7 ms·

Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles

84 points by beefman 6y ago

ivalm 6y ago
Just to be clear for a general reader. These are quasiparticles. They are effective mathematical descriptions of certain effects in the real world, but the physical particles responsible for the effects are fermions and bosons, not anyons.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  But the article also says, If it seems strange to call the collective behavior of electrons a particle, think of the proton, which is itself made up of three quarks.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ivalm 6y ago
    Absolutely! Just wanted to highlight. It is easier to think of stable and localized collective behaviors (protons) as particles than unstable and delocalized (anyons). Both are collective behaviors but most of the time you can think of protons as “balls made of quarks.” It’s not quite right but with semi classical treatment you get most of the effects. Anyons are not even approximately balls made of electrons. They break a lot of “classical particle” intuition the way protons don’t.
    - xvilka 6y ago
      But if you think of them as the waves, any kind of close and stable wave superposition can be called "a particle". At some point, we might just drop the "particle world" and go with the "quantum systems".
      - ivalm 6y ago
        Most people have an intuition about particles, they don’t have an intuition for quantum systems. I wanted to highlight for a general reader that anyons are not particle in the sense of common intuition. Protons, which the article brings as an example of collective phenomenona, roughly follow a lot of “particle intuition.”
        state_less 6y ago
        Here is a link to the quasiparticles Wikipedia page that may be helpful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle Personally, I don’t mind if folks reify these things to make it easier to follow, fwiw.
        adrianN 6y ago
        I wonder whether we could change school curricula so that people develop an intuition about quantum systems instead. I my schooling I learned almost exclusively particle abstractions. It's only natural that I'm more comfortable with particles.
        DagAgren 6y ago
        > Most people have an intuition about particles That intuition is also most likely completely wrong.
      - stared 6y ago
        In this case, electric current is NOT carried by electrons. Electrons in a material are effective particles, with a different mass, vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_ph.... Partice != fundamental particle.
- knzhou 6y ago
  Yeah. In this case it's fine, but in general it can lead to confusion. For some weird reason, condensed matter physicists keep giving their quasiparticles the same names particle physicists give their particle particles, even though the mathematics are quite different. If you hear someone proclaiming the discovery of Majorana fermions, axions, or monopoles, it's essentially guaranteed to be a quasiparticle in a lump of metal or something. Sometimes even the articles themselves get confused about this.
  - twic 6y ago
    Is this really so different from particle physicists' "resonances", where they see a peak in a graph and pronounce a new particle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_(particle_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_(particle_physics)
    - knzhou 6y ago
      That's fine because basically everything's a resonance. The only particles that aren't technically resonances are those that have infinite lifetime, i.e. just the proton, electron, and photon.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The "weird reason" is that it's an analogy. You want to name things in a way that people will be able to guess what they are from the name.
- contravariant 6y ago
  In addition the proper term would be fundamental particles for the regular quarks/bosons. It's somewhat debatable whether quasiparticles are physical or not.
  - badrabbit 6y ago
    What else would they be?
    - Retric 6y ago
      Arbitrary classifications like national borders.
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Emergent phenomena. Like how a row of toppling dominos will have a front which seems to move through the dominos, but is actually just a long chain of mostly stationary dominos. It would be odd to argue the front is a physical object. Taking this further you might conclude that a soundwave isn't physical either. And sound is actually an examples of quasiparticles (phonons) when you get down to the quantum level. Then again most people would be of the opinion that light propagates slower through solids like glass, but the photons in that description are quasiparticles (which have mass, unlike the photons in isolation). And quasiparticles share many properties that you'd normally expect only physical particles to have so it gets complicated.
  - ivalm 6y ago
