Real or Virtual Particles: Chicken or the Egg?

[lightarrow]

"There needs to be something out there, or there would be nothing to measure, right?"

Yes, but it is always human beings who are the measure of things and we tend to be a bit repetitive in how we divide things up...

four fundamental forces, four base nucleotide bases, four seasons, four cardinal directions, four archangels, four classical greek elements, four temperaments, lucky four leaved clovers...

...a particle here and another there (instead of no dividing the field at all...)

 

[QuantumClue]

Except they don't exist, we made them up. Show me a quark or an electron. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

http://compukol.com/mendel/articles/articles.html

http://www.mizozo.com/tech/09/2009/15/first-picture-of-an-atom.html

I think that artical shows that there is something there. Whether it be a particle, a string or something else, there is still something there, and is a far shot from being nothing at all.

 

[Maui]

http://www.mizozo.com/tech/09/2009/15/first-picture-of-an-atom.html

I think that artical shows that there is something there. Whether it be a particle, a string or something else, there is still something there, and is a far shot from being nothing at all.

So someone did a measurement(atom bombardment) and found that there is an electron cloud? Great, that's revolutionary.

How about you tell us where in the statement - "physical matter is a propensity" there is an inconsistacy? Questions concerning what and how reality is aren't really answerable anyway, all the theroies we built so far are inconsistent with either human logic or with some of the evidence we gathered so far. All you could possibly have is a collection of prejudices that you picked up from other prejudiced individuals looking for answers to diffucult philosophical questions.

 

[yoda jedi]

Whether it be a particle, a string or something else, there is still something there, and is a far shot from being nothing at all.

Right.

"being qua being"

...anything that exists just because of its existence and not because of any special qualities it has.

 

[sujiwun]

http://www.mizozo.com/tech/09/2009/15/first-picture-of-an-atom.html

I think that artical shows that there is something there. Whether it be a particle, a string or something else, there is still something there, and is a far shot from being nothing at all.

I don't think the argument is that there is nothing there, but rather that any description of it as a sum of parts will be incomplete.

Mandel Sachs holistic field ideas suggest to me that the random vacuum quantum flux is the ground of existence - white noise static as an analogy. Within the random noise, there emerge sporadic localised regions that deviate breifly from the overall randomness - literally incidental filaments of order within a global chaos - matter out of empty space, the symmetry of the noise broken.

This order represents the virtual particles popping in and out of existence which in turn give rise to the appearance of interacting electrons, and quark etc by the defining regional field properties by which we know them, because these virtual particle are the regional field properties and seemingly electrons and quarks are nothing without them.

Philosophically, this still wouldn't settle any old scores. There's no account for why there should be order in chaos. One could take a materialist stance that it is just incidental, one could equally take a transcendental stance that a personal God put it there, or one could take a pantheistic stance that the order (being literally meaningful in constrast to chaos being meaningless) is or contains some form of intelligence, not least our own. So belief one way another would still be a matter of personal conviction.

 

[QuantumClue]

Well maybe not. Maybe the special qualities it has is because it has existence...


(forgot to qoute... that was to jedi)

 

[ibysaiyan]

Seems so.

In general relativity, mass and energy are the same thing, apart from the factor c^2. Some of the black hole's mass=energy is in the form of a gravitational field; therefore mass=energy is lost when a particle is radiated.

But I am not an expert on black holes; so what I wrote might be a bit simplistic, and so may be my attempt to answer your question.

Very true,the fluctuation of energy caused near to the event horizon causes the formation of particle-antiparticle of which one is sucked into the BH before the occurrence of annihilation. So to the observer outside the BH would appear to have emitted H-radiation.The outward is the positive energy,this is how entropy is picturized for a BH.

 

[QuantumClue]

So someone did a measurement(atom bombardment) and found that there is an electron cloud? Great, that's revolutionary.

How about you tell us where in the statement - "physical matter is a propensity" there is an inconsistacy? Questions concerning what and how reality is aren't really answerable anyway, all the theroies we built so far are inconsistent with either human logic or with some of the evidence we gathered so far. All you could possibly have is a collection of prejudices that you picked up from other prejudiced individuals looking for answers to diffucult philosophical questions.

On the contrary. You have used a very subjective line of thought, which would be from a quantum viewpoint, a dogma based faith of ideologies.

Very early on as you should know, quantum theory did, and still does rely heavily on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This takes the same conjunction as you do. If it is not really measurable then there is no consensus on how to deal with the problem. This is a inconsistency.

There is no reason not to be able to fill in the gaps to unify physics, just because something is beyond a screen. Questions asking how reality really fits our picture is not irrelevant as you claim, but rather enlightens the theories we have that work only to a certain degree. If we can mathematical formulate a theory without considering other possibilities, then we are in the dark with what to expect out of an otherwise, very complicated theory.

More to the point, if one says unobservable parts of a theory are not worth looking into, does not give us a whole picture on aspects which should be avoidable.

 

[yoda jedi]

Well maybe not. Maybe the special qualities it has is because it has existence...


(forgot to qoute... that was to jedi)

special like distinctive.

as you said:

Whether it be a particle, a string or something else,

there is still something there, and is a far shot from being nothing at all.

Qualities are just attributes, no Existence per se.

 

[_PJ_]

Since 'virtual particles' are essentially "fluctuations in the quantum foam" that just happen to give rise to interactions as if 'real' particles had appeared, neither "virtual particles" or "real particles" necessarily 'cause' one another.

That both types can be considered, (i.e. by Feynam-like trajectory models) to be time-symetric, the answer to your question is, in my opinion, neither.