Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, I would give a one word answer too: No
Can't the answer be both at the same time?
yes and no
Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#52Why not both?
It is both, or probably even better neither. Elementary particles are not classical particles and they are not classical waves. They are things that behave similar to classical particles in some circumstances and similar to classical waves in others, but they are neither. But as humans have no experience with such things in the macroscopic world, as we lack intuition for them, we desperately want them to be either or…
It might be some kind of an uncanny valley situation.
Because they share behavior with two very distinct objects we have macroscopic experience with, we try to categorize them as such.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#53This was linked recently: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantu... > An electron is not a billiard ball, and it’s not a crest and trough moving through a pool of water. An electron is a mathematically different sort of entity, all the time and under all circumstances, and it has to be accepted on its own terms. > The universe is not wavering between using particles and waves, unable to make up…
Imagine talking to an ancient philosopher who strongly believed that the everything in the world was made of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Explain electromagnetic waves to them.
They might end up saying, "so EM waves are invisible like Air, but they move around like Water waves, so really EM waves display Air-Water duality?"
That's how stupid the idea of wave-particle duality is. When you upgrade to a better model of the world, you have to drop the old concepts, and start anew with new concepts.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#54Earlier 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…
The problem with treating everything as a wave is that all these entities can only exist at certain energies. So the field is quantized.
IS quantisation a property that waves cannot have?
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#55Earlier 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.
How is that different from saying "this problem cannot be approximated these ways"?
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#56Earlier 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"?
How do you know a priori which kind of problem it is? Wave or particle are interpretations we attach to the results of applying the Schrodinger equation.
So if I understand your point correctly, approximations are a priori simplifications of problems, while we are talking about after-the-fact interpretations here, and therefore they are not the same? That sounds logical, thank you.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
No, you can't do that with one photon.
What you can do with one photon is to observe that it almost never appears in the screen in positions where geometry dictates there would be destructive interference of the photon was a wave.
If you literally try one photon only once, well, you can't really talk about probabilities; whatever happened happened (possibly you witnessed an unlikely event). But if you repeat the experiment N times, even if you do it spaced by many miles and many days, and collect the data you'll notice that the measurements cluster in ways that are compatible with interference bands.
If an actual physicist can tell me whether that I wrote above is fundamentally wrong, I'd be happy and have more questions
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
No, you can't do that with one photon.
If his apparatus was a "beta barium borate" crystal, isn't this exactly how entangled pairs of photons are created?
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#59Watch this TED talk by Aaron O'Conell's experiment if you haven't seen it. Even objects large enough to be seen can exhibit quantum effects. It's not the size of the object that matters but the condition of its environment. Of course the smaller the object, the easier it gets to create those conditions
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/making-sense-of-a-visible-quantum...
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#60In each of the many-worlds it is a particle. The wave behavior is caused by the interaction of the many-worlds.
Does that explain the two slit experiment, with a single particle inferring with its own wave function? If you consider it to be a particle, then you probably need to make the interact of the many-worlds be wavelike. At that point you probably have a more complex model than admitting the photon was not a particle.