    I said "physical" because I wanted to include things other than elementary particles but that behave in a way consistent with what I think is a typical non-physicist general intuition about particles: "somewhat long lived (sufficient to be resolved not just by decay products) point-like objects". Some elementary particles (quarks) don't really obey a lot of this intuition. Some none-elementary particles, for example protons/neutrons, do follow a lot of this intuition. Even some topological order quasiparticle in CMP follow this intuition -- magnetic skyrmions can be localized, can be imaged, have particle-like scattering. Anyons don't follow this particle intuition.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  Even if these are interesting research results, in my opinion, "anyon" is a stupid word choice. It might have been a good joke initially, but it should not have persisted as a scientific name. The termination "-on" in the Ancient Greek words "electron" and "proton" does not have any concrete meaning, it is just the thematic vowel "o" followed by the marker "n", of a singular neuter noun (originally "m", but in Ancient Greek all final "m" became "n"). Combining some undeclinable English word with an Ancient Greek case termination seems ugly and pointless for me (not that "fermion" and "boson" are any better from this point of view). Even if we accept making words to rhyme as a technique for coining new words, "anyon" remains a bad choice, because it is easily confused with "anion" (introduced by Faraday almost two hundred years ago). I assume that "anyon" is meant to have a different pronunciation, i.e. like "any-on", but nonetheless, in almost all other languages the vowels are pronounced different than in English and the default pronunciation for "anyon" and "anion" will likely be the same.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Wait, why is ancient Greek a justifiable basis for evaluating the language evolution of modern English?
    - adrian_b 6y ago
      Like I have said, the main problem is the too great similarity to an existing word, which is expected to be used in the same contexts. The reference to Ancient Greek is a matter of taste, I prefer new words to either have a meaning or to have no meaning, i.e. to be random. I find words with nonsense meaning irritating and more difficult to remember. At least "fermion" is just a distorted form of Fermi, which does not suggest any specific meaning. On the other hand "any on", has a meaning, but a nonsensical one, i.e. its suggests a reference to any one of the "ons", but there is no such thing as an "on", as that is just a grammatical case marker. By the way, the "-on" in "anion" is not the same as the "-on" in proton. While the "-on" in proton comes from "-om", the "-on" in anion comes from "-ont", which corresponds to the English "-ing", the suffix of the active participle (anion = upwards-going).
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Yes, every time I hear about a new class of whatever, with surprising properties, I check to see if they're talking about quasiparticles. And they're almost always talking about quasiparticles. Now, there's nothing wrong with exploring those ideas and they might eventually be fruitful, but in terms of looking "further down" (which is typically the lure of the excitement), quasiparticles are only looking back up. I am of the mind that you could make assemblages of particles -- that is to say, quasiparticles -- do all kinds of oddball things that their constituents cannot. That is fine and often useful, but it isn't the further down we were interested in.
amluto 6y ago
This is a surprising error from Quanta, which is otherwise pretty good at getting the details right: > Imagine two indistinguishable particles, like electrons. Take one, then loop it around the other so that it ends up back where it started. Nothing seems to have changed. And indeed, in the mathematical language of quantum mechanics, the two wave functions describing the initial and final states must be either equal or off by a factor of −1. As explained later in the article, in three or more dimensions, if you loop a particle around another and back where it started, you did nothing at all. The factor is 1, not -1. The actual thought experiment is that you swap two indistinguishable particles. The resulting state must be the same up to a scalar factor k, since, if it wasn’t, you could tell the particles apart. Moreover, if you swap two particles twice, you end up exactly where you started, so k^2=1. In two dimensions, this all breaks down a bit, and it gets very complicated very quickly.
- MooMooMilkParty 6y ago
  I'm a little bit curious here. My understanding is that the wave function has complex values and the "state" is described by the wave function times its complex conjugate. Couldn't they have meant the factor of -1 to be on the imaginary portion and then things still work out to have the same probability distribution?
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Why does the factor of -1 just have to be on the imaginary proportion? seems like this would be true if you multiplied the whole thing by -1.
  - amluto 6y ago
    Suppose you have a very simple system with two indistinguishable particles in one dimension and no spin or any other complications. The wavefunction is just a complex valued function of two variables: f(x0, x1) where x0 and x1 are coordinates of the two particles. The fact that the particles are indistinguishable means that no possible experiment can tell them apart. After a bit of math, this means that f(x0, x1) = k * f(x1, x0) where k is a constant. All wavefunctions are normalized, so |k|^2=1, which constrains k to be on the unit circle. But you can go farther: it's possible, at least in principle, to come up with an experiment that measures k. So you start with the particles in their initial state, do your experiment, and learn k. (Maybe you need to repeat it a bunch of times -- no big deal.) Now you repeat the same experiment but start with the two particles having their roles swapped. Since the particles are indistinguishable, you had better measure the same value for k. This means: f(x0, x1) = k * f(x1, x0) and also f(x1, x0) = k * f(x0, x1) = k^2 * f(x1, x0) So k^2 = 1, and that rules out everything except k=1 or k=-1.
