Are Particles Theoretically Tangible?

[zebo-the-fat]

It's complex, because ... quantum!

[JairCrawford]

Tangibility is really more of a theoretical question, since we can’t actually shrink ourselves at all to find out, let alone to quantum levels.

I think essentially what I’m trying to grasp is… at the quantum level are particles that are responsible for matter, in and of themselves material in nature? Is, say, a proton an actual physical object? Or is it better understood as three quarks all more energy-like and fuzzy spinning around so fast that once you zoom out, we get the illusion of a material nature? (Again… not trying to delve into any pseudoscience here. Just trying to wrap my head around this.)

The answer to that is "Yes". It's a matter of perspective. Think of it this way, is a chair a single solid object? Or a collection of wood fibers? Or a grouping of organic molecules? If you're sitting on it it's one thing, if you're doing biochemical analysis it's another. It's both at the same time, we just have different ways of looking at it.

That's what makes the quantum realm so counterintuitive, We live on a scale where waves are waves and particles are particles and never the twain shall meet. At our scale air pressure is constant across our bodies because the enormous number of atoms pushing on us averages out all variability. Look through even a modest optical microscope though and you can start to see that variability. Small objects get nudged about by Brownian motion as molecules smack into them at different rates, Not something that we typically sense but you can see it with any old high school microscope. Go even smaller and the rules get even less like what we're used to. Harder to comprehend by brains trained to obey walk lights and treat vehicles as discreet particles. Go small enough and particles are also waves and fields. You can look at them and describe them in any of those terms and they'll act that way too. But our common sense gets in the way of thinking that way.

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.

[The Grand Nudger]

Think of a net. It's mostly empty space, but tell that to the fish.

[HappySkeptic]

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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I blame my primary education for my lack of physics knowledge. To this day, I think of atoms as mini solar systems, and I tend to visualize an electron as something about the size and shape of a small pea.

Boru

[Ranjr]

Thread read, but I'm still wondering, has wave-particle duality been fully explained?  

[Rahn127]

Imagine there is a large pile of cylinder like beads in an empty swimming pool. Millions of beads of every color all mixed together.

Let's pretend that enough purple beads are removed and using some thread, they are connected together in a ring and then another ring and another until you had 20 rings.

Then all 20 rings connected until you made a cylinder. That cylinder is now a larger version of each individual bead.

Now we will make several increasingly smaller rings that will be used as a bottom of our cylinder making it look something like a drinking glass.

We can now scoop our glass into the pool of beads and gather together a collection of beads.

We might consider the glass we made to be tangible because the beads are connected together. If you remove that connection, the glass would fall apart back into the individual beads.

On the atomic scale and much smaller there is no tangibility as we think of it. It's a clash of forces and charge.

It's energy that gets transferred through the fundamental forces of nature.

[HappySkeptic]

Thread read, but I'm still wondering, has wave-particle duality been fully explained?  

Popcorn noted .

[Jehanne]

Thread read, but I'm still wondering, has wave-particle duality been fully explained?  

No.

[Angrboda]