By the way, light has no speed. Light is not a "thing" that "moves" through space, even if it is a particle. Source and target of light incidence simply exchange their excitations through entanglement, symmetrically. There is no direction of movement. And there is no movement.
Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
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Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#72By the way, light has no speed. Light is not a "thing" that "moves" through space, even if it is a particle. Source and target of light incidence simply exchange their excitations through entanglement, symmetrically. There is no direction of movement. And there is no movement.
And time is a product of causality chain established by light incidence, thus making up reality.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because someone might come up with a problem that is a bit like X and a bit like Y.
The French called this the "le principe Donny et Marie," based on some research from the mid 70's for some reason. Oooh la la, those hot pants!
Hmmm... that post was a little bit HackerNews-ish, and a little bit Reddit-ish.
I’m going to simultaneously upvote and downvote you.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#74> we can swap one type of detector for another at the very last instant, implying that the photon was “always a wave” or “always a particle” in order to produce the result that we see.
Can't help but think that whatever supposedly "happened" is not that relevant, what matters is the measurement.
Clearly "the photon" is only the effect of the interaction between light and the act of measuring it. You just can't remove the measurement from the phenomenon.
In our reality ("to us"), light doesn't make sense if it's not measured, and the result of that measurement is not light itself, but the product or outcome of the interaction of the measuring device/method and whatever "light is" (when not being measured), if light can even exist without being measured (which is unknowable).
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#75By the way, light has no speed. Light is not a "thing" that "moves" through space, even if it is a particle. Source and target of light incidence simply exchange their excitations through entanglement, symmetrically. There is no direction of movement. And there is no movement.
Where can I read more about this? Thank you in advance
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#76By the way, light has no speed. Light is not a "thing" that "moves" through space, even if it is a particle. Source and target of light incidence simply exchange their excitations through entanglement, symmetrically. There is no direction of movement. And there is no movement.
I believe you're right. While I'm not a physicist by profession, I took enough high level physics to be dangerous. The way I interpret lorentz contraction and time dilation, there will always be a possible observer for which the photon does not need to exist because the interacting particles collided.
This is in much the same way that there is always a possible observer that sees only electrical interactions when magnetic fields are involved for other observers.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#77This 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…
I hope that this is as amazing (complete, consistent and coherent) as it initially looks.
But I don't see your quote in the link. Did it come from another source, or did the linked sequence change in the interim, or something else?
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#78Watch 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...
I watched, and was disappointed. First I had to listen to the debunked psychological theory of two brains, which anyway was unrelated to the topic. The they brought the thing... and it was a tiny dot that did nothing. Then he excitedly talked about how cool it is.
Okay, I get that the theory is cool. But what's the point of showing audience an object, where they can't see anything interesting anyway? And perhaps, if you are quantum physicist, stick to quantum physics and don't meddle in psychology. You should know best how annoying it is when psychologists start meddling in quantum physics, so don't do the same thing in reverse.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#79By the way, light has no speed. Light is not a "thing" that "moves" through space, even if it is a particle. Source and target of light incidence simply exchange their excitations through entanglement, symmetrically. There is no direction of movement. And there is no movement.
Where can I read more about this? Thank you in advance
I haven't read this somewhere. I was just consolidating my thoughts through reasoning. The first abnormality I observed was light propagation having a direction that is asymmetric between source and target. There is no room for that asymmetry. Next is, assumption that time, space and causality exist independent of light, and movement of light being described in terms of those concepts. This can't be true, because all these (light, time, space, change, causality, direction etc) only have mutual existence but not independent or absolute existence. So, light can't be described in terms of others as if others already exist. For more discussion, you can ping me at vrpbkp_at_gmail.
Re: Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?
#80Earlier 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…
If you want to think about it, I suggest that you keep a “library” of classic experiments in your head. There are experiments that show that light is not a particle (in the classical sense) and other experiments that show that light is not a wave (in the classical sense). Quantum mechanics is the result of trying to find a theory consistent with both sets of experiments. Originally, the double slit experiment was see…
> If light were a wave that carried energy, this wouldn’t explain why an equal amount of energy has a different effect depending on its wavelength.
Not by itself but the accompanying theory - classical EM theory - does explain why different frequencies interact differently. Absorption/dispersion spectra are well described by wave theory. What the classical wave theory can't explain easily are coincidence counts in extremely weak light (antibunching), or things such as the Compton scattering.