rhn_mk1 6y ago
What does the "looping around" mean here? There's no definition given, and the expression can be interpreted in several ways. Does it mean "being moved on a circular path around something"? That would be simply a couple of translations, which change exactly nothing. Or does it happen in a sort of a field? Taking the interpretation of "engulfing", like "a rope looped around a post engulfs it" shows a clear difference between 2D and 3D, and seems topologically relevant, but what does it mean "to go back again"? Not knowing the topological model for particles beforehand, I am unable to learn anything from the article.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  > Does it mean "being moved on a circular path around something"? That would be simply a couple of translations, which change exactly nothing. I can't exactly tell you how the topological part works but I can tell you that this statement isn't as simple as you think. You're not reasoning about the location of a particle, but you should actually be reasoning about the Feynman path integral, the sum of all the probabilities of the potential paths that the particle could travel through in the future — because this is physics and our particles are all waves. Say that translating the particle does not change its state. Imagine for a moment a macroscopic two dimensional system in which you have a globe depicting the Earth. Initially, this globe is set with the north pole facing up and the Greenwich meridian facing north. Draw an circle on the floor and place another sphere in the middle. Roll this globe around the circle. When you it returns to the initial location, does the globe look the same? It might not! The globe has state and that state changes as it is moved around. Your globe changes direction because it is rotating on the floor. Particles don't have a floor to roll on, but they can have internal state. If your globe ends up the same place after a circle, then your globe is a boson (phase factor 1). If the globe is upside down with Antarctica on top but otherwise the same, it is a fermion (phase factor -1). If Florida or the Ukraine or God-knows-what end up on top instead, it is an anyon. Now, you're going to rig this up to a camera and do a time lapse (this is us taking the integral). Every time the globe passes the camera, take a photo. Stack all the photos after each other in a video. If you have a boson globe, any picture looks like one facet of the globe. If you have a fermion globe, you'll have a double-image, with "north" pointing two directions at once. If you have an anyon globe, well, it could look like a bunch of different things, and that's the point. In physics, of course, we actually want to run this sort of integral on all sorts of circles simultaneously, instead of just one, and some of these circles are more probable than others, and everything gets all quantized (which is why the path integrals usually add up in a way that exclude anyons instead of that being the default.)
steve76 6y ago
I'm new to physics and in no way a professional. Here's my thought process work in progress: - Boltzman defined entropy with probability. I think of a soup can. Inside, collisions with either the wall or each other, or not at all. When colliding with the wall, you get the temperature and pressure needed to keep them separate. - Planck took this and showed why nothing happens when the lights go out on a room full of dark pots and pans. Newton's Law of Cooling said one should glow white hot and every other one gets darker. Planck used Boltzman to say you need to build up a little energy before you change color. - Einstein took Planck's work and said you have a start, you have an end, you have a particle, a photon. Slowing down and spinning up your clock is a medium of heat transfer just the same as conductive surfaces or convective mediums. The photon hits an entire object at once, not just one spot, that's why energy level matters over intensity and can describe everything in photons and photoelectricicty. - Other scientists looked at this and said you are either throwing beach balls at a brick wall, and don't know if the brick wall is moving towards you at a thousandth of an inch a century. Or you're throwing a medicine ball to someone on roller skates. You push them back so you know they stopped still, but just don't know where. - Bohr took this to model the atom for orbitals. Here you need a full number of cycles for something to exist. - Pauli showed that the electron has spin on it's own. Spin produces magnetism. Magnetism is the atom looking for an electron not just up the conductive chain but everywhere, so an exchange of photons. - Shannon brought more abstraction in terms of entropy as available choices When I think of the atom, I think of what's needed on the inside to make the outside exist. I think of a hollowed golf ball with dimples, or a sphere made of sticks all connected at the center. The surface can move, the inside makes it happen. Put two next to each other, they can get closer or farther away based on how that surface moves. For string theory, I visualize a flat sheet of graph paper. Behind it, a point can have a something coming off of it that whips all the way across the page. I would like to think of the atom as nothing material. Instead one way of many to push back on everything that already exists. So particles are quite significant and more than an abstraction to me. I would like to see what happens when matter waves go in orbit. Can we make information satellites out of molecules? Inside that diameter, can we spontaneous generate something?

