31–40 of 81 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not say "when solving problem X, we can approximate it as a particle" or "when solving problem Y, we can approximate it as a wave"?
Because someone might come up with a problem that is a bit like X and a bit like Y.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I right that thinking of everything as waves isn't a bad mental model? If everything is a field, then light is simply a three dimensional wave in that field. This makes the double slit experiment seem much easier to grasp: A single photon (which is a wave with a discreet amount of energy) travels through both slits at the same time. This causes the wave to interfere with itself and when it hits the wall it registe…
"When it hits the walls it registers as a single point" is pretty vague and seems to me to be where you're kinda glossing over a lot of the not-just-a-wave complexity. Im fairly certain you could make an experiment where one photon went through some apparatus and two specks of light appeared at the photo detector (with new wavelengths of course). What mechanism in your wave-only theory describes this split? Why do th…
Wave particle duality used to stress me out before I read Feynman talk about it. "Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen..... There is one lucky break, however—electrons behave just like…
Wave particle duality used to stress me out before I read Feynman talk about it. "Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen..... There is one lucky break, however—electrons behave just like…
Single beam of electrons diffracts like single beam of light, but otherwise electrons behave very differently than light: two electron beams interfere with each other, while two light beams do not.
Photons do interact! There is no two-photon vertex, that’s true, since there is no fundamental interaction between two photons. But put four photon/charged particle vertices together and you’ll get the 4-photon box diagram [1], whose contribution is nonzero.
[1]: Since I’m not good at painting diagrams in ASCII on HN, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article with the box rendered nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics
In each of the many-worlds it is a particle. The wave behavior is caused by the interaction of the many-worlds.
Even I might behave like a wave, it's just extremely unlikely :)
Let me summon the annoying physicist take on this by Sabine:
QM is one of those transitions and the jump bothers many.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Single beam of electrons diffracts like single beam of light, but otherwise electrons behave very differently than light: two electron beams interfere with each other, while two light beams do not.
Am I right that thinking of everything as waves isn't a bad mental model? If everything is a field, then light is simply a three dimensional wave in that field. This makes the double slit experiment seem much easier to grasp: A single photon (which is a wave with a discreet amount of energy) travels through both slits at the same time. This causes the wave to interfere with itself and when it hits the wall it registe…