Wave particle duality? Magic?

[FridgeMagnet]

The cliff, I'd say.

 

[laptop]

Therefore colour is magic!

Wooooh!


​

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

ligth behaves as a partical via one slit and a wave via tow because of the observer recording the changes which causes them.

Light is neither partical or wave it is energy as such the most mabluable forces in the universe and therefore is capable of mimicking anything else as at pure distileate everything else in the universe is also just energy... It's the differences in vibrations wot makes the different states innit

 

[laptop]

mabluable

mabluable adj Onomatopoeic description of GleC's current state

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

hung over Adj description of my now current state

 

[JonathanS2]

My general way of thinking about this stuff (the interesting wave particle duality stuff, that is) is that physics is not reality. Physics is a bunch of laws and models we have constructed such that reality as we observe it tends generally to obey those laws and models. Light is not a 'wave' or a 'particle', light is light, we have models that describe the way in which light behaves, a wave model and a particle model, neither of which on its own fully describe what light actually is. We don't know what light actually is, we just watch it and try to figure out what we can. Some clever person came along and invented the quantum model, which messes with us poor people's heads for being seemingly unintuitive, but even that is just a model and someday someone will come along and invent some other model which works a little bit better and will no doubt be even less intuitive, but it in turn will still just be a model, it won't be reality. This refinement of models process could go on forever (or so my gut instinct says), and we will never have a completely fully accurate model of everything. We'll just have an extremely complex and sophisticated way of predicting how stuff behaves most (but not all) of the time.

 

[parallelepipete]

Could it be because the simplest explanation is obviously completely unthinkable for a materialist? Or if fridgemagnet can think it, then why can't he say it. After all, the simplest explanation is supposed to be favoured by science. Or is it really the case that the simplest explanation is to be favoured by "science" so long as it's a materialist explanation.? Yeah, that must be it. Well that proves it then.. the materialists win by default. Science is the only means to truth, and any non-materialist accounts of reality aren't science, and therefore aren't true. What an argument.

Z, I suggest that you're mistaking the nature of a 'simple' explanation here.

Calling an inexplicable phenomenon 'magic' is a very simple explanation, certainly: it only requires a few words and very little thought to say, "This is magic." However, human curiosity being as it is, you can't stop there if you actually want an answer.

For instance, you would then have to ask, for instance, how you could detect the functioning of this magic? what its nature is? who might be performing it? - and if you answer those questions, it's no longer magic. If you don't ask those questions, then it might be a simple (and I'm making no implication of 'simplistic') answer, it's not an explanation at all.

You could, alternatively, try and elaborate on the concept of magic as a force in the world. Then you run into the same problem of constantly having to add more and more layers of magic interacting with each other to try and explain the actual state of things. This is one reason geocentric astronomy eventually crumbled: astronomers were relying on so many epicycles on epicycles to try and model the motion of the heavenly bodies that gradually people like Copernicus and Kepler realised that the epicyclic model (very simple at heart, simply circular motion, but made horrendously complicated to try and retrofit it to reality) was wrong.

 

[Loki]

As Paul Daniels used to say....

It's magic!!

 

[ZWord]

Honestly, I'm not going over the edge at the moment, sorry to give that impression. Trying to get some attention for my predicament, heading for a court case, and the possible outcomes do scare me. I think there could be a better outcome, if people were prepared to give me some credit. But history seems to be repeating itself, and I can't claim that I'm not to blame. I've seen more of Reality than most people, I reckon. I reckon quite a few of you know what I'm talking about. But it seems to me you're determined to bury me. I don't think it's going to do anyone much good. But I don't know what's going to happen.

Actually, it was quite a relief to return to the thread and not find a stream of jeers waiting for me. I don't have the desire to argue about it any more. What Garfield says sounds about right to me. Which suggests strongly that maybe matter is an epiphenomenon of mind, contrary to common sense. But on the other hand, matter generally seems quite stubbornly objectively real, hence so much suffering. But I wanted to persuade the world that it could be different. I reckon it would be worth it.

(listening to the Smiths at the mo, and last night, - it seems so right. - Wish I'd known their music earlier in my life.)

 

[ZWord]

Had another thought and example to add.

