this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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The duality of particles (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 6 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 6 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.