84 points by beefman 6y ago

Just to be clear for a general reader. These are quasiparticles. They are effective mathematical descriptions of certain effects in the real world, but the physical particles responsible for the effects are fermions and bosons, not anyons.

Koshkin 6y ago
But the article also says, If it seems strange to call the collective behavior of electrons a particle, think of the proton, which is itself made up of three quarks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ivalm 6y ago
  Absolutely! Just wanted to highlight. It is easier to think of stable and localized collective behaviors (protons) as particles than unstable and delocalized (anyons). Both are collective behaviors but most of the time you can think of protons as “balls made of quarks.” It’s not quite right but with semi classical treatment you get most of the effects. Anyons are not even approximately balls made of electrons. They break a lot of “classical particle” intuition the way protons don’t.
  - xvilka 6y ago
    But if you think of them as the waves, any kind of close and stable wave superposition can be called "a particle". At some point, we might just drop the "particle world" and go with the "quantum systems".
    - ivalm 6y ago
      Most people have an intuition about particles, they don’t have an intuition for quantum systems. I wanted to highlight for a general reader that anyons are not particle in the sense of common intuition. Protons, which the article brings as an example of collective phenomenona, roughly follow a lot of “particle intuition.”
      - state_less 6y ago
        Here is a link to the quasiparticles Wikipedia page that may be helpful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle Personally, I don’t mind if folks reify these things to make it easier to follow, fwiw.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        I wonder whether we could change school curricula so that people develop an intuition about quantum systems instead. I my schooling I learned almost exclusively particle abstractions. It's only natural that I'm more comfortable with particles.
      - DagAgren 6y ago
        > Most people have an intuition about particles That intuition is also most likely completely wrong.
    - stared 6y ago
      In this case, electric current is NOT carried by electrons. Electrons in a material are effective particles, with a different mass, vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_ph.... Partice != fundamental particle.
knzhou 6y ago
Yeah. In this case it's fine, but in general it can lead to confusion. For some weird reason, condensed matter physicists keep giving their quasiparticles the same names particle physicists give their particle particles, even though the mathematics are quite different. If you hear someone proclaiming the discovery of Majorana fermions, axions, or monopoles, it's essentially guaranteed to be a quasiparticle in a lump of metal or something. Sometimes even the articles themselves get confused about this.
- twic 6y ago
  Is this really so different from particle physicists' "resonances", where they see a peak in a graph and pronounce a new particle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_(particle_physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_(particle_physics)
  - knzhou 6y ago
    That's fine because basically everything's a resonance. The only particles that aren't technically resonances are those that have infinite lifetime, i.e. just the proton, electron, and photon.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  The "weird reason" is that it's an analogy. You want to name things in a way that people will be able to guess what they are from the name.
contravariant 6y ago
In addition the proper term would be fundamental particles for the regular quarks/bosons. It's somewhat debatable whether quasiparticles are physical or not.
- badrabbit 6y ago
  What else would they be?
  - Retric 6y ago
    Arbitrary classifications like national borders.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Emergent phenomena. Like how a row of toppling dominos will have a front which seems to move through the dominos, but is actually just a long chain of mostly stationary dominos. It would be odd to argue the front is a physical object. Taking this further you might conclude that a soundwave isn't physical either. And sound is actually an examples of quasiparticles (phonons) when you get down to the quantum level. Then again most people would be of the opinion that light propagates slower through solids like glass, but the photons in that description are quasiparticles (which have mass, unlike the photons in isolation). And quasiparticles share many properties that you'd normally expect only physical particles to have so it gets complicated.
- ivalm 6y ago
  I said "physical" because I wanted to include things other than elementary particles but that behave in a way consistent with what I think is a typical non-physicist general intuition about particles: "somewhat long lived (sufficient to be resolved not just by decay products) point-like objects". Some elementary particles (quarks) don't really obey a lot of this intuition. Some none-elementary particles, for example protons/neutrons, do follow a lot of this intuition. Even some topological order quasiparticle in CMP follow this intuition -- magnetic skyrmions can be localized, can be imaged, have particle-like scattering. Anyons don't follow this particle intuition.
adrian_b 6y ago
Even if these are interesting research results, in my opinion, "anyon" is a stupid word choice. It might have been a good joke initially, but it should not have persisted as a scientific name. The termination "-on" in the Ancient Greek words "electron" and "proton" does not have any concrete meaning, it is just the thematic vowel "o" followed by the marker "n", of a singular neuter noun (originally "m", but in Ancient Greek all final "m" became "n"). Combining some undeclinable English word with an Ancient Greek case termination seems ugly and pointless for me (not that "fermion" and "boson" are any better from this point of view). Even if we accept making words to rhyme as a technique for coining new words, "anyon" remains a bad choice, because it is easily confused with "anion" (introduced by Faraday almost two hundred years ago). I assume that "anyon" is meant to have a different pronunciation, i.e. like "any-on", but nonetheless, in almost all other languages the vowels are pronounced different than in English and the default pronunciation for "anyon" and "anion" will likely be the same.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Wait, why is ancient Greek a justifiable basis for evaluating the language evolution of modern English?
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    Like I have said, the main problem is the too great similarity to an existing word, which is expected to be used in the same contexts. The reference to Ancient Greek is a matter of taste, I prefer new words to either have a meaning or to have no meaning, i.e. to be random. I find words with nonsense meaning irritating and more difficult to remember. At least "fermion" is just a distorted form of Fermi, which does not suggest any specific meaning. On the other hand "any on", has a meaning, but a nonsensical one, i.e. its suggests a reference to any one of the "ons", but there is no such thing as an "on", as that is just a grammatical case marker. By the way, the "-on" in "anion" is not the same as the "-on" in proton. While the "-on" in proton comes from "-om", the "-on" in anion comes from "-ont", which corresponds to the English "-ing", the suffix of the active participle (anion = upwards-going).
at_a_remove 6y ago
Yes, every time I hear about a new class of whatever, with surprising properties, I check to see if they're talking about quasiparticles. And they're almost always talking about quasiparticles. Now, there's nothing wrong with exploring those ideas and they might eventually be fruitful, but in terms of looking "further down" (which is typically the lure of the excitement), quasiparticles are only looking back up. I am of the mind that you could make assemblages of particles -- that is to say, quasiparticles -- do all kinds of oddball things that their constituents cannot. That is fine and often useful, but it isn't the further down we were interested in.