In bloom. The point about human reality, although it's generally taken as real, and in a way it should be, It's nothing like physical reality -by which I mean, reality as described by physics-

Human reality is more like a great art work created by our brains/minds and senses. I thought this was well known, and I took it for granted.

The weirdness: here's an example from Roger Penrose, in the emperor's new mind, Quantum magic and Quantum mystery.

If you fire one photon, just one- (at one stage, a photon was held to be an indivisibly small particle) at a half-silvered mirror angled at 45 degrees, then it seems the photon "magically" divides into two, and half of it goes through the mirror, and the other half is reflected at ninety degrees. But it doesn't divide into two particles with independent existence, it divides into a wave form, and the two "halves" of it remain invisibly connected eternally. Even if you allowed the light to travel for a year in different directions, this relationship between the two ends of the waveform would continue, -but as I understand it, if you detected the photon on either route, you would find that it was all there, and not in the other place. And yet it was in the other place because experiments find that it's just as detectable there as otherwise.

The notion of indivisible particles dividing into waveforms is weird in itself, as it kind of suggests that infinity goes both ways.(outwards and inwards) i.e. however deep you look, you'll always find more stuff to surprise you. The idea that there's an invisible faster than light connection between the two "halves" of the divided photon, is even weirder, as it suggests that locality is a human illusion.

Earlier I suggested that magic has been defined as primitive science that assumes a law of connection between objects once in contact. It seems that with light at least this science is not primitive, it's actually true, however far apart the ends of the photon are.

And I also suggested that believeing in magic was the idea that consciousness can affect reality at a distance. It seems also that this idea is borne out by science, for it is well known that the act of measuring affects connected thingamajigs, however far away they are. It seems to me to be not unreasonable to suggest that the simplest explanation of the phenomenon is that it's our consciousness that makes reality behave in the way it does. And that is not far away from believeing in magic.

 

[axon]

It seems to me to be not unreasonable to suggest that the simplest explanation of the phenomenon is that it's our consciousness that makes reality behave in the way it does.

It seems unreasonable to me. It drives me barmy to see the weirdness of quantum physics linked to consciousness. There is simply no reason to do it other than the two things are both weird/complex. The universe did not pop into being at the point that humans evolved conciousness. And the chair I'm sitting on is subject to exactly the same laws of quantum physics that my brain is but I don't think my chair is conscious.

 

[888]

There is slightly more reason to link the two than that they are both "weird"... Namely that if you observe something you change its state.

 

[JonathanS2]

It's not the fact that your consciousness is aware of it that changes its state though. The 'observation changing state' thing is because the actual process of obesrving something means physically interacting with it on some level. The state of something changes when a measuring device 'observes' it, and there's no consciousness involved there.

You can't see something without having some photons (or light energy waves if you prefer) bouncing off it and into your eye. If light is bouncing off something, its being changed. It's the same idea at the quantum level, just a bit weirder.

 

[ZWord]

I don't think that's true, though I suppose for some people it's a more comfortable explanation.

No physicist has any explanation of how the physical act of measuring the whatevers can change their physical state, if they did, then no-one would be surprised by it.

It's kind of like saying that the act of weighing something will change its weight. The point of a detector is that it records the nature of the property you're trying to detect without changing it.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

It's not the fact that your consciousness is aware of it that changes its state though. The 'observation changing state' thing is because the actual process of obesrving something means physically interacting with it on some level. The state of something changes when a measuring device 'observes' it, and there's no consciousness involved there.

You can't see something without having some photons (or light energy waves if you prefer) bouncing off it and into your eye. If light is bouncing off something, its being changed. It's the same idea at the quantum level, just a bit weirder.

Exactly. The point is that you can't just detect something by some sort of magical passive appreciation of the universe.

 

[JonathanS2]

You cannot just observe/detect without interacting with the thing being observed/detected. Most of the time (for example weighing something big like a person) it doesn't matter, when you get to the subatomic level it does matter. What's not really understood is how this observation of one thing in one place seemingly alters something else 'linked' in another place.

 

[Crispy]

No physicist has any explanation of how the physical act of measuring the whatevers can change their physical state, if they did, then no-one would be surprised by it.

You can't see something without having some photons (or light energy waves if you prefer) bouncing off it and into your eye. If light is bouncing off something, its being changed. It's the same idea at the quantum level, just a bit weirder.

Is the explanation.

