How We Got To The Quantum World

[hazelm]

Let's see if I can get to an intelligent question.  In his new book (The Consciousness Instinct),  Michael Gazzaniga has written the best explanation of how we moved from the macro world of physics (atoms, molecules, etc.) to the micro world of.quantum mechanics (particles).   From page 166 through page 179, he has explained the theory of complementanity using the study of light and how it functions. 

 

Light consists of particles called photons. When light shines on a metal surface, the photons interact with the electrons of the metal, creating excitement among the electrons.  After much conflict of why and how to show this by measuring.  But you cannot measure a frantic electron because you never know where it is.  The problem was solved  by returning  to the macro world and working from there - with help of Neils Bohr and his complementarity,

 

I shall leave it there for anyone interested to read the solution because here is where I get lost and left in a quandary.  It seems that once you succeed in locating the position of the electron, the quantum theory collapses. 

 

Having solved the mystery of what light is doing, they realize that this plays havoc with the wave theory.  They say light's wave theory will not work here.  And this is my quandary.  I keep asking "why not?"  Isn't the wave simply carrying the photons?

 

A question that may explain.  What is light?  Is light a solid mass of photons (nothing else)?   Or is light something more and one of its characteristics a mass of photons? 

 

If someone can answer that, I can - I think -  figure out more.   I think the answer is in Neils Bohr's complementarity but that part is over my head.

 

Thank you for some enlightenment - on the simple level.  :-)

[Super Polymath]

I'm not going to answer any question but the one in the title:

 

Let's see if I can get to an intelligent question.  In his new book (The Consciousness Instinct),  Michael Gazzaniga has written the best explanation of how we moved from the macro world of physics (atoms, molecules, etc.) to the micro world of.quantum mechanics (particles).   From page 166 through page 179, he has explained the theory of complementanity using the study of light and how it functions.

 

Incorrect, America (more specifically the District of Columbia) branched off of the Head of the Nations (Holy See of the Pope) that was stationed in Old York Britain off of a Catholic Empire that originated with Ancient Roman Emperor Constantine 19 thousand and some change years ago: his regime originated with the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece that became the Athenian Empire.

 

The Seven Sages Regime wrote the Old Testament, and later the New Testament (Centuries Later) for their desperate subjects, before going to war in Sparta & Greece to cancel the debts. They poisoned Rome's waterworks with led leading partially to it's collapse before it fell to invader's before using their wealth to create the Templar, Pope controlled Roman Catholics, etc who capitalized on Judeo Christianity to become wealthier than God for some vast monopoly & control of resources all throughout Europe in the Dark Ages when they spread the plague with rats using the road systems built by their ancient extinct Roman ancestors.

 

But of the original Seven Sages, the journey into chemistry began with the Philosopher Thales of ancient Greece. Anaxagoras invented astronomy & secretly wrote of a round earth & other such spherical heavenly bodies in motion. Aristotle was a philosopher after Thales as well like Anaxagoras, he had invented what would become known as the elementary particles IN MOTION in his quest for the Unmoved Mover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover, later Socrates invented what would become the atom of modern science.

 

Quantum Mechanics breaks elementary motion down null to get a quantifiable irreducible metric that does not reflect reality beneath the planck length & was invented in the late 1800s or early 1900s to distract from Pythagoras' sacred geometry that DOES reflect reality & cannot be defined by a luxon metric but an inertial pattern in nature, the turtles all the way down fact that there is no Unmoved Mover but instead a 12-fold circular overlay pattern underlying all motion in nature seen flowers, diamonds, etc which can be found using the conic sections of further iterations of David's Star and the Koch Anti-snowflake:

 

 

 

It was to distract from further investigations into Einstein's spacetime continuum (time dilation) being mixed up with the sacred geometry exposed by Hogh Von Koch and put into experimentation and invention by Tesla.

Edited June 21, 2018 by Super Polymath

[exchemist]

Let's see if I can get to an intelligent question.  In his new book (The Consciousness Instinct),  Michael Gazzaniga has written the best explanation of how we moved from the macro world of physics (atoms, molecules, etc.) to the micro world of.quantum mechanics (particles).   From page 166 through page 179, he has explained the theory of complementanity using the study of light and how it functions. 

