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Neeum Zawan wrote:
> Throughout this thread (which I admit I did not read all of), you've
> stated stuff a bit too definitively for my taste, as if all the top
> physicists agree on this.
I'm just stating my understanding of the general consensus. I freely admit
that maybe they're wrong, but when the guy who got the nobel prize for
explaining to other theoretical pysicists how it works says "It's never ever
a wave", I'm gonna go with his explanation. :-)
> I'm guessing that the actual mathematical formalism that we have for
> QM addresses all that is _needed_, in that it always works, and we know
> of no phenomenon (except perhaps gravity) that our mathematical
> formalism fails at.
The other quantum stuff is similar but not identcail formulas, yes.
> Given that, having an argument about whether it's a
> wave or a particle is philosophy of the pointless kind. The theory will
> remain unchanged.
Yep.
> any of you has bothered to *define* what a particle is or what a wave
> is.
Well, I tried to indirectly describe things a wave would do that a particle
doesn't, but yeah.
> We had an illusion that we understood that better merely
> because we were used to it in our daily lives. But that's just an illusion.
True. It's like asking *why* there are three dimensions, or *why* you
subtract the square of time instead of adding it in GR.
> In general, are you sure polarization cannot be described just by
> waves? If you have waves in 3-D materials? FYI, the standard model for
> sound waves in solids (i.e. phonons) assumes they have a polarization.
I think the effect of polarization of quanta does stuff that polarization
based entirely on the directions of waves can't do, like lasing and fermion
exclusion.
> I haven't read the book, but my physics professor said that it's THE
> book to read (QED) if you want to get an understanding of light/EM
> phenomenon.
Yep. It's awesome, explained by the guy who invented the way to calculate
the stuff *based* on the explanation. The link to the videos is Feynman
presenting the lectures that got edited into the book, which is also
fascinating.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
much longer being almost empty than almost full.
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