Special Relativity

necroforest said:

I don't like this wave-particle duality thing. I'm no physicist, but it seems that saying something is "both a wave and a particle" is a poor explanation; It seems to me that instead of saying "x is a wave and a particle", it's better to say "x is something that exhibits both wave-like and corpuscular behavior". I think Richard Feynman once said something about the issue like "Light is a wave on mondays, tuesdays, and wednsdays, and a particle on thursdays, fridays and saturdays", and then proceded to declare that light was strictly a particle (whose behaviour was governed by quantum electrodynamics)

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Yeah, particle-wave duality is just poor use of language. They're quantum-mechanical particles. That is all. Quantum mechanical particles act a bit weird, sometimes acting somewhat like we usually think waves to act, other times acting somewhat like we usually think particles to act, depending upon what it's interacting with at the time. Why it does this is mathematically very well-understood, but it seems to be impossible for humans to understand it at an intuitive level. As a result, it's not entirely surprising that we make use of incomplete, and therefore incorrect statements like "wave-particle duality" to describe these things.

Ultimately it doesn't work, though. Quantum mechanical particles behave like quantum mechanical particles, and this behavior is really quite different from anything we have experience with on the macroscopic level. It's weird, but we shouldn't be overly surprised: we didn't evolve having to deal with quantum mechanical interactions, and so never developed the systems in our brain to understand them.

necroforest said:

I don't like this wave-particle duality thing. I'm no physicist, but it seems that saying something is "both a wave and a particle" is a poor explanation; It seems to me that instead of saying "x is a wave and a particle", it's better to say "x is something that exhibits both wave-like and corpuscular behavior". I think Richard Feynman once said something about the issue like "Light is a wave on mondays, tuesdays, and wednsdays, and a particle on thursdays, fridays and saturdays", and then proceded to declare that light was strictly a particle (whose behaviour was governed by quantum electrodynamics)

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Exhibiting wave-like and particle-like behaviour is the definition of wave-particle duality. Saying that it is both things at the same time is to show how quantum theory contradicts common sense. It's like Feynman's path integral formulation, or sum over histories to explain how the electron is everywhere at anyone moment, until it's measured. Intuitively it seems impossible and like it could never happen, but the model perfectly explains everything as far as I know.

necroforest said:

I don't like this wave-particle duality thing. I'm no physicist, but it seems that saying something is "both a wave and a particle" is a poor explanation; It seems to me that instead of saying "x is a wave and a particle", it's better to say "x is something that exhibits both wave-like and corpuscular behavior". I think Richard Feynman once said something about the issue like "Light is a wave on mondays, tuesdays, and wednsdays, and a particle on thursdays, fridays and saturdays", and then proceded to declare that light was strictly a particle (whose behaviour was governed by quantum electrodynamics)

Click to expand...

Yeah, I prefer the "light is something which has both wave-like and particle-like properties" description too. The "duality" way of describing it always seemed unecessarily clumsy to me.

The 'wave particle duality' nonsense was clumsy and daft, and everyone knew it. Feynman gave an excellent description of how that phrase describes a state of confusion in the scientific community during the early 1900s, before quantum mechancis was fully developed.

These days 'a photon is an excitation of a quantised vector field' is a pretty good description.