6 ms·

Everything acts like a wave. The term to Google for is "de broglie wavelength". Even you have an effective wavelength and you refract (slightly) when passing th

Everything acts like a wave. The term to Google for is "de broglie wavelength". Even you have an effective wavelength and you refract (slightly) when passing through a slit (door)

criddell 8y ago
My brain just can't accept that. It's seems too nuts. What does mass mean when you are talking about waves and fields? What does it mean to collide two waves together and look for smaller waves coming out? Everything is divisible? Or is there some kind of Planck wavelength?
- trentlott 8y ago
  You might be interested in Pilot Wave Theory. It tries to reconcile wave/particle duality by claiming there is a real physical particle at all times in an attempt to get around the strange idea of everything being a probablistic wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation). It explains some things pretty intuitively (double slit experiment), but from what I can tell it becomes too convoluted for other things. Mass can be related to energy with E=mc^2, and you can get some idea of its relation to wavelength and wave collisions. I think a smallest wavelength is unlikely, because it would put an upper bound on energy. The only side-effect of increasing the energy density (ie a lot of energy in a small space, like a very low-wavelength photon) is the formation of a black hole. I think the question of whether photons (massless) can form them is one of those quantum-gravity issues that are awaiting a theory.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "You might be interested in Pilot Wave Theory. It tries to reconcile wave/particle duality by claiming there is a real physical particle at all times in an attempt to get around the strange idea of everything being a probablistic wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation)." I don't understand much of anything, but based on what I read, I strongly prefer the idea that everything is a field and particles don't exist, rather than vice versa. It just feels right. We don't experience particles any more than waves in our daily lives anyway.
    - trentlott 8y ago
      That's probably the right side of history anyway. Pilot wave fails in a lot of ways, but it at least allows a way to express the anxiety of thinking "is that it?! Nobody thought of a better rationalization?!" You experience the properties of particles a little more directly...mostly in solution. It's easy to see why pilot wave is appealing...maybe, secretly, things are actually not crazy or incomprehensible at small scales and the universe makes sense! But even ignoring QM and looking out at the 13 billion light years of space above should make one ponder what right we had to get even this far
  - qubex 8y ago
    Pilot Wave Theory has been disproved as a valid basis for the dual split experiment. https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave-alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot...
    - trentlott 8y ago
      Yeah, I don't see pilot wave as valid. I think it's wishful theorizing from people who can't take Copenhagen. There is also a divorcing of pilot wave from these particular visualizations - the emergent properties of fluids will always make them bad approximations. But the maths don't work out either, and it ends up getting too convoluted compared to the 'simpler' and weirder version. However, I think it's an interesting alternative that demonstrates why, at some level, you just kind of have to throw your hands up and say "well I guess that's just how reality works, dammit." There are less-crazy visions about how very small things work, but they don't do the job.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  The human brain is not wired to have an intuition into the world of subatomic particles. (Just like with the 4-dimentional geometry, one has to go through an extensive training in order to have an inkling of such intuition.) All these spheres, point-like particles, waves, etc. are mathematical models at best.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  I struggled with it until I thought that these things aren't particles or waves in the way that we think of them. They don't flip back and forth. They are one thing that is simultaneously both a particle and a wave and they are like that all the time. They're not particles and waves. They're particle-waves, or wave-particles. It's neither a wave nor a particle and neither is it both things simultaneously. Instead, it shares many properties of both. It is it's own thing. We don't have a better word or description for it because there isn't a good analogy in the normal macroscopic physical world we're used to. It appears contradictory to us only because we don't have a good analogy for it. However, we do understand that things can be two things at once. Say I take an metal marble that has been painted blue. We have an object with two distinct properties. Now we can say that the marble is metal, and we can test it is by feeling it or using a magnet. And we can say that it's blue, and we can test that it's blue by shining a light on it and measuring the light that comes off of it. But our marble doesn't stop being blue just because we're using a magnet, and it doesn't stop being metal just because we're shining a light on it. However, we can't tell that it's blue by using a magnet, and we can't shine a light to tell if it's metal. Indeed, we can even think of more properties. A marble is spherical, but we could also have a blue metal cube. The universe isn't tricking us or making something switch between two states of being. Our tests are just limited. When we get to a subatomic level, our tests and interactions are so limited that you can't test for more than one property at a time because every test interferes with what we're testing. You have to pick the one you want to look at. That's where the uncertainly principle comes in. As far as I'm aware, the reason that we can't develop any test that can break the uncertainty principle is because everything we could potentially test with is, itself, a part of the wave-particle system. Since experimentation requires measurement (of course), and every measurement requires interaction (it does), and every interaction in the universe is either wave-like or particle-like and it's never both (they are, AFAIK), then no matter how smart we build our system we can't measure for both at once because everything we can build is inherently limited to this restriction because everything is in this system. It's like baking a cake. Say you want to know two things: Is the oven temperature right, and is the cake completely cooked through? If you want to know if the cake is cooked, you'll have to open the oven and stick a tester into the cake. But, if you open the oven, you've let all the heat out. You can't do both at the same time, because one test interferes with the other. Even if you check the temperature and then test the cake, you've still changed the system. This is not a perfect analogy, of course, but it kind of gets you thinking along the right lines. I'm no expert in this field, however, and I'm sure someone will be along to correct my misconceptions.

