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Warp wrote:
> These "quants" behave oddly. Sometimes they behave like particles,
> sometimes they behave like waves, and sometimes they behave like both
> at the same time.
Actually, you might be confused because you're not being precise enough.
The way I think you want to think about it is this:
"Sometimes they behave like particles" means "in some experiments, we
get results whose mathematical formulation is isomorphic to the
whatever-they-ares being particles."
"Sometimes they behave like waves" means "in other experiments, we get
results whose mathematical formulation is isomorphic to the the behavior
of waves."
In particular, the times you see "behavior like waves" is when you stop
*measuring* "does it behave like a particle?" The times you see
"behavior like a particle" is when you stop *measuring* whether it
behaves like waves. But in each case, you're explicitly excluding some
of the behavior and not too unsurprisingly seeing the other behavior.
In other words, when you do the math, sometimes the results you get for
electrons are the same results as those you get for waves. That doesn't
mean electrons *are* waves, any more than it means that light behaving
like a wave needs a medium to "wave" in order to travel.
Sort of like a PRNG. Some experiments you do, it looks random. That
doesn't mean it's random. It just means you haven't seen the real thing,
and you haven't measured whether it's deterministic or not. But every
time you *do* measure whether it's deterministic, it looks like it is.
Every time you take a (good) PRNG and measure its statistical
properties, it looks random. Every time you start a (good) PRNG from the
same seed, you get the same values. That doesn't mean sometimes the PRNG
is deterministic and sometimes it isn't.
Sort of like General Relativity. You can predict which way a satellite
in outer space will go by assuming gravity is a force like muscular
exertion is a force. That doesn't mean gravity *is* a force - it just
has the same equations (modulo Lorenz contraction, of course).
> Different measurements of the exact same quant can
> show wildly different behavior in this respect.
"Exact same"? I didn't know you could tell electrons apart.
> (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.)
Yes. That doesn't mean sometimes it *is* a wave and sometimes it *is* a
particle. It means that sometimes the particle behaves in a way that can
be predicted with the same mathematical formulas that predict the
behavior of waves.
Plus, as I understand it, light as such doesn't have a specific
"frequency". The light source does, but not the photons themselves. But
I'll admit I'm probably very confused on this one. I.e., a photon isn't
"waving" as such while it travels, but you can tell frequency by looking
at the probability vectors of photons over time coming out of a source.
If there's anyone who can actually explain that better to a layman, I'd
love to hear it. :-)
Note that a single electron does *not* interfere with itself in the same
way a wave does. If it did, it would cancel itself out sometimes, and
that doesn't happen. You can set up a detector behind the two slits
that's too imprecise to tell you *which* slit the electron went through,
but can tell you it went through, and the two sets of detectors will
count approximately the same number of events. Hence, electrons don't
interfere with themselves in a wave-like manner. They just change the
probabilities of where they'll land, and the formula for that is the
same as the formula for a wave, and for the same reason - they're both
multiplications (and hence convolutions) of cyclic 2-dimensional values.
(Oh, and as for "half the charge of an electron", the one that boggles
my mind is spin-2 particles. A particle that's not symmetric when you
turn it 360 degrees, but is when you turn it 720?)
--
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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