richerrich said:
Ken, There's a reason while this duality STILL can't be explained.
No one is ever going to "explain" the duality, any more than anyone ever explained why we thought particles followed trajectories (is that a "natural" thing for a particle to do? Why?). We just witnessed trajetory-like and wave-like behaviors, and we thought they were different things, and now we know they are the same thing. That's all we're likely to get, I don't see much point in hoping for more than that. Maybe there'll be additional layers added there, but at the lowest layer we will always wonder why.
Classic experiment demonstrates that electrons or photons behave as either wave or particle dependent on the observer (and like you at the back of my mind i was thinking waves are a bunch of particles anyway).
Yes, we need to move away from "particle
or wave" and see that the lesson is "particle
and wave." There never was any difference between particles and waves, they were always two sides of the same coin, but we only now realize it (if we stop getting told that things are turned from one thing into another by an observer). If you spend your whole life thinking there are two kinds of coins, ones with heads on both sides and ones with tails on both sides, and someone flips a coin over and shows you the actual state of affairs, you don't say "that's amazing, sometimes coins act like they have heads on both sides, and sometimes like tails", you say "aha, heads and tails come on the same coin, not two different coins." That's understanding, that's the explanation.
But note that in the double slit experiment there was no "turning down the intensity" since using the same setup the ONLY difference when the screen showed either particles or waves was the result of the detector being counted (say by a computer while the experimenter was outside the room for coffee break).
The difference was where the detector was placed. My point was, that is entirely explained by wave mechanics-- water waves will do those exact same things if you put a seawall behind two holes in a jetty. The only thing that makes it seem strange is if you turn down the intensity until you notice you have individual particles there, but then you don't say "wait, sometimes these things are particles", you say "oh, these things are both particles and waves, I guess waves and particles are the same thing." Which they are.
I've been looking for articles or documents detailing the double slit experiment further. I've come across one and it says that they behave as particles once the observer starts counting how many particles have passed through the slit, but not because somehow the detectors themselves have influenced how electrons or photons behave.
That's just not the right lesson. Waves do all those same things if you turn up the intensity, there is not a single thing that a high-intensity source of particles does that waves don't do, because there's no difference between what we used to think waves were and a high-intensity particle source. It's all a question of what the wavelength is (that length compared to length scales of the obstacles encountered), and what the intensity is (whether or not we can distinguish individual detection events). That's it, that's where all the differences between what we thought were waves, and what we thought were particles, comes in. There's your "duality"-- there are actually two dualities there, the duality of high and low intensity, and the duality of long and short wavelength. That's it, that's the whole enchilada, the deepest level of our theory. That's what you want to understand, but you won't, because we never understand the deepest level of any of our physical theories. That's not a bad thing, it's just how science works. The point of science is to try to unify everything you don't understand into the simplest possible set of principles that you don't understand.
Recently though I'm glad that my sentiment is justified by a latest New Scientist October article that there are Physicists making the effort of explaining the duality independent of the observer. And it has something to do with entanglement.
They will never explain the duality independent of the observer, that's obvious. Because they are always going to have an observer in there, I guarantee it-- that's how science works. What they mean is really something quite different-- they will be trying to include the observer in as unimportant a way as possible, they want the "least violent" observation to happen-- and so they can learn a lot about what observers are
not doing by eliminating various kinds of observer influences. But what they can never learn is what observers are doing, because they can never completely remove the observer and make a comparison-- they will always be doing science, and science is, quite demonstrably, about what observers do. Again that's not a bad thing, it's what science is.
