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A problem with trying to use concepts like this and asking "what if?" is that it's reasonning and trying to extrapolate from an analogy It's one thing to use a
by tux3 2y ago
A problem with trying to use concepts like this and asking "what if?" is that it's reasonning and trying to extrapolate from an analogy
It's one thing to use analogies to guide your intuition, but physical theories are written in the language of math, and not the language of analogies!
You don't have to use QM to describe protons and electrons at a fine level, but it is very hard to do otherwise, because whatever new theory you want to invent would also have to agree with QM on all the experiments where we have observed quantum effects. You can make an even bigger theory, but you can't throw away the existing approach without reinventing most of its results.
You're welcome to try, of course. But be aware you'll need cold hard math, not just high-level ideas
- IAmGraydon 2y agoWell said. I think Einstein himself used the same kind of analogous thinking to guide his intuition, and wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as he was without allowing himself this sort of unbounded thinking. In the end, however, he proved these intuitions true or false with the light of math.
- XorNot 2y agoEinstein followed where the results lead - his primary breakthrough was assuming no wave-propagation medium was necessary, and accepting an absurd result on it's face by exploring the mathematical consequence (namely: speed of light is constant, as a result the passage of time can vary, there is no medium through which light propagates unlike all other known wave phenomena). You have grown up with a set of different analogies based on more modern theories: which is to say, you're letting the tail wag the dog: we have those analogies to explain physics to laymen, but the analogies don't inform the physics.