Quote:Anyway, about your definition of virtual particles
I don't remember exactly where I got this notion but I believe it was in Anthony Zee' s QFT IN A NUTSHELL, where he makes the following suggestion - I have put it in one of my earlier post, maybe not to you. He says you can look at the interaction between two electrons from afar,and what you conclude is an electrical repulsive force, or from QFT, it's an exchange of virtual particles. Then he asked, what about when you have opposite charges, do you get an attraction? So in redoing the calculation for the Feynman propagator, he gets an opposite sign, suggesting as in classical physics, you have an attractive force. I think that it was in that book he makes the plead that virtual are just as real as the ones that would hit your eyes. But I went through that book a long time ago. So maybe my thinking about these things have evolved since then. And so my thinking is a hodge-podge of all my readings and my own reflections. Regardless, I made that claim in one of my blogs (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2015/09/superposi...tates.html).
NOTE: Now my blogs have been designed to answer specific questions I often had from students, former students and acquaintances of students/former students. So they are not in any order, some are more elaborate than others, done at different levels of who I had in mind. They are pedagogical tools, not me bragging about my skills...;-)
