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Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

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101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#101
post #22

The wave/particle duality notion isn't really meant to hold an accurate deep insight into QM, it's just meant to inform intuitions, and sorta communicate it to laypeople.

This is not correct. The duality is the fact that an elementary particle is point-like but requires wave mechanics to describe its motion. Another related discovery was that energy waves, too, consist of quanta, which in many respects behave as particles. Those are valuable physical insights (similar in its power to the idea that “everything consists of atoms”).

I disagree with your disagreement, but perhaps we all three agree.

The electrons/photons/whatever must be described quantum field theory, but the math is too complex to use it unless it's a very simple experiment with a few particles or with a computer. So it's good to have some simplifications.

In some cases, you can approximate an electron/photon/whatever as a wave. The math is much simpler and with some training you can to with paper and pencil or in some simple cases with handwaving.

In other cases, you can approximate an electron/photon/whatever as a particle. The math is much simpler and with some training you can to with paper and pencil or in some simple cases with handwaving.

I don't like the name "wave–particle duality" but it is probably too late to change it. It's not true that an electron/photon/whatever is sometimes a particle and sometimes is a wave. It is always a weird quantum thing that sometimes can be approximated as particle and sometimes can be approximated as wave.

For historical reasons, people discovered first the approximations, named it as the "wave–particle duality", and later understood what is really happening.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#102
post #100

> What many don’t realize is that the double slit experiment (with particles), proposed by Feynman in 1963, was for decades only a thought experiment. Finally, in 2013, it was successfully performed with electrons. It’s easy to see why it took so long: the slits were 62 billionths of a meter apart. Who is this clown? I did the two slit experiment using a CRT (aka using electrons) in undergrad experimental physics cla…

Doing it with actual slits and standalone particles is not so easy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Doing the two slit experiment with electrons and actual slits is absolutely trivial, and that link doesn't say what you think it means.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#103
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the classical variables would have to either influence each other faster than light, or be pre-set since the beginning of the universe in a malicious conspiracy Why is superdeterminism almost universally rejected by working physicists? From the outside, it feels like the most parsimonious explanation: there is just a single way things are and will be, set in motion from the very beginning. It doesn’t feel like a co…

Because if you take superdeterminism seriously, you can't do science. Sure, it is logically possible that the world runs on classical mechanics, but that random factors in the light emitted from opposite ends of the observable universe billions of years ago were delicately set at that point so that whenever you run an experiment with it, naively assuming that no such correlations exist, quantum mechanics appears to b…

> you might as well not bother getting out of bed in the morning.

Sometimes I feel that way.

But I get up, take my meds, and press on.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#104
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

de Broglie-Bohm has the same problems as usual for such theories. I wrote an article once [0] about such things and I'll just quote from it. > To understand the working physicist’s position, it is useful to consider pilot wave theory. This alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation is often championed by realist philosophers, who would prefer that measurable properties, such as the position of a quantum particle, s…

This is as good a description of the ontological limitations of pilot wave theory as any, but many of the criticisms apply to almost literally any interpretation of quantum mechanics whatsoever. As a physicist with a passing interesting the subject of foundations, its my feeling that what quantum mechanics tells us is that at least one aspect of our classical ontologies is not correct. My personal bet is that its loc…

I thought that locality had had to be abandoned long ago, at least for entangled particles.

Of all the oddities pressed on us by alternative interpretations, non-locality between particles that have once interacted seems least troubling. Or is that not enough?

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#105

1. It’s very nice to be introduced to Landé and Duane. 2. After so much emphasis on reason and experiment and evidence, it is jarring to switch gears to a conspiracy theory about scientists concealing or ignoring theories in order to make themselves seem “superhuman.” 3. It’s very nice to be introduced to Landé and Duane.

You'd be surprised how much scientists hush and push dissenting voices which don't suite a particular theory which one cabal wants to be true. Sean Caroll has been advocating strongly in public to go back and take a look at measurement problem but nobody wants to do it. He speaks more about this on his podcast (mindscape) and also on Joe Rogans podcast ( I mean the fact that he had to bring it up in Joe Rogans podcas…

Scientists generally don't like to talk about things they can't say anything meaningful about. (String theorists are in another category.) "Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." -- Wittgenstein; maybe the only useful thing he said.

