Comment by nyc111
2 days ago
But he is not talking about wave particle duality. He explicitly states that it is not helpful "to imagine them as both wave and particle." He calls waves with very small amplitude "particles" (for historical reasons). So, according to this picture the building blocks of the universe are waves. It makes no difference if physicists choose to call a wave "particle". Calling a wave particle does not make the wave a particle.
> He explicitly states that it is not helpful "to imagine them as both wave and particle."
Where? I can't find that quote in the article.
> He calls waves with very small amplitude "particles" (for historical reasons).
The closest thing I see is
In a quantum world such as ours, the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves, which for historical reasons we call “particles.”
Note the "indivisible" part. That's not how waves work in your everyday experience. The common understanding of "wave" is based on classical physics, where waves can be scaled up or down arbitrarily. But here you have "waves" which can only get so small, but no smaller, which he then goes on to parenthetically suggest calling "wavicles".
Is coining a new word which is literally a combination of "wave" and "particle" not a way "to imagine them as both wave and particle"?
I copied the quote you couldn’t find from his figure 8: “Figure 8: There’s no perfect intuition for quantum physics. But it’s not helpful to imagine photons and electrons as particles (top right), meaning a “tiny speck”. Nor is it helpful to imagine them as both wave (top left) and particle (top right).”
Thanks. I didn't find it because of the redacted parentheses.
What he's trying to explain without math is essentially the canonical quantization formalism due to Dirac, circa 1927:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_quantization
It's still the first approach to quantum field theory which physics students are likely to encounter.
His "wavicle" is essentially the field expectation value for a free particle. There is a nice animation (in the non-relativistic limit) here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation
He seems to gloss over the connection to experiment though. Let's say you shoot an electron through slits in a screen and want to find out where it ends up using a photographic plate; you'll get a single dot somewhere on your plate, not an extended pattern. You can repeat the experiment with a new electron and get another dot, and keep repeating the experiment until all the dots form a pattern, in well known fashion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
The "wavicle" explains the pattern, but the pattern is made of dots...