 

[bluestreak]

so basically, weird shit sometimes happens and we haven't quite worked out why.

 

[axon]

It's not the fact that your consciousness is aware of it that changes its state though. The 'observation changing state' thing is because the actual process of obesrving something means physically interacting with it on some level. The state of something changes when a measuring device 'observes' it, and there's no consciousness involved there.

Exactly. It isn't the action of observation that affects the particle, it is the interaction which affects the particle. It just so happens that there is no way of observing something without interacting with it.

 

[parallelepipete]

I don't think that's true, though I suppose for some people it's a more comfortable explanation.

No physicist has any explanation of how the physical act of measuring the whatevers can change their physical state, if they did, then no-one would be surprised by it.

It's kind of like saying that the act of weighing something will change its weight. The point of a detector is that it records the nature of the property you're trying to detect without changing it.

No no no! JonS2, FM and axon never mentioned weight (or more precisely, mass). The weirdness of quantum mechanics is that you can't measure both the velocity (i.e. speed and direction) and position of a particle exactly. The more precise the measurement of one, the less precisely you can measure the other. Measurement of mass doesn't come into this.

Mass will stay constant as a particle is weighed, so its physical state isn't changed. Mass does decrease during nuclear fission and fusion, which is why you can produce such large amounts of energy per kg of fuel, but in that case, you're firing heavy particles (neutrons or alpha particles) at nuclei specifically to disrupt or fuse them, which is completely different from the exchange of momentum between a particle and a photon being used to measure its velocity and position.

 

[In Bloom]

Had another thought and example to add.

In bloom. The point about human reality, although it's generally taken as real, and in a way it should be, It's nothing like physical reality -by which I mean, reality as described by physics

But physics do agree with "human reality", its just that things get kind of weird on the quantum level.

Furthermore, if human consciousness creates reality independent of some nebulous "true" reality, then why is quantum physics so bizarre? How would we detect it, if its not just part of our normal, everyday world?

 

[onemonkey]

the universe is subtle, complex and above all mathematical.
most of the really cool stuff happens in realms way beyond our perception and everyday experience.. so common sense and metaphors like wave and particle aren't going to cut it.

you need to learn lots of really hard maths to figure out what is meant by duality (or 'particle' or 'wave' or photon ...etc) and even then it's just the answer to some formula.. and not usually something with a meaningful tangible macro-scopic analogy..

sorry

 

[888]

It's not the fact that your consciousness is aware of it that changes its state though. The 'observation changing state' thing is because the actual process of obesrving something means physically interacting with it on some level. The state of something changes when a measuring device 'observes' it, and there's no consciousness involved there.

You can't see something without having some photons (or light energy waves if you prefer) bouncing off it and into your eye. If light is bouncing off something, its being changed. It's the same idea at the quantum level, just a bit weirder.

No, before measurment something is in a superposition of states, then when you measure it it changes to a particular state, this is different from simply interfering with something by measuring it. The thing isn't in a particular, but unkown state before measuring, that can't be accurately determined due to the interference of the measurement, it is actually in several states at once.

 

[Balbi]

Technology distuinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

I prefer this idea, after all the majority of what happens in everyday life is 'magic' to a certain degree. How does electricity flow? We had it wrong for so many years, my old man was trained as an electrician with the old idea of electric flow, although flow isn't exactly what happens.

I like the fact I can't explain some things, and I am constantly reminding myself that when studying things that aren't alive, the question is how, rather than why. The lending of human characteristics, of human storytelling to things like light is one of the most interesting parts of studying things.

Light is the fastest thing there is, that's pretty remarkable in itself. Maybe it's not a wave/particle, maybe it's something that we haven't seen before or can't define yet but current understanding makes us class it within what we know now. The most intelligent people in the world are sometimes reduced to explaining things in the most basic and honest manner, answering 'because'.

There's a lot of work and thinking to be done before we reach 'because of....'

 

[ZWord]

The point about the two-slit experiment that people seem to have failed to grasp, is that, the nature of the light changes before it enters the eye, not afterwards. We observe the nature of the light, as waves through two slits, an as particles through one slit, by looking at the pattern it makes on a screen. It is therefore, not the fact of the light interacting with our eyes at the point of entry to our eyes that changes the nature of the light. The light changed before it hit the screen, depending on whether you had one or two slits for it to pass through.

