Comment by T-A
3 months ago
> 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...
Your comment is helpful, thanks. I also discussed this with chatgpt and he said similar things: “Strassler’s term "indivisible waves" seems to be his unique phrasing to make these ideas more intuitive for a lay audience. Physicists usually use more formal language, such as ‘quantized excitations of a field’ or ‘wave-particle duality.’
But my problem is different.
Below I use the word “particle” to mean “a three dimensional indivisible unit,” and nothing else. A particle is not a mathematical point as Strassler suggests when he describes a particle as a “dot.” And a particle is not a wave. If Strassler decides to call waves “particles”, waves do not magically become particles. Ever since the scientific revolution we have not explained natural phenomena by magic.
I read Strassler quote again:
“In a quantum world such as ours, the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves, which for historical reasons we call “particles.” Despite their name, these objects aren’t little dots...”
My interpretation of this quote is like this:
> In a quantum world such as ours the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves...
This means that the world is made of quantum fields and fields are waves and not particles [particle are indivisible units, Strassler calls them “little dots”].
This is a clear statement. Strassler is saying that our world is quantum and it is made of fields. Fields are not particles. The unit of study of physics is now fields, not particles. There are no particles in this world because the field is made of waves. These waves are not particles. But they differ from the classical waves because they can only be scaled down to a certain length.
> ...which for historical reasons we call “particles”. Despite their name these objects aren’t little dots [they are not indivisible units with extension].
Strassler’s quote makes it clear that the building blocks of the world are waves, not particles. In this world of ours there are no particles in the sense of indivisible units. It is only that Strassler chooses to call these waves “particles.” This is just a naming convention.
If someone decides to call “monkey” the animal we know and love as a “donkey”, obviously the long eared cute animal will not become a monkey just because someone decided to call it “monkey”. This play on words can only make a monkey out of logic and create confusion. If we are calling an animal with the name of another animal we are only exposing ourself as a sophist.
This is exactly what Strassler is doing. He is intentionally trying to corrupt the meanings of well established words by loading them with new meanings. He is playing naming games. Calling a wave particle does not make the wave a particle. Then why call a wave particle? No sane person would call a wave “particle” unless he has something to hide and wants to deceive us or even deceive himself.
To me, if true, the fact that the building blocks of the world are waves is a huge and fundamental discovery because it proves that the world is not atomic and matterful as Newton assumed. There are no forces acting between particles because particles do not exist.
This is where the problem lies for physicists. Atomic materialism is their professional dogma and they need to save it despite the experiments contradicting it. But this dogma cannot be saved by using sophistry and calling waves particles.
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