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Warp wrote:
> Actually "quantum physics" means that everything is quantified.
Nobody has figured out for sure if space or time are quantified. Lots of
speculation, but nothing concrete, last I heard.
> there's a minimum amount of everything (for example electric charge and
> mass),
Nope. Electric charge, yes, but not mass. Photons will have mass
proportional to their frequency, and frequency isn't apparently quantified.
> and everything is an integer multiple of that amount. You just can't
> have eg. half of the electric charge of an electron, for example.
Uh, yeah, you can, but that's because they found smaller things like
quarks. I'll grant that nobody has found something with half the charge
of a quark. :-)
> Waves are also quantified for the same reason: There's a minimum amount
> of amplitude, for example, and all amplitudes are integer multiples of
> that amount.
Well, if you're talking about frequency, as far as I understand, this
isn't true. There's no lower limit to the frequency of a photon, nor any
quantum levels thereof. Indeed, if you believe in General Relativity,
that'll tell you there's no quantum of frequency - look at a photon
climbing out of a gravity well.
Photons are quantified, but not frequencies. There's a minimum amount of
energy a collection of photons of a specific frequency can have, and
it's an integer multiple of the energy of one photon, but there's no
quantification between photons of different frequencies.
> These "quants" behave oddly. Sometimes they behave like particles,
> sometimes they behave like waves, and sometimes they behave like both
> at the same time. Different measurements of the exact same quant can
> show wildly different behavior in this respect. (One experiment will
> clearly show that light behaves like a wave and not like a stream of
> particles, while another experiment will show the exact opposite.)
You are out of date by several decades, I believe. That's how the math
works out, because the probabilities are two-dimensional. But you never
wind up measuring waves as such. Just probabilities of certain events
happening.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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