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Personally I think the concept of "particle" needs to go away completely. I think really what "particle" means is that "all measurements are quantized". But th
by tbabb 9y ago
Personally I think the concept of "particle" needs to go away completely.
I think really what "particle" means is that "all measurements are quantized". But the probabilities of any given measurement happening flows around as a wave.
For example, "there is a quantity of energy `e` at location `x`" is an observation you could make. The answer to that question has a discrete yes/no answer. The probability of the answer being "yes" flows around like a wave between all the different possible `x` as time progresses.
- k__ 9y agoReally? You mean all particles are virtual? Whaz is the alternative?
- tbabb 9y agoNo, I mean that there are no particles. Only waves. Only that if you try to measure something about the wave, you will always get a discrete "yes/no" answer.
- tedsanders 9y agoParticles are a really useful fiction. I'm having a tough time thinking of how to teach and explain chemistry without the concept of valence electrons. Do you have any ideas? (Related tangent: a super important but occasionally missed nuance of quantum mechanics is that the waves are not waves over 3D real space. They are waves over configuration space, with way more than 3 dimensions.)
- k__ 9y agoThen what are they in 3D space?
- tedsanders 9y agoThe electromagnetic field and other fields exist over 3D space. But the probability waves that represent them are in infinite dimensional space, because each point in 3D can have multiple states at once (and these states are correlated/entangled over space).
- xaedes 9y agoOne wouldn't teach sort algorithms or data structures by explaining how the individual bits are flipping. It is totally appropriate to use abstractions to teach concepts.
- k__ 9y agoBut why?
- hyperpallium 9y agoIIRD doesn't the double-slit experiment show it goes through one or the other?
- tbabb 9y agoNo. It goes through both. That's the weird thing that double-slit tells us, especially because it remains true even for "one photon" (i.e. one quantized energy packet arriving somewhere on the detector screen).
- k__ 9y agoWasn't it that particles went through both if you measure at the screen that shows the patterns and they went through one if you measure at the screen with the two slits?
- whatshisface 9y ago>"I think really what "particle" means is that "all measurements are quantized"." I'm not sure about that, classically the only quantized measurement is number. In QM only some eigenvalues are quantized, and even then only in some problems. (The energy of a free particle isn't quantized, nor is the position of a particle in a box.)
- antonvs 9y ago> Personally I think the concept of "particle" needs to go away completely. For those who haven't already seen it, "There are no particles, there are only fields" is a good paper about this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616 https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616