amluto 6y ago

This is a surprising error from Quanta, which is otherwise pretty good at getting the details right: > Imagine two indistinguishable particles, like electrons. Take one, then loop it around the other so that it ends up back where it started. Nothing seems to have changed. And indeed, in the mathematical language of quantum mechanics, the two wave functions describing the initial and final states must be either equal or off by a factor of −1. As explained later in the article, in three or more dimensions, if you loop a particle around another and back where it started, you did nothing at all. The factor is 1, not -1. The actual thought experiment is that you swap two indistinguishable particles. The resulting state must be the same up to a scalar factor k, since, if it wasn’t, you could tell the particles apart. Moreover, if you swap two particles twice, you end up exactly where you started, so k^2=1. In two dimensions, this all breaks down a bit, and it gets very complicated very quickly.

MooMooMilkParty 6y ago
I'm a little bit curious here. My understanding is that the wave function has complex values and the "state" is described by the wave function times its complex conjugate. Couldn't they have meant the factor of -1 to be on the imaginary portion and then things still work out to have the same probability distribution?
- MiroF 6y ago
  Why does the factor of -1 just have to be on the imaginary proportion? seems like this would be true if you multiplied the whole thing by -1.
- amluto 6y ago
  Suppose you have a very simple system with two indistinguishable particles in one dimension and no spin or any other complications. The wavefunction is just a complex valued function of two variables: f(x0, x1) where x0 and x1 are coordinates of the two particles. The fact that the particles are indistinguishable means that no possible experiment can tell them apart. After a bit of math, this means that f(x0, x1) = k * f(x1, x0) where k is a constant. All wavefunctions are normalized, so |k|^2=1, which constrains k to be on the unit circle. But you can go farther: it's possible, at least in principle, to come up with an experiment that measures k. So you start with the particles in their initial state, do your experiment, and learn k. (Maybe you need to repeat it a bunch of times -- no big deal.) Now you repeat the same experiment but start with the two particles having their roles swapped. Since the particles are indistinguishable, you had better measure the same value for k. This means: f(x0, x1) = k * f(x1, x0) and also f(x1, x0) = k * f(x0, x1) = k^2 * f(x1, x0) So k^2 = 1, and that rules out everything except k=1 or k=-1.