Everything acts like a wave. The term to Google for is "de broglie wavelength". Even you have an effective wavelength and you refract (slightly) when passing through a slit (door)

criddell 8y ago

My brain just can't accept that. It's seems too nuts. What does mass mean when you are talking about waves and fields? What does it mean to collide two waves together and look for smaller waves coming out? Everything is divisible? Or is there some kind of Planck wavelength?

trentlott 8y ago
You might be interested in Pilot Wave Theory. It tries to reconcile wave/particle duality by claiming there is a real physical particle at all times in an attempt to get around the strange idea of everything being a probablistic wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation). It explains some things pretty intuitively (double slit experiment), but from what I can tell it becomes too convoluted for other things. Mass can be related to energy with E=mc^2, and you can get some idea of its relation to wavelength and wave collisions. I think a smallest wavelength is unlikely, because it would put an upper bound on energy. The only side-effect of increasing the energy density (ie a lot of energy in a small space, like a very low-wavelength photon) is the formation of a black hole. I think the question of whether photons (massless) can form them is one of those quantum-gravity issues that are awaiting a theory.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "You might be interested in Pilot Wave Theory. It tries to reconcile wave/particle duality by claiming there is a real physical particle at all times in an attempt to get around the strange idea of everything being a probablistic wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation)." I don't understand much of anything, but based on what I read, I strongly prefer the idea that everything is a field and particles don't exist, rather than vice versa. It just feels right. We don't experience particles any more than waves in our daily lives anyway.
  - trentlott 8y ago
    That's probably the right side of history anyway. Pilot wave fails in a lot of ways, but it at least allows a way to express the anxiety of thinking "is that it?! Nobody thought of a better rationalization?!" You experience the properties of particles a little more directly...mostly in solution. It's easy to see why pilot wave is appealing...maybe, secretly, things are actually not crazy or incomprehensible at small scales and the universe makes sense! But even ignoring QM and looking out at the 13 billion light years of space above should make one ponder what right we had to get even this far
- qubex 8y ago
  Pilot Wave Theory has been disproved as a valid basis for the dual split experiment. https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave-alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot...
  - trentlott 8y ago
    Yeah, I don't see pilot wave as valid. I think it's wishful theorizing from people who can't take Copenhagen. There is also a divorcing of pilot wave from these particular visualizations - the emergent properties of fluids will always make them bad approximations. But the maths don't work out either, and it ends up getting too convoluted compared to the 'simpler' and weirder version. However, I think it's an interesting alternative that demonstrates why, at some level, you just kind of have to throw your hands up and say "well I guess that's just how reality works, dammit." There are less-crazy visions about how very small things work, but they don't do the job.
Koshkin 8y ago
The human brain is not wired to have an intuition into the world of subatomic particles. (Just like with the 4-dimentional geometry, one has to go through an extensive training in order to have an inkling of such intuition.) All these spheres, point-like particles, waves, etc. are mathematical models at best.
da_chicken 8y ago
I struggled with it until I thought that these things aren't particles or waves in the way that we think of them. They don't flip back and forth. They are one thing that is simultaneously both a particle and a wave and they are like that all the time. They're not particles and waves. They're particle-waves, or wave-particles. It's neither a wave nor a particle and neither is it both things simultaneously. Instead, it shares many properties of both. It is it's own thing. We don't have a better word or description for it because there isn't a good analogy in the normal macroscopic physical world we're used to. It appears contradictory to us only because we don't have a good analogy for it. However, we do understand that things can be two things at once. Say I take an metal marble that has been painted blue. We have an object with two distinct properties. Now we can say that the marble is metal, and we can test it is by feeling it or using a magnet. And we can say that it's blue, and we can test that it's blue by shining a light on it and measuring the light that comes off of it. But our marble doesn't stop being blue just because we're using a magnet, and it doesn't stop being metal just because we're shining a light on it. However, we can't tell that it's blue by using a magnet, and we can't shine a light to tell if it's metal. Indeed, we can even think of more properties. A marble is spherical, but we could also have a blue metal cube. The universe isn't tricking us or making something switch between two states of being. Our tests are just limited. When we get to a subatomic level, our tests and interactions are so limited that you can't test for more than one property at a time because every test interferes with what we're testing. You have to pick the one you want to look at. That's where the uncertainly principle comes in. As far as I'm aware, the reason that we can't develop any test that can break the uncertainty principle is because everything we could potentially test with is, itself, a part of the wave-particle system. Since experimentation requires measurement (of course), and every measurement requires interaction (it does), and every interaction in the universe is either wave-like or particle-like and it's never both (they are, AFAIK), then no matter how smart we build our system we can't measure for both at once because everything we can build is inherently limited to this restriction because everything is in this system. It's like baking a cake. Say you want to know two things: Is the oven temperature right, and is the cake completely cooked through? If you want to know if the cake is cooked, you'll have to open the oven and stick a tester into the cake. But, if you open the oven, you've let all the heat out. You can't do both at the same time, because one test interferes with the other. Even if you check the temperature and then test the cake, you've still changed the system. This is not a perfect analogy, of course, but it kind of gets you thinking along the right lines. I'm no expert in this field, however, and I'm sure someone will be along to correct my misconceptions.