So, for example, plasma fluid dynamics is way, way harder than regular fluid dynamics, which is itself very hard. So, anything that takes understanding plasma fluid dynamics to talk about, most try not to discuss. If they can get an interpretation together that describes a phenomenon without reference to plasma fluid dynamics, but only, e.g. heat and gravity, they will prefer that, even if it doesn't account for everything. Then, they will prefer not to talk about the parts not accounted for. (Thus, the universe is full of "hot gas", not plasma. It's there, but it doesn't do anything.)

If it needs dark matter and dark energy, or perfectly parabolic nozzles in the geysers of Enceladus, or volcanoes on Io that bob about like ducks in a bath, then so be it. They're only human, and used to being right.

Solar physicists are awesome because they take on plasma fluid dynamics head-on, and get meaningful results. They are hot on the trail of the apparently-million-degree solar corona. So to speak.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#106

I absolutely agree. We tend to forget that nothing is still in our universe. Everything to the smallest quanta oscillates. The only way to get something to stop moving is by freezing it. You need to hit absolute zero to stop movement completely, I don't believe we have even observed absolute zero. If you think about it, absolute zero shouldn't be possible. There are an infinite amount of degrees between 1 and 0. Aren…

They don't stop at absolute zero, either, because then position and momentum would both be fixed.

But there is a continuous range of temperature all the way down, and there is plenty of work at increasingly tiny fractions of the last degree. It is meaningful to talk about what happens at a billionth of a degree.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#107
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is as good a description of the ontological limitations of pilot wave theory as any, but many of the criticisms apply to almost literally any interpretation of quantum mechanics whatsoever. As a physicist with a passing interesting the subject of foundations, its my feeling that what quantum mechanics tells us is that at least one aspect of our classical ontologies is not correct. My personal bet is that its loc…

I thought that locality had had to be abandoned long ago, at least for entangled particles. Of all the oddities pressed on us by alternative interpretations, non-locality between particles that have once interacted seems least troubling. Or is that not enough?

There isn't any consensus on what aspects of our classical ontology are the right ones to get rid of. You can preserve local realism if you have superdeterminism, for instance.

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#108
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it with actual slits and standalone particles is not so easy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Doing the two slit experiment with electrons and actual slits is absolutely trivial, and that link doesn't say what you think it means.

“The general perception is that the electron double-slit experiment has already been performed. This is true in the sense that Jönsson demonstrated diffraction from single, double, and multiple (up to five) micro-slits [2], but he could not observe single particle diffraction, nor close individual slits. In two separate landmark experiments, individual electron detection was used to produce interference patterns; however, biprisms were used instead of double-slits [3, 4]. First, Pozzi recorded the interference patterns at varying electron beam densities. Then, Tonomura recorded the positions of individual electron detection events and used them to produce the well known build-up of an interference pattern. It is interesting to point out that the build up of a double-slit diffraction pattern has been called 'The most beautiful experiment in physics' [5, 6], while the build-up for a true double-slit has, up to now, never been reported.”

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/15/3/03...

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#109
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tend to agree, the notion of matter being in two places at once is nonsense. Based on what? Empirical experience with macroscopic objects? There are tons of phenomenons that are at odds with everyday empirical experience for that to matter (relativity has all kinds of such cases).

Based on the fact that no two reference frames are the same. Based on the fact that everything points to the universe being deterministic. Also we have never been able to even prove it mathematically.

How about radioactive decay? Is that deterministic? Do atoms contain extra state somehow that determines when they will decay?

Re: Double Slit Experiment No Mystery

#110
post #83

Has the double slit experiment been done and verified in a vacuum? I'm able to produce the superficial results with a simple neon laser, but it always struck me that outside a vacuum, there is a lot available to skew those results.

> Has the double slit experiment been done and verified in a vacuum?

99.9999999% sure yes, but I can't find a source with the actual experiment. The versions with electrons are made in vacuum, but I'm not sure they use the double slit pattern.

You can reproduce the experiment with light in air. It's expected that you will get the same result in vacuum. An actual experiment is nice, but the setup in more complicated, so it's not done in a normal lab class.

It should be easy to setup for someone with access to a vacuum pump, and some free time (1 week top). It would be nice to see how the lines move when the refraction index of the air that is almost 1 changes to the refraction index of vacuum that is exactly 1.

It's hard to convince someone of doing the actual experiment, because it looks a lot of work without an insightful result. Perhaps you are lucky and someone already did this. I guess this is the case, but I can't find it. Perhaps you can convince someone like Cody of "Cody's lab" to make the experiment and upload a video.

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