Particles And The Wave

[Dubbelosix]

The general consensus in any good and well-written textbook in physics often states that particles and waves share a duality... But is it an exact duality of nature?

 

For quite a few years now this absolutist notion has troubled me; as a result, many quantum physicists par a few have abandoned the mechanical and deterministic models of past physics for something more mystical, albeit mundane. All the while that experiment hinted at a wave present with the particle, the double slit experiment still indicated that while diffraction of the particle is observed from wavelike mechanics, it is still detected as a bullet in the screen.

 

Stranger yet, even when the apparatus shoots a single particle into the slits, the diffraction would still emerge after a finite amount of time and the detector screen is eventually bombarded equally all over. How this is possible still has not been properly assessed and has somewhat been swept under the carpet, because how do non entangled particles know where to land? How did it know where the previous particle had comfortably sat on the detector?

 

This raises a serious question about whether the universe is deterministic. Regardless of non locality and romantic words like statistical probabilities, there is little reason in physics to abandon determinism. While phycisists are quite certain behind the existence of particles and the wave nature they exhibit, what is often overlooked is that the wave function is entirely deterministic concerning its evolution. Only a smear of uncomfortable unpredictability arises when we want to know exactly where a particle is at a given time. We will come back to this.

 

Let's take a few steps back first, what if the particle and wave are not exact dualities, but accompany one another? Worded yet in a different way, we know matter curves space and spacetime geometry is in some way linked to the way waves move through spacetime, are they still an exact equality?

 

The question has been asked since the days of de Broglie and later Bohms extension and is the crucial interpretation of physics which included non locality even before Bell constructed the non local inequality - in fact, it was this early work which inspired him to write out his inequality, later admitting he could not rule out super determinism and that his preferred model was that of a particle guided by the wave itself. In a similar stance, while de Broglie was the first to predict a wave nature to matter, he was also quite clear that the wave guided the particle, both entities intrinsically related but always there. This is what led to the empty wave interpretation of the double slit experiment. In short, if the electron is always there, then it does not follow through both paths in the double slit, but will go through one alone, and the wave passes through both slits, with one carrying the particle and the other being theoretically empty. The empty wave might be detectable, in fact some theorists have already enertained how detection of the wave could be carried out. I suggested that if waves are in fact gravitational in nature, they may be detectable with extremely sensitive equipment that we use today to detect them from deep space. In fact it was shown a few years back from an article shortly after the detection of the gravitational that the detector is also capable of producing them, meaning that the waves a particle can experience could be the wake of small gravitational perturbations guiding them in phase through space. I went as far to demonstrate that the emission of absorption of radiation inside the atom leading to the almost instantaneous phenomenon of the quantum leap could be the result of a gravitational wave either raising or lowering an electron orbital.

 

While de Broglies interpretation cannot today be ruled out, we still seem to fall to the Copenhagen interpretation for the foundation of explaining physics, probably due to the consensus taken a few decades back. The randomness of nature still lingered like a bad smell from physics too ignorant to care about why certain things happen in nature and I have no doubt the main reason today for this ignorance is still rooted from the "apparent" lack of predictability with how a wave function collapses, if it collapses at all from the way dogma has written it from Heisenbergs tomestone. The uncertainty principle, a regarded fact of nature has had to be modified. We where in fact able to predict some of the time where a particle may be and hinted that perhaps one day his uncertainty principle could break down with the right technology.

 

The wave and particle nature are indeed facts from experiment... I cannot disagree with this. In the advent of the modern theory of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg only showed that the knowledge gained from one observable would be at the expense of another - this complementarity seems to be a measure of ignorance of information able to be obtained from a system rather than it justifying an innate randomness to the world. We will leave it at this for now and tomorrow discuss a bit more on the wave nature and complimentary observables, which I will discuss not just a property of particles but also linked to classical geometries.

Edited August 10, 2020 by Dubbelosix

[TomBooth]

"We will leave it at this for now and tomorrow discuss a bit more..."

 

I guess it's true. "Tomorrow, tomorrow, your always a day away".

 

Interesting topic. Looking forward to its continuation.

[Dubbelosix]

I keep forgetting to update this sorry.

[TomBooth]

I keep forgetting to update this sorry.

No problem. I just joined the forum yesterday, so it's brand new to me. I just find the double slit experiment very interesting.

 

One of my favorite sites on the subject: http://www.bottomlayer.com/index.html

[Dubbelosix]

I don't mean to be rude, but I cannot rain dance between my life, your post and something else.