rhn_mk1 6y ago

What does the "looping around" mean here? There's no definition given, and the expression can be interpreted in several ways. Does it mean "being moved on a circular path around something"? That would be simply a couple of translations, which change exactly nothing. Or does it happen in a sort of a field? Taking the interpretation of "engulfing", like "a rope looped around a post engulfs it" shows a clear difference between 2D and 3D, and seems topologically relevant, but what does it mean "to go back again"? Not knowing the topological model for particles beforehand, I am unable to learn anything from the article.

fennecfoxen 6y ago
> Does it mean "being moved on a circular path around something"? That would be simply a couple of translations, which change exactly nothing. I can't exactly tell you how the topological part works but I can tell you that this statement isn't as simple as you think. You're not reasoning about the location of a particle, but you should actually be reasoning about the Feynman path integral, the sum of all the probabilities of the potential paths that the particle could travel through in the future — because this is physics and our particles are all waves. Say that translating the particle does not change its state. Imagine for a moment a macroscopic two dimensional system in which you have a globe depicting the Earth. Initially, this globe is set with the north pole facing up and the Greenwich meridian facing north. Draw an circle on the floor and place another sphere in the middle. Roll this globe around the circle. When you it returns to the initial location, does the globe look the same? It might not! The globe has state and that state changes as it is moved around. Your globe changes direction because it is rotating on the floor. Particles don't have a floor to roll on, but they can have internal state. If your globe ends up the same place after a circle, then your globe is a boson (phase factor 1). If the globe is upside down with Antarctica on top but otherwise the same, it is a fermion (phase factor -1). If Florida or the Ukraine or God-knows-what end up on top instead, it is an anyon. Now, you're going to rig this up to a camera and do a time lapse (this is us taking the integral). Every time the globe passes the camera, take a photo. Stack all the photos after each other in a video. If you have a boson globe, any picture looks like one facet of the globe. If you have a fermion globe, you'll have a double-image, with "north" pointing two directions at once. If you have an anyon globe, well, it could look like a bunch of different things, and that's the point. In physics, of course, we actually want to run this sort of integral on all sorts of circles simultaneously, instead of just one, and some of these circles are more probable than others, and everything gets all quantized (which is why the path integrals usually add up in a way that exclude anyons instead of that being the default.)

steve76 6y ago

I'm new to physics and in no way a professional. Here's my thought process work in progress: - Boltzman defined entropy with probability. I think of a soup can. Inside, collisions with either the wall or each other, or not at all. When colliding with the wall, you get the temperature and pressure needed to keep them separate. - Planck took this and showed why nothing happens when the lights go out on a room full of dark pots and pans. Newton's Law of Cooling said one should glow white hot and every other one gets darker. Planck used Boltzman to say you need to build up a little energy before you change color. - Einstein took Planck's work and said you have a start, you have an end, you have a particle, a photon. Slowing down and spinning up your clock is a medium of heat transfer just the same as conductive surfaces or convective mediums. The photon hits an entire object at once, not just one spot, that's why energy level matters over intensity and can describe everything in photons and photoelectricicty. - Other scientists looked at this and said you are either throwing beach balls at a brick wall, and don't know if the brick wall is moving towards you at a thousandth of an inch a century. Or you're throwing a medicine ball to someone on roller skates. You push them back so you know they stopped still, but just don't know where. - Bohr took this to model the atom for orbitals. Here you need a full number of cycles for something to exist. - Pauli showed that the electron has spin on it's own. Spin produces magnetism. Magnetism is the atom looking for an electron not just up the conductive chain but everywhere, so an exchange of photons. - Shannon brought more abstraction in terms of entropy as available choices When I think of the atom, I think of what's needed on the inside to make the outside exist. I think of a hollowed golf ball with dimples, or a sphere made of sticks all connected at the center. The surface can move, the inside makes it happen. Put two next to each other, they can get closer or farther away based on how that surface moves. For string theory, I visualize a flat sheet of graph paper. Behind it, a point can have a something coming off of it that whips all the way across the page. I would like to think of the atom as nothing material. Instead one way of many to push back on everything that already exists. So particles are quite significant and more than an abstraction to me. I would like to see what happens when matter waves go in orbit. Can we make information satellites out of molecules? Inside that diameter, can we spontaneous generate something?