Comment on Observer
VoterFrog@lemmy.world 1 week agoWell, famously, they’re waves and particles. The double slit which way experiment will only set off the detector in one slit, as if it was a particle. Yet, without a detector it will interfere with itself as if it were a wave that passed through both slits.
cynar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
QM entities are quantised waves. You can make a wave look very close to a particle quite easily, a particle can never behave like a wave.
Dumping the mental short hand of particle interactions is one of the main reasons most people can’t get their heads around it.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s wrong that, and further belies my point about math.
They are particles and waves.
cynar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
What is a particle, what is a wave? QM entities are neither. They are a 3rd thing. A quantised wave is the term my university professor used as a short hand. The nature of that wave is described by the Schroeder equation + its constraints. Certain interactions will bound it heavily, and so make it look particle like, others emphasise the wavelike properties.
You require the maths to actually do anything useful with it, but not to get the basic concepts. It’s no different to the rest of physics, in that. E.g. you can understand the concepts of orbital mechanics, without being able to calculate them.