 

Light consists of particles called photons. When light shines on a metal surface, the photons interact with the electrons of the metal, creating excitement among the electrons.  After much conflict of why and how to show this by measuring.  But you cannot measure a frantic electron because you never know where it is.  The problem was solved  by returning  to the macro world and working from there - with help of Neils Bohr and his complementarity,

 

I shall leave it there for anyone interested to read the solution because here is where I get lost and left in a quandary.  It seems that once you succeed in locating the position of the electron, the quantum theory collapses. 

 

Having solved the mystery of what light is doing, they realize that this plays havoc with the wave theory.  They say light's wave theory will not work here.  And this is my quandary.  I keep asking "why not?"  Isn't the wave simply carrying the photons?

 

A question that may explain.  What is light?  Is light a solid mass of photons (nothing else)?   Or is light something more and one of its characteristics a mass of photons? 

 

If someone can answer that, I can - I think -  figure out more.   I think the answer is in Neils Bohr's complementarity but that part is over my head.

 

Thank you for some enlightenment - on the simple level.  :-)

Something seems to have got lost in translation here. 

 

It is the wave nature of matter that leads to the complementarity.

 

A simple sinusoidal wave extends throughout space, mathematically speaking. However if you combine a series of such waves of differing wavelengths, you get constructive interference - in other words a non-zero amplitude of the wave "packet" -  in only one part of space. This animation shows what happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#/media/File:Sequential_superposition_of_plane_waves.gif

 

Now, in quantum theory, the amplitude of the wave expresses the probability of finding the QM entity (photon, electron, etc) in that region of space. Whereas the wavelength expresses the momentum of the entity.

 

So the more localised in space the amplitude is, the more varieties of wavelength have to make up the wave packet, i.e. the less certain the momentum.

 

We say that position and momentum are "complementary" properties of the QM entity, as you can't know both at once exactly, due to this wave behaviour of matter. 

[hazelm]

Something seems to have got lost in translation here. 

 

It is the wave nature of matter that leads to the complementarity.

 

A simple sinusoidal wave extends throughout space, mathematically speaking. However if you combine a series of such waves of differing wavelengths, you get constructive interference - in other words a non-zero amplitude of the wave "packet" -  in only one part of space. This animation shows what happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#/media/File:Sequential_superposition_of_plane_waves.gif

 

Now, in quantum theory, the amplitude of the wave expresses the probability of finding the QM entity (photon, electron, etc) in that region of space. Whereas the wavelength expresses the momentum of the entity.

 

So the more localised in space the amplitude is, the more varieties of wavelength have to make up the wave packet, i.e. the less certain the momentum.

 

We say that position and momentum are "complementary" properties of the QM entity, as you can't know both at once exactly, due to this wave behaviour of matter. 

Correct.  The something that got lost is the part I said I would not attempt to summarize because it was too far over my head.  I know that I am picturing light traveling in a wave pattern wrongly.  Thank you for the explanation.  I will concentrate on that now and see what happens. 

 

Back to my other question, first. That is if it can be answered.  I meant to Google "what is light?" and maybe find the answer there but been very busy.  Is light totally a mass (collection) of photons?  Is that all it takes to make light?  Or is there more to light than just photons?  I think the answer to that will help in my re-reading (fourth time) of these pages.  They really are good.  Just a bit more than I could chew on all at once.

Edited June 21, 2018 by hazelm

[exchemist]

Correct.  The something that got lost is the part I said I would not attempt to summarize because it was too far over my head.  I know that I am picturing light traveling in a wave pattern wrongly.  Thank you for the explanation.  I will concentrate on that now and see what happens. 

 

Back to my other question, first. That is if it can be answered.  I meant to Google "what is light?" and maybe find the answer there but been very busy.  Is light totally a mass (collection) of photons?  Is that all it takes to make light?  Or is there more to light than just photons?  I think the answer to that will help in my re-reading (fourth time) of these pages.  They really are good.  Just a bit more than I could chew on all at once.

Yes it is a collection of photons.

 

Light is also a travelling wave, made up of a disturbance in the electric field and a companion disturbance in the magnetic field, at right angles to one another. If you have light travelling from left to right, you can imagine there is an electrical disturbance going rhythmically from +ve to -ve and back in the up and down direction, while there is a magnetic disturbance going from N to S (magnetic poles) and back into and out of the paper. So both electric and magnetic fields are "waving", perpendicular to each other, and to the direction of propagation of the wave. Visible light is said to be an "electromagnetic wave", as are radio waves, x-rays and gamma radiation. They are all the same thing, just with different ranges of frequencies (wavelengths). 

