Natural Order and Science

[little_monkey]

This will be of no good as I do not argue with an appeal to authority to support my posts. I either convince you with the strength of my arguments or I don't. Since it is the latter rather than the former, there is no reason for me to continue.

You so far just seem to keep shouting

I don't recall shouting at you, but if I did, it was unintentionally, and I apologize for it. 

the same thing at me

 

It's a definition, and there are only a limited number of ways to explain a definition before one ends up repeating oneself.

and don't respond to questions or comments except by telling me how I apparently don't know anything,

I don't think I said you know nothing, but I did point out that you've failed to understand the basic definition. What was I supposed to say? 

how is that supposed to convince me of anything.

I believe I've made an honest effort to clear out things, but it didn't work. I'm not going to repeat myself on and on. So right now I have no tools in my kit to clear up things for you. This is about a basic definition that is used commonly throughout the physics community. I doubt that they will change their definition of virtual particle just because some people don't understand it. 

So is the distinction you make above between virtual and real particles your entire definition or just one aspect of it?

Well, I'm not sure what you have in mind. One aspect is to look at how the idea of virtual particles came about, from its origin due to Yukawa to how Feynman used them in his development of the path integral. Another very interesting aspect is how it affected gauge theory, and led to postulate the Higgs bosons, proposed first in the 1960's and was only confirmed in 2012. Another aspect is how Hawking used that concept to derive that Black Holes have entropy, that they will necessarily radiate and eventually evaporate. Another aspect is that virtual particles are used to predict the Casimir force, which was subsequently confirmed in the lab. There are so many topics in QFT in which the use of virtual particles are part of the discussion. And most likely a surprise for you, not only do we use the concept of "virtual" particles, but also the concept of "ghost" particles. They're cool but a lot harder to explain.