# De Broglie wave

1. Oct 18, 2004

### newton1

de Broglie hypothesis is $$\lambda = h/p$$
how about if p tend to zero....
is it wavelength tend to infinite?

2. Oct 18, 2004

### vanesch

Staff Emeritus
Yes, you get a constant field.

cheers,
patrick.

3. Oct 28, 2004

### newton1

what you mean by constant field? can you tell me more?

4. Oct 30, 2004

### Mwyn

ok I have a question If I could hrienk myself down into an atomic size and particles were as big as basket balls (highly unlikly yet metaphorically) what would they look like? would they be like glass like orbs? or actual waves? or force feilds?

5. Oct 31, 2004

### Ghetalion

The would be blurs of probability.

6. Oct 31, 2004

### \$id

Surely that only true until you actually measure them (i.e. look at them)

They dont have any definate properties until measured. Thats my idea. Even then you cant know certain things accurately. So i guess if you are that small and look at an atom, you see something whizzing about pretty fast (in the particle sense)

Hmmm thinking about it I am struggling to imagine what i would see.

7. Oct 31, 2004

### Kane O'Donnell

You wouldn't see anything, because an electron in a stable orbit doesn't emit light. You can't see the thing unless it's emitting photons in your direction.

8. Nov 1, 2004

### masudr

Even if electrons did emit light, we wouldn't be able to understand or analyse what we saw. As Heisenberg wrote, many years ago, our bodies and brains and hence our experimental machines work only in "classical" mode and not in "quantum" mode. So trying to make sense of an essentially quantum phenomenon is not possible. We can write the equations, but I wouldn't try visualising, because it is usually wrong. If a probability cloud actually meant something to our brains, we would see them. But as Kane points out, we only see photons. So it would have to be an excited atom which returns to a lower energy eigenstate, and thus emits a photon in a random direction.

Masud.