The math is one thing, but I find the idea that the fundamental pieces of reality aren’t particles a little unsettling.
The classic double-slit experiment is kinda bizarre when one considers the “single electron” case.
The classic double-slit experiment is kinda bizarre when one considers the “single electron” case.
The one-two punch of the photoelectric effect and the double slit experiment (the classic first two labs of QM) force you to accept that photons behave both like waves, and like particles.
This is the reason for statistical interpretation of QM that states that a wave function is just a way to calculate probability with no inherent meaning.
So wave-particle duality is just an artifact of Copenhagen interpretation of QM, not something that one can observe. What one clearly observes that photons travel through a region where they should not classically be and never appear in the region where they should be classically.
Note that even classically waves does not exist as they are just an artifact of motion of collection of molecules that on average can be described by wave-like equations.
The same could be said of the entirely unsurprising many-photon case. The individual photons aren't demonstrating the interference pattern, just the "big enough sequence of single photon measurements". Again, that's not the interesting part of the double slit experiment. We're perfectly used to the concept of a collection of many interacting particles having wave-like properties.
The double slit experiment has non-interacting photons demonstrating wave-like properties.
The modern record for a matter-wave superposition stands at a nanoparticle composed of roughly 7,000 sodium atoms (about 8 nanometers wide), achieving a massive "Schrödinger's cat" state at the scale of a small virus.
So then particles don't exist, and viruses also don't exist? Is "reality" just a dynamic pattern that doesn't exist in the naive sense? As astute stoics we should not worry ourselves with such matters, "shut up and calculate"?
There is something about quantum theory that is different in character from any physical theory posed before. To put a finger on it, the issue is this: The basic statement of the theory—the one we have all learned from our textbooks—seems to rely on terms our intuitions balk at as having any place in a fundamental description of reality. The notions of “observer” and “measurement” are taken as primitive, the very starting point of the theory. This is an unsettling situation! Shouldn’t physics be talking about what is before it starts talking about what will be seen and who will see it? Perhaps no one has put the point more forcefully than John Stewart Bell:
> What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD?
"reality" is just a picture painted on consciousness. A particle exists because consciousness, for some reason, perceive a particle. Physicists should stop looking for smaller particles, and look into space and time as something that emerge out of consciousness...
Without a common understanding of that word, any further discussion is useless..
You are enthralled! "There is something there still!" you say to yourself.
But there is nothing there! The game engine just figured that the particle would collide with the triangle, and altered its velocity accordingly. But you are too caught up in your assumption that you do more experiments (I think this is what our physicists are doing in our world). But what ever you do, you can only observe the behavior implemented by the game engine, and not the game engine itself, or the computer that is running it....
But you can imagine it. You can imagine an explicitly implemented program and a computer with limited memory that is running it. And if you are allowed to consider it, they can do other experiments. Instead of looking into smaller and smaller things, you can look for other observations that might confirm this. Maybe you can go really far and see if they are not allowed to go beyond some threshold (Ref: The movie "The thirteenth floor").
And would that be pursuing something metaphysical?
Yes, physics is about learning about the rules that the game engine implements. It’s not about learning about some reality outside our own, that’s the domain of metaphysics. Physics can’t answer questions about what is happening outside our own reality, and indeed neither can anything else inside reality because (as you pointed out) we can only test and observe what the game engine allows.
But the observation that I describe does happen in our reality. It is just that if you look for a reason for such observations here, you are not going to find it.
It is just like when say, biology have to reach out to chemistry and chemistry to physics and physics to math for deeper explanations for processes and observations that are native to their domain. So as unprecedented as it may be, physics should may be try to reach out to metaphysics as a way to explain observations that happen in its domain..
I don't know what observation you're talking about--you were giving an analogy, right? What am I misunderstanding about your claim?
> It is just like when say, biology have to reach out to chemistry and chemistry to physics and physics to math for deeper explanations for processes and observations that are native to their domain.
Yes, this is emergent complexity and physicists already look into this (e.g., holographic principle). In your game/engine analogy, we're still talking about examining the game, not the game engine.
In my example, the observation would be something alters the path of a particle that is shot at the center of the triangle (where it is empty space). This happens in the game reality, but cannot be explained by looking within the same (for example, if you expect to find a smaller triangle at the center of the bigger triangle)