 

Although light is, from this point of view, a wave, it can only interact, e.g. be absorbed or emitted, in discrete units with a fixed amount of energy, which is what we mean by a "photon".

 

When I say the energy of each photon is fixed, this is so for a given frequency (wavelength) of light. However the amount of energy each photon carries depends on the frequency (wavelength) of the light. For instance each "blue" photon has more energy than each "red" photon. (And each UV photon has even more, which is why too much UV can give you sunburn or even skin cancer.)

 

This is described by Planck's relation: E=hν, in which E is the energy of each photon; ν, the Greek letter "nu", is the frequency; and h is called Planck's Constant, one of the most famous fundamental constants in physics.  

Edited June 21, 2018 by exchemist

[Farsight]

Light is also a travelling wave, made up of a disturbance in the electric field and a companion disturbance in the magnetic field, at right angles to one another. If you have light travelling from left to right, you can imagine there is an electrical disturbance going rhythmically from +ve to -ve and back in the up and down direction, while there is a magnetic disturbance going from N to S (magnetic poles) and back into and out of the paper. So both electric and magnetic fields are "waving", perpendicular to each other, and to the direction of propagation of the wave.

This is something of a lie-to-children Heather. A photon is an electromagnetic wave. Yes, the Wikipedia electromagnetic radiation article says the electric field, magnetic field, and direction of wave propagation are all orthogonal. But pay special attention to this:

” This is guaranteed since the generic wave solution is first order in both space and time, and the curl operator on one side of these equations results in first-order spatial derivatives of the wave solution, while the time-derivative on the other side of the equations, which gives the other field…”

The thing we call E is the spatial derivative of the electromagentic wave, whilst B is the time derivative. They aren’t actually two orthogoanl waves. To gain a better appreciation use a canoe analogy. Imagine you're in a canoe at sea. Imagine something like an oceanic swell wave comes at you. Let’s say it’s a 10m high sinusoidal hump of water, without a trough. As the wave approaches, your canoe tilts upward. The degree of tilt denotes E, whilst the rate of change of tilt denotes B. When you're momentarily at the top of the wave, your canoe is horizontal and has momentarily stopped tilting, so E and B are zero. Then as you go down the other side, the situation is reversed. The important point to note is that there's only one wave there, not two:

 

What people usually say is there:

 

A better picture of what’s there:

 

Like Oleg Jefimenko said: "neither Maxwell's equations nor their solutions indicate an existence of causal links between electric and magnetic fields. Therefore, we must conclude that an electromagnetic field is a dual entity always having an electric and a magnetic component simultaneously created by their common sources: time-variable electric charges and currents”. That’s why E and B are always in phase.

 

Another lie-to-children fable is that an E wave generates a B wave which generates an E wave and so on. The people who say this tend to be unaware of electromagnetic unification, and tend to say that this is why light doesn’t need a medium to travel in. It’s an incorrect assertion. We have Faraday’s law, usually written as ∇ × E = − ∂B/∂t, not because changing one field creates the other, or because one circulates round the other. The equals sign is an “is”. The curl of E is the time rate of change of B. Because they're two aspects of the same thing, the electromagnetic wave.

[Farsight]

Gravity is weak because it's a "trace" force.

 

Electromagnetism is a very strong force. However we don't normally notice just how strong it is. For example, in the current in the wire, most of the forces balance. However the electrons are moving, so the forces don't quite balance. Hence two such wires will move together. See hyperphysics: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/wirfor.html .  

 

And guess what? When you stop the electrons, the forces still don't quite balance. The two wires still move together. But now the force is much much weaker, and we don't call it magnetism any more. We call it gravity.   

 

 

It has been shown by Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam, that at these scales, gravity can indeed play the role of the strong force. Further, if it does play such a force, it may even answer why we cannot detect a single quark in existence, they always seem to be in bound pairs. 

 

I know how gravity works. I wrote about it http://physicsdetective.com/how-gravity-works/'>here. I know how a magnet works too. Trust me Dubbelosix, gravity has got nothing to do with the strong force.

Edited June 26, 2018 by Farsight