Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

SideburnsOfDoom

This was linked recently:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantu...

> An electron is not a billiard ball, and it’s not a crest and trough moving through a pool of water. An electron is a mathematically different sort of entity, all the time and under all circumstances, and it has to be accepted on its own terms.

> The universe is not wavering between using particles and waves, unable to make up its mind. It’s only human intuitions about quantum mechanics that swap back and forth. The intuitions we have for billiard balls, and the intuitions we have for crests and troughs in a pool of water, both look sort of like they’re applicable to electrons, at different times and under different circumstances. But the truth is that both intuitions simply aren’t applicable.

> If you try to think of an electron as being like a billiard ball on some days, and like an ocean wave on other days, you will confuse the living daylights out of yourself.

> Yet it’s your eyes that are wobbling and unstable, not the world.

This also applies to light.

IMHO, light is light. When we view it as a particle, we are wrong. When we view it as a wave we are also wrong, but in a different way.

Imagine talking to an ancient philosopher who strongly believed that the everything in the world was made of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Explain electromagnetic waves to them.

They might end up saying, "so EM waves are invisible like Air, but they move around like Water waves, so really EM waves display Air-Water duality?"

That's how stupid the idea of wave-particle duality is. When you upgrade to a better model of the world, you have to drop the old concepts, and start anew with new concepts.

Why not say "when solving problem X, we can approximate it as a particle" or "when solving problem Y, we can approximate it as a wave"?

Because someone might come up with a problem that is a bit like X and a bit like Y.

That sounds like an excellent opportunity to test both the models, and perhaps to develop a third.

We already have, its called QED and is the most preise physical theory ever created and tested. Theoretical predictions agree with experiment inside the statistical uncertainties which are now at the 15th or so decimal digit.

The problem is, people still want to map the mathematical description of how light and particles behave of QED to common sense analogies and that just does not work.

There is no commonly known and understood thing that lends itself as a working analogy.

The French called this the "le principe Donny et Marie," based on some research from the mid 70's for some reason. Oooh la la, those hot pants!

Hmmm... that post was a little bit HackerNews-ish, and a little bit Reddit-ish.

I’m going to simultaneously upvote and downvote you.

How is that different from saying "this problem cannot be approximated these ways"?

How do you know a priori which kind of problem it is?

Wave or particle are interpretations we attach to the results of applying the Schrodinger equation.

So if I understand your point correctly, approximations are a priori simplifications of problems, while we are talking about after-the-fact interpretations here, and therefore they are not the same? That sounds logical, thank you.

I hope that this is as amazing (complete, consistent and coherent) as it initially looks.

But I don't see your quote in the link. Did it come from another source, or did the linked sequence change in the interim, or something else?

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