> The electrons aren't really orbiting the nucleus; they are technically waves that take on particle-like properties when we do an experiment to determine their position. While orbiting an atom, they exist in a superposition of states, both particle and wave, with a wave function encompassing all the probabilities of its position at once. A measurement will collapse the wave function, giving us the electron's position
Physics will make more progress and faster than ever before, when it finally embraces that everything is a wave and that our perception is inseparable from the world we perceive.
What we usually call particles/objects are just what things look like to us when we sample reality at the sampling rate of our perception.
Our reality is basically the intersection/interaction of our perception and the environment.
> Physics will make more progress and faster than ever before, when it finally embraces that everything is a wave...
Physicists have already embraced this position: it's called quantum field theory. The degrees of freedom in QFT are fields, with particles just various excitations of those fields.
> ...and that our perception is inseparable from the world we perceive
Human perception does not have a sampling rate. This is why our eyes don't produce weird shutter speed effects like the one shown in the video. There is no shutter and there are no frames.
The same is true for measurements in physics. Modern digital lab equipment may use sampling, but this has nothing to do with the underlying physics. Putting a photographic film behind a double slit "collapses" the wavefunction of the photons going through without any sampling.
That carries the analogy a bit too far. While 'sampling rate' commonly implies a discrete time interval it can also mean an average.
Wave function collapse isn't a physical process but instead a commitment to not try to explain what's behind the equations. (And IMO consequently not science. We don't just give up because it's hard.)
QFT meanwhile seems to say that samples is what you get when two fields intersect. However, Bell inequality and decoherence further implies that there is no such thing as an abstract 'sample'. The spread of quantum information from an interaction is a subtle physical process.
>Human perception does not have a sampling rate. This is why our eyes don't produce weird shutter speed effects like the one shown in the video. There is no shutter and there are no frames.
our visual cortex is sampled at about 200Hz. The pipeline is about 6 stages (similar to the layers in CNN deep net) each taking 5ms, so about 30ms from photons hitting retina to the recognition.
To play with eye shutter speed effect - look at a wheel of the car driving along in a near by lane, and now quickly close and open eyelids, may be couple times in a row, and you will catch a glimpse of the non-spinning wheel still-photo like as in those movies.
You can call "sampling" "interaction" instead, if it's clearer. It still happens.
The "shutter speed effect" that your eyes produce are effectively what you perceive as your reality. If you could perceive as fast as a hummingbird or a bee, your reality would look a lot different.
Making a photographic film interact with photons is effectively sampling. The film is sampling the photons in the sense that whatever vibrations/waves the film is made of is interacting in a certain way with the vibration/wave of the photon. This process is going on continuously, non-stop every single moment, for everything.
Yeah as a Physics PhD I wonder how much quicker we’d be advancing if every single student didn’t have to go through a mini history lesson throughout their schooling, successively unlearning bad models. We could pick new abstractions that have math accessible to a level but are more accurate.
Each bad model that is learned is typically a valid model on some energy/velocity/ mass scale. Newtonian mechanics is a valid for sub-lightspeed velocities. Solving those problems using full general relativity is possible, but not useful. Modeling molecules as masses connected by springs is valid on short time scales and low energies. You can go on and on. These models are not "bad", they are just approximations that are only valid for a subset of all problems. Without these approximations, you cannot even solve most problems.
Its not like you want to teach and understand all of chemistry from a quantum chromodynamics perspective. Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but the history perspective is useful, because each of the models builds upon one another and slowly reveals the stranger and harder to describe parts of nature.
Newtonian mechanics fails only at extreme scales as far as mass is concerned, to break it completely you need to solve it for the entire mass of the universe, or for a singularity (the latter breaks GR too).
Newtonian mechanics is still the primary tool for astrophysics, and anything we do in space.
In some cases PPN is used but no one is solving non linear equations outside of extreme cases which are usually theoretical.
Btw, the link says the camera's capture rate changes in brighter light. I don't think that's right - I believe it's just the shutter angle that changes (the amount of time the shutter is open for each exposure).
