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LIght wave-particle-duality

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ruveyn
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15 Feb 2013, 10:49 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Feralucce wrote:
It's all good... sorry for my strident posts... Simply put... Light is not a wave or a particle, it has properties of both. We use the terms in an effort to describe what we see... it transcends and defies description in the laymen's terms... Nothing else in physics suffers more from the observer effect worse than light.

That doesn't bode well for the so-called solidity of everything else though either. AFAIK they were doing this with whole atoms and getting a similar effect.


What is a "whole atom"? Atoms are made of smaller stuff.

ruveyn



techstepgenr8tion
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15 Feb 2013, 11:07 am

Feralucce wrote:
I disagree. There is nothing about atoms and even some molecules demonstrating wave/particle duality that contradicts the current model. It actually this behavior is predicted by a higgs field universe...

I guess I said this in a more vague manner than I meant to, then again its a bit tough not to have that happen because I'm going in a more philosophical/ontological direction with 'solidity'. It tends to confer that this is all essentially 'data', Higgs Boson being something like a qualifier.

ruveyn wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Feralucce wrote:
It's all good... sorry for my strident posts... Simply put... Light is not a wave or a particle, it has properties of both. We use the terms in an effort to describe what we see... it transcends and defies description in the laymen's terms... Nothing else in physics suffers more from the observer effect worse than light.

That doesn't bode well for the so-called solidity of everything else though either. AFAIK they were doing this with whole atoms and getting a similar effect.


What is a "whole atom"? Atoms are made of smaller stuff.

ruveyn

That's really my point though. They were able to do this with buckey-balls which are spheres of carbon. On the scale of QM this is relatively macro. I'm sure as Feralucce is implying that this would just intensify more with the particles, I'm just noting how far upstream the effect travels.



Apple_in_my_Eye
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16 Feb 2013, 5:10 am

The way I think of this wave/particle business is that our brains come pre-loaded with certain concepts because they were evolutionarily useful to our ancestors -- and that those concepts aren't actually true. So, the problem is that when it comes to these realms (tiny atomic scales, or moving near the speed of light) that outside of our (ancestors') sensory experience we don't have any intuitive pre-conceptions to help us understand.

(By "built-in concepts" I mean, --> i.e. Eudlidean geometry is useful if you are an organism that benefits from being able to navigate. It's intuitively obvious that if you take 4 equal steps, turning right 90 degrees after each one, that you'll end up back at your starting point. But that's not actually how space on the surface of the Earth works (gravitational field curves space) -- it's just a very close and very useful approximation for animals that can actively move themselves around.)

So, we have to take pieces of one concept (wave properties) and pieces from another (particle properties) and others (probability) and stitch them together as best we can to try to build a model that we can work (math) and vaguely grasp (intuition). I think the bad news is that quantum physics will always feel weird on a gut level because we just weren't built to intuitively understand it. OTOH, it is amazing that we humans have abstracted our intuitions so far and deep into these unseen realms as we have. So, maybe quantum weirdness is not so bad, because it's better than us not being able to understand that part of reality at all.



ruveyn
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16 Feb 2013, 8:11 pm

Apple_in_my_Eye wrote:
The way I think of this wave/particle business is that our brains come pre-loaded with certain concepts because they were evolutionarily useful to our ancestors -- and that those concepts aren't actually true. So, the problem is that when it comes to these realms (tiny atomic scales, or moving near the speed of light) that outside of our (ancestors') sensory experience we don't have any intuitive pre-conceptions to help us understand.

(By "built-in concepts" I mean, --> i.e. Eudlidean geometry is useful if you are an organism that benefits from being able to navigate. It's intuitively obvious that if you take 4 equal steps, turning right 90 degrees after each one, that you'll end up back at your starting point. But that's not actually how space on the surface of the Earth works (gravitational field curves space) -- it's just a very close and very useful approximation for animals that can actively move themselves around.)

So, we have to take pieces of one concept (wave properties) and pieces from another (particle properties) and others (probability) and stitch them together as best we can to try to build a model that we can work (math) and vaguely grasp (intuition). I think the bad news is that quantum physics will always feel weird on a gut level because we just weren't built to intuitively understand it. OTOH, it is amazing that we humans have abstracted our intuitions so far and deep into these unseen realms as we have. So, maybe quantum weirdness is not so bad, because it's better than us not being able to understand that part of reality at all.


That is what Immanuel Kant believed. He thinks that our perceptions are ordered by built in mental categories.

ruveyn



Feralucce
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17 Feb 2013, 4:22 pm

ruveyn wrote:

What is a "whole atom"? Atoms are made of smaller stuff.

ruveyn


So are electrons and protons... But, since you asked and atom is a unit of matter, the smallest unit of an element, having all the characteristics of that element and consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons. The entire structure has an approximate diameter of 10-8 (that is ten to the negative 8)centimeters and characteristically remains undivided in chemical reactions except for limited removal, transfer, or exchange of certain electrons. Essentially, it is the smallest possible part of an element that still remains the element.


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