No. The wavefunction is used to predict various aspects of a particle, such as position or momentum, but not its path through space. Particles are certainly not traveling with an up and down or side-to-side motion.Bach33 said:
Where? We require links to the reading you have been doing, and we require that the links be from reputable sources (see the PF Rules page under INFO at the top of the page).Bach33 said:
That paradigm has been redacted in the last few dozen years (or more). It was used in the early days of trying to understand the "new" science of quantum mechanics, but nowadays is not used in mainstream science. I'll see if I can find some links for you to check out...Bach33 said:
Those are not showing a path. Those are showing either the way the magnetic and electric field vectors behave in an EM wave, or something having to do with the interplay between angular momentum and the direction of travel or momentum or something (I'm not entirely sure, as I'm not very familiar with this specific topic). In either case the helicity isn't showing the particle traveling in a helical manner.Bach33 said:
No, because nothing about these paths is helical. They are complex and chaotic, changing over time in ways that aren't easily predicted thanks to their timescales and the combined gravitational interaction of countless numbers of objects.Bach33 said:
I'm pretty sure that you are thanking me, and not @Drakkith since my reply was way better than his...Bach33 said:
Here is a relevant link. Please ignore the line thing through his username thing. I just means that the user is uh, retired. Yeah, retired.berkeman said:
"Helicity" is basically another name for "spin", and has nothing to do with a particle's path through spacetime.Bach33 said:
Thanksberkeman said:
I see what you mean here. But is it correct to say "nothing about these paths is helical"? If I'm standing on the surface of the Earth that is rotating and orbiting, surely my trajectory is helical in some reference frame? And similarly, at the next scale up the Earth's trajectory is helical from some observer's viewpoint. In fact, is there any other single trajectory that applies across the board to every object in space, granted not in every reference frame, but in at least some reference frame?Drakkith said:
You must never think about photons as being classical particles. That's always wrong. Rather think of a very specific kind of an electromagnetic wave (technically speaking a one-photon Fock state of the electromagnetic quantum field). The electromagnetic wave carries energy, momentum, and angular momentum. The helicity is the projection of the wave's angular momentum to the direction of its momentum. There are two helicity values for a single photon, i.e., ##\hbar## and ##-\hbar##. These eigenstates of the helicity are described as the quantum version of what you might know as left- and right-circular polarized electromagnetic waves from classical electromagnetism/optics.Bach33 said:
Note that pilot wave theory, aka Bohmian mechanics, is an interpretation of QM, not "a possible approach to quantum gravity". Let me say three things:Bach33 said:
Thanksgentzen said:
ThanksDelta2 said:
I should have clarified that I meant that none of those paths are ideal helices. They can be helix-like to varying degrees of accuracy when viewed from certain reference frames, but how closely the resembled ideal helices varies widely. This isn't because there's something special with helices and motion, it's simply because objects tend to make a series of elliptical orbits within larger elliptical orbits under the influence of gravity. But even that isn't entirely true, as perfect ellipses are idealized orbits that don't exist in real life. They are the result of 2-body approximations we use because they are easy and they work well enough in many circumstances.Bach33 said:
I see that I was applying rather crude observations to something rather more nuanced. But is that to say that we cannot make any generalisations about the trajectories that objects make in the universe? Not to labour the point (and I appreciate your comments), but “orbits” and I would add “helices” do seem to generally feature at all scales? In one sense this seems to have drifted from the underlying deeper QM considerations, but then perhaps not so much? Side note: The reason I’m perhaps biased toward seeing helices everywhere is because I’m working on a geometry constructed with minimal information input (e.g., no assuming straight-line as primitive) and fractally layered helices appear in the construction.Drakkith said:
Depends on what exactly you mean by this. A subatomic particle (treated classically, not quantum in this context), a basketball, a planet, and a star all behave the same under the influence of gravity, meaning they all accelerate at the same rate when placed near the same gravitational source. So things certainly scale in this sense.Bach33 said:
Thank you for your comprehensive answer.Drakkith said:
A helix is just a circle with uniform translation normal to the plane of the circle. You can say circlular paths, hence helical paths, are common in physics. But, to demand that there is something universal about circular paths is to regress to the physics before Kepler.Bach33 said:
From that statement it seems reasonable to investigate the converse view that the helix is the trajectory associated with a fundamental underlying geometry, and the more complex trajectories of the real physical environment are the special cases that depart from that. This is the proposition that my model of that “fundamental underlying geometry” is supporting.PeroK said:
No comment!Bach33 said:
This is personal theory and is off limits here.Bach33 said:
