Whirlpools, Charge, and the Wave Nature of Matter

[Little Bang]

Moderation note: the first 2 posts of this thread were split from the thread Standard Model, because they are a different topic.

 

You have swished your hand through the surface of water and it creates little whirl pools that slowly fad away. How do we know in super-colliders that the collision products are not something like those whirl pools? If there was a POSSIBILITY that charge has something to do with the wave nature of matter how would we ever know?

[Erasmus00]

You have swished your hand through the surface of water and it creates little whirl pools that slowly fad away. How do we know in super-colliders that the collision products are not something like those whirl pools? If there was a POSSIBILITY that charge has something to do with the wave nature of matter how would we ever know?

 

There certainly is a sense that the hadrons are like whirlpools- in non-linear sigma models various hadrons are topological defects in the fields. This is very much like whirlpools, which are topological defects in the "field" of water.

 

If charge has "something to do with the wave nature of matter" there are lots of ways to know, depending on what that you mean by something. Is charge related to wavelength or wave vector? No. Frequency? No.

 

Charge is certainly intimately bound up with gauge symmetry- which is tied together with Maxwell's equations, which have very much to do with the nature of matter.