1. Media reports always get it wrong blah blah blah
2. The problem is much deeper than you indicate. Classical mechanics forces an ontology onto us that includes particle, wave, force, kinetic energy, potential energy. When people are taught/learn quantum mechanics they try to stick to that same ontology. But it doesn't work. Quantum mechanics requires a different ontology. Some things are shared by the two ontologies, like kinetic/potential energy. Others like force/wave/particle are not part of the quantum ontology. Nobody is upset that you won't find the word force in a quantum mechanics book. But people continue to use wave and particle, which they should not.
3. In quantum mechanics, the state of a system is simply a complex function over the configuration space of the system. Sometimes the configuration space is continuous (like position is Real^3), other times it is discrete (like the spin). This discreteness is why it is not correct to use wave to describe the state of the system. And also, just use a different name like "quantum state" for a different mathematical object altogether and not get confused.
4. This is not hard to implement in practice. I am teaching a course on quantum mechanics, and I told my students in the first class that we will never use the words wave and particle in the course (and why not), and we have stuck to that promise still. Similarly, we have covered why saying "an electron is both here and there" are statements that you don't make within the framework of (pure state) quantum mechanics. This is a good summary of the latter concept https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
Loved the comic. Especially the part where it says: "... choreograph a pattern of interference..."
Choreographing a pattern of interference is basically all of physics and pretty much all the solutions to any engineering problem.
An interference pattern is basically just a way of calling the superposition of two (or more) waves/vibrations/whatever-name-you-want-to-use, and each one of those can be also thought of as the superposition of other two (or more). Hence any manipulation of the physical world is basically coregraphing those in a way that provides the output you want.
It illustrates very clearly how perception is affected by the coordination of different rates of movement of all the elements that connect the observed subject and the observer, including the elements that make up the observer. Which then makes you wonder, what is an observer?
It's just a stroboscope. The frequency of the oscillating ruler is close to an integer multiple of the camera frame rate which makes the motion look almost stationary. For low light the effect is washed out by motion blur due to the longer shutter speed. Nothing deep at all really.
A quark system might be nearly as complicated as a galaxy. Certainly, a particle of carbon is much more than a simple point-space. "Particle" is a misnomer and hopefully we will one day resolve the Standard Model particles down into more specific classes of systems.
There absolutely is. It's called a microscopic particle. A simple Google search would have revealed this to you.
They vary greatly in size or quantity, from subatomic particles like the electron, to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like powders and other granular materials.
Sure, if you change the context from what was intended then you have the power to twist the meaning of anything.
I don't understand why you are choosing to conflate a quark and a molecule of carbon. My entire point is that the usage of the word particle, which literally means "a point in space", for such a range of systems is inadequate. You can have dust particles as well, which are macroscopic and much bigger than molecules, so I'm not sure what position you're trying to establish, exactly. I know what an elementary particle is, I'm not just saying fancy words like quark and standard model because I read them in a Pop Sci magazine or skimmed a Wikipedia article. An elementary particle is a type of particle, but let's not move goalposts here.
Sorry, but your use of the word particle is surrounded with statements about elementary particles. Then, you, not me, conflate this context with another context in which particles are more general. It's as helpful as claiming that quarks are a misnomer, because they are obviously not a dairy product. Here, have a fish, for me it's EOT.
> conflate this context with another context in which particles are more general
I can't help it if you want to willfully ignore the meaning of the word "particle" in order to make an irrelevant argument on the internet. You failed to understand the context of my original post and are continuing to double down on this absurd position. Just because you were thinking of just elementary particles doesn't mean that's all that was being discussed.
> It's as helpful as claiming that quarks are a misnomer, because they are obviously not a dairy product.
Quark is a made up word and has nothing to do with dairy. What on earth are you talking about?
How can you sit here and argue that particle isn't a good word for these systems and then say that I'm misusing the word "particle" when I've clearly been pointing out from the start that I don't like the broad application the word has. It's not my fault that the word "particle" means what it does, but you tried to shift the discussion to just the class of elementary particles, not me.
You're literally arguing just to argue. And your need to downvote me and attempt to insult my intelligence instead of having a civil discussion just reinforces what kind of person you are. Please stop embarrassing yourself and read up on these things before interjecting as an armchair physicist.
I’m going to admit that I only got partway through the abstract when I was distracted by the pleasing font used for the body text on the website (HardingText-Regular-Web).
That is a beautiful font, but my googlefu must be lacking because I can't find a reference to this font anywhere. I wonder if it is one they created in house?
