RE: Are Particles Theoretically Tangible?
March 25, 2022 at 4:17 pm
(This post was last modified: March 25, 2022 at 4:18 pm by HappySkeptic.)
(March 25, 2022 at 3:17 pm)JairCrawford Wrote: Ok, I think I’m starting to track a little bit with this explanation. Still confused as to how something can be a particle and a wave at the same time but the chair analogy is a good one.
I remember when I was first told that an atom is mostly comprised of empty space, because of how far the electrons orbit the nucleus. I wondered how something made mostly of empty space could produce solid objects. But then I pictured a fan, with fan blades. There is more space between the blades than there are blades, but once you turn that thing on high speed you’re not going to be able to poke it fast enough to only hit the empty space. Do electrons and their ridiculously fast orbits work similarly?
As for fields… I don’t know how to conceptualise that. I’ve read some people say that vibrations between fields cause quarks and electrons and other particles to ‘be’, or that they are nothing else but simply vibrations. I don’t know how much of this is established or still theoretical, but it’s very hard to conceptualise.
There are two separate ideas you are combining.
There is quantum field theory, which states that every particle is literally a perturbation of a field for that type of fundamental particle. If you put a precise amount of energy into the field, it creates a small wave that remains reasonably localized - we call that a particle. These are not the common fields like electric, magnetic, etc. There is one for each type of quark.
Then, there is regular quantum theory, that states that for every particle, there is an associated wavefunction that describes the time-evolution of its probability to have a certain position, energy, etc. One can view this wavefunction as simply a mathematical construct, with no basis in reality, but physicists tend to go the other way, and view the wavefunction as "all that there is".
Everything in existence is reducible to individual countable "things", but those things can appear localized in space (what we think of as a particle), or can be extended in space (as a wave) depending on what sort of measurement we take. Basically, it is a wave, until it starts to interact in a way that measures its localized position.
