4 ms·
We know it arrives as a particle. We don’t know it travels as a particle. What we know is that it acts very wave-like when it travels. If I were forced to bet,
by richardw 7y ago
We know it arrives as a particle. We don’t know it travels as a particle. What we know is that it acts very wave-like when it travels. If I were forced to bet, I’d say it travels like a wave and arrives like a particle. That doesn’t mean “duality”. It means the condition required to arrive somewhere require a set of values that are packet-like. But we insist that it’s a packet all the way through, so the discussion remains confusing to lay people for 100 years.
If you measure before/at the slit you affect the experiment. You affect how it travels through the slits, removing the interference pattern. So yes it’s not split but that has no bearing on when the detector is not at the slit. They’re different situations and have different outcomes.
- imtringued 7y agoSo you are saying that light is always a wave but when it is being absorbed by an atom it somehow consumes the "entire" wave, no matter how spread out?
- animal531 7y agoI was reading now that photons when created are already at light speed, they don't accelerate. That's because they are in this instance a wave, and a wave is a distortion of its medium; the whole wave can instantly be created at a certain speed (for example throw a rock into a pond, the waves will immediately radiate at speed). So in reverse then, when absorbed the wave could be cancelled out and it is forced into particle behaviour?