The appearance of an interference pattern on a screen behind two slits, showing that light is waves, but of a sharp line on a screen behind one slit showing that it is particles, does not depend on effects from measuring instruments used to measure it. The effect can be observed by you performing the experiment at home with a piece of card, a light, and a wall. It should be obvious, that these simple objects should not be capable of changing the nature of light. Similar effects are observed all the time in everyday reality.

Perhaps. it is neither waves nor particles. It is something else, that manifests in a wave like way in one situation and a particle like way in another situation. But then what is its nature? The experimental results show that it certainly appears to be waves sometimes and particles at other times, even though it can change its nature in the blink of an eye or the shutting of a slit. Some other nature it must have to make this possible, but it doesn't seem possible to describe such a nature without accepting that the idea of locality, - the idea that this a universe of *things* with distinct locations in space and time, is a human illusion created by the kind of perceptual organs and brains we have.

The problem for those with a mundane view of reality, is that for the light to do this, then you would imagine it has to start its manifestation at the moment it leaves its source of light. Waves and particles really are very different things, and something that can appear to be both must be a remarkable spirit/energy, whatever. It really seems from the experimental results, (in sophisticated experiments rather than home demos) that when it passes through one slit, it "really is" photons. And yet with two slits, it really is waves, and it's difficult to see how this can be so, for to act as a wave, it has to start off manifesting as a wave the moment it leaves the light source, and yet how could it know whether it would encounter one or two slits, unless it were intelligent? or unless it were one substance?

You can repeat and repeat that there is nothing mysterious about it, and it's all totally commonplace and material, but geniuses and brilliant physicists have found it deeply mysterious. If you are correct that there's nothing weird about it, then why does Richard Feynman describe it as "the central mystery." ? (see the link at the beginning of the thread)

 

[angry bob]

I think you have missed the point of the double slit experiment.

It's, perhaps easiest to think of it being done with electrons.

A single electron has always been thought of as a particle.

If you fire electrons through a double slit set up with a flourescent screen behind then each electron reaching the screen causes it to glow and you can count individual electrons as they arrive ... clear evidence of particle nature.

however, after many electrons have reached the screen an interference pattern is formed. Even if the electrons are fired over time such that the electrons cannot possibly interfere with each other you still get an interfernce pattern. i.e. the electron goes through both slits and interferes with itself!

Which is all very odd.

The implications of QM are that all particles are waves until they are measured and which point the wave collapses and becomes a particle.

(The moon isn't there until somebody looks at it!)

The electron is a wave that carries information on where the particle probably is.

The fundamental questions posed by the double slit experiments are:

1) QM tells us statistically where the particles will hit the screen. What are the rules to determine where a single particle will be observed?

2) What happens to the particle in between emission and observation?

3) What causes the particle to switch between statistical (wave) and non-statistical behaviours?

 

[ZWord]

Well, I don't think I missed the point. there's nothing you've written above that I disagree with apart from that.

Interestingly one materialist "refutation" of the surprising implications of quantum physics, ended up saying "the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks at it."

 

[angry bob]

Well, I don't think I missed the point. there's nothing you've written above that I disagree with apart from that.

Interestingly one materialist "refutation" of the surprising implications of quantum physics, ended up saying "the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks at it."

The double slit experiment with light doesn't demonstrate wave-particle duality.

Look at the photoelectric effect and Compton scattering for this.

 

[ZWord]

Well Feynman reckons it does, at least it shows the duality within light.

But the interesting thing is that the duality goes to the heart of matter. As you pointed out, you can do the two-slit experiment with an electron, and this is the bizarre thing. An electron was originally definitely a particle, but in order to try to understand how the atom works, it was found that it was better described as a wave in circumstances. But what is a wave?

A wave as I understand it is a kind of metaphor for an oscillation within a medium. And a medium is usually a bunch of particles.

It's a strange sort of reality, when a subatomic particle appears as an oscillation, within a medium of what sort, does the rabbit hole go on for ever?

particle turns out to be wave, but within what medium, more particles?, and these particles, what are they, etc?

 

[Kameron]

Just So You Know

A young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves.

-- Bill Hicks got there first (well may be not first but certainly in more psychedelic way than most other people)