/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #12088825

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Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 19:36:42 2020 No.12088825 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>12089017 >>12089022 >>12089027 >>12089303 >>12090467

How can light be both a wave and a particle? How does that make logical sense? Does it just mean that it works differently depending on the way and situation you examine it in, or is it really a wave and a particle at the same time?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:23:18 No.12088995 Report

Quoted By: >>12089052

https://www.google.com

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:30:29 No.12089017 Report

Quoted By: >>12089052

>>12088825
Light is a wave. It can sometimes behave like it would have particle-like properties, but in its nature (intrinsically) it is a wave. Photon is a wave and so are other elemental "particles".

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:32:05 No.12089022 Report

Quoted By: >>12089052

>>12088825
It's all just made up Jewish physics

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:33:34 No.12089027 Report

Quoted By: >>12089045 >>12089052 >>12090467

>>12088825
depends on who you ask, some people even say that all matter is both a wave and a particle

honestly just don't believe in the duality, just tell yourself you don't know what it is, sometimes it acts like a wave, sometimes it don't

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:39:03 No.12089045 Report

Quoted By:

>>12089027
But that's not true. Photon is a stationary wave or an excitement of a photon field if you like. This stationary wawes can act as particles in some cases but this doesn't change their nature.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:41:58 No.12089052 Report

Quoted By: >>12089057

>>12088995
Do you always reply the same to threads with questions?

>>12089017
Yeah I think that sounds reasonable, this here looks like it's saying the same thing https://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html
Isn't everything just different forms of energy anyway? Waves / particles too.

>>12089022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality
>Although the use of the wave-particle duality has worked well in physics, the meaning or interpretation has not been satisfactorily resolved; see Interpretations of quantum mechanics.

>>12089027
Yeah, that seems funny. Physics teachers just tell to students that light is both a particle and a wave and the students usually just believe that blindly, but I'm not sure even the physics teachers are aware of all the theories explaining this seemingly illogical duality.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:43:18 No.12089057 Report

Quoted By: >>12089062 >>12089065

>>12089052
I don't understand why you have linked a wiki article at me.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:44:27 No.12089062 Report

Quoted By:

>>12089057
Read the quote, it says nobody really knows

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:45:48 No.12089065 Report

Quoted By:

>>12089057
He wanted to insult you. He succeeded.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:47:44 No.12089071 Report

Quoted By: >>12089089 >>12089206

"light is just a wave that can have particle-like properties"
if light is solely a wave how do you explain:
>photoelectric effect
>single-photon sources
>the entire field of quantum optics
>the entire field of photonics

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:52:03 No.12089089 Report

Quoted By: >>12089095

>>12089071
Could it be that light is a combination of a wave and a particle, with a particle or particles travelling along the wave? Or does light just have different effects in different contexts, akin to the uncertainty principle?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:53:03 No.12089095 Report

Quoted By: >>12089114

>>12089089
there's no use in asking what's "really" going on as is the case with a lot of things in quantum mechanics. we only can describe what we observe, and some phenomena are explicable only when you treat light as quantized photons.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 20:56:21 No.12089114 Report

Quoted By: >>12089142

>>12089095
Yeah, I know that's the case with quantum mechanics and maybe we'll never know better. It is what it is but it does sound almost like a logical paradox. Could our logic just be wrong?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:01:54 No.12089142 Report

Quoted By: >>12089203 >>12089269

>>12089114
we have no way of knowing if our logic is right or wrong because at the moment we cannot test these properties. we can only observe their effects.
maybe string theory is right, maybe everything we know is wrong, maybe atoms are just little gremlins playing tricks on us. but since we cannot test any of these there's no use coming up with theories, since they cannot be falsified.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:15:05 No.12089203 Report

Quoted By:

>>12089142
That's insightful, thanks for the answers anon.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:16:04 No.12089206 Report

Quoted By: >>12089269

>>12089071
You shouldn't think of a photon like of a wave on a water surface. Think of it like of a single peak that "doesn't move". It's an excitation. The width of this excitation is its frequency (even though it looks like a single "impulse" and is not periodic as normal waves). If you make a lot of photons they start to look as a normal wave. But if you create a single photon, a single "pulse", then it behaves like particle but intrinsically is still a wave, therefore it can produce e.g. diffraction patterns. The name particle is a bit misleading. There are no particles just different excitations of fields which have a wave like nature and when quantified (measured one by one in single chunks/ "pulses") can behave like particles.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:39:45 No.12089269 Report

Quoted By: >>12089277

>>12089206
don't tell me how to think of photons, especially when your "description" isn't any more correct than implied in >>12089142. I work with these systems.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:42:56 No.12089277 Report

Quoted By: >>12089289

>>12089269
And yet you cannot explain what they (photons) really are.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:46:18 No.12089289 Report

Quoted By: >>12089307

>>12089277
because there is no explanation beyond "photons are elementary quantizations of the electromagnetic field." any other attempt to go deeper is just metaphysics.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:51:20 No.12089303 Report

Quoted By:

>>12088825
Light is just a state in a symmetrized (bosonic) Fock space which obeys electromagnetic $\mathrm{U}(1)$ gauge symmetry and evolves nontrivially with respect to particular interaction terms in a Lagrangian.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 05 Sep 2020 21:52:35 No.12089307 Report

Quoted By:

>>12089289
Have you read prof. Kobayashi's paper "On the true nature of photons and other elementary particles"? I suppose you haven't. If you had, you wouldn't question my words and prof. Kobayashi's authority. I just want not remaind you, that he's probably the one of the most influential scientists of last 20 years or so. Especially when it comes to QED.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 06 Sep 2020 06:41:18 No.12090467 Report

Quoted By:

>>12088825
>>12089027
Waves travel through particles. They are not, themselves, particles. Waves are movements, not material things.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Sun 06 Sep 2020 09:32:52 No.12090815 Report

Quoted By:

Is a photon a wave packet?

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