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." Introduction, Page 15.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As you read deeper, it's more and more obvious. Light is neither. It's a quantum mechanical object that has no direct analog in classical physics.

Under some conditions, the wave properties are dominant. In others, the particle. In most quantum mechanical problems, both are present.

My main point is that you get log jammed if you try and add the wave properties to a particle concept. There's nothing it can properly connect to. However, a wave can look like a particle, if you set it up right, and squint hard enough. In graph form, it's normal distribution with standard deviation close to zero. Basically a spike, with some slight rounding. It's far from perfect, but it gives our limited brains an anchor to work from.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Light is neither

I would agree that light is neither but Feynman is very adamant that it's a particle and he describes all the properties of light using a particle only model. It's much simpler conceptually to keep everything as a particle than treating light as a wave that sometimes collapses to a particle.

In his book he used the Mayan numbering system as an analogy. You can do everything in math by counting one by one, it's only extremely cumbersome. In a similar way he saw waves as a mathematical method to make calculating particles easier in some situations. But underlying the fancy math, it's still counting one by one.

Feynman argues that you can calculate and observe everything as only particles but you can never observe waves and have to make waves instantly transform into particles if you treat them as waves.