tl;dr: I disagree with the statements "Matter is made up of particles; matter is made up of waves." Instead I think "Matter has properties of particles and properties of waves." Same goes for light. The distinction is 1) That doesn't mean it is waves and particles, and 2) It need not have those properties all the time, in every way meaningful.
I still like the idea but the following post is content-free.
As of today, I do not believe in the existence of atoms apart from their measured properties. Specifically, I think that matter will exhibit particular properties when measured on a quantum scale, but not otherwise.
To avoid this degenerating into a purely philosophical idea, such as "nothing exists when it is not measured to exist", which probably can't be falsified, I'll qualify the idea. I think that matter can be measured to behave not as particles in certain cases, such as in macroscopic observations (everyday human interaction with most matter) [edit: this is an example of a uselessly vague idea. The macroscopic behavior of large bits of matter is consistent with it being made of particles, and there's no point to asking "yeah but what if it's not?", and no test, at least none that I've identified], interaction with light as a wave (a glass lens bends light as though it has smooth homogeneous surfaces rather than individual particles), and the behaviour of Bose-Einstein condensates (the "particles" of the matter seem to take up the entire space of the matter, and are I think not distinguishable from each other as particles).
I think that the mainstream view of this would be that matter exists as particles, that it always is made up of particles, and that those particles exhibit different behaviours depending on how they're observed. My view is that the particles are emergent and only show up as a consequence of the measurement, and are not actually there otherwise.
I've long figured this is true for light, that it isn't made up of particles, but merely is quantified when measured. It doesn't "exist both as a wave and a particle"---its existence is best described in terms of conserved quantities, stuff that's always there no matter how you measure it, such as its energy; wavelike and particle-like nature is not conserved---it merely has measurable particular properties specific to certain measurements. For example, when measuring "where" some quantity of light energy is, it will be quantified into individual particular locations, but that doesn't make it necessary that the energy moved as those photons between places where it is measured, and certainly not that "it moves as a particle through both slits of a double-slit experiment at the same time," which is something that is not measured and is true only if the particle-like nature of light is persistent and not emergent from measurement. I believe the particle nature of light is not persistent between measurement, and I now believe the same is true of matter.
I don't know enough to make any claims, but I think that this alternative view could be made compatible with mainstream quantum mechanics, and might let other sciences more easily harmonize with quantum mechanics if they were forced to adopt it. Roughly, any 'weirdness' of quantum mechanics is not due to inherent properties of things and reality, but just quirks of how reality may be measured [edit: this is an example of over-generalizing an idea to justify a belief. The belief does not follow logically, it's just what I want the idea to mean]. If the particle nature of matter displays weird properties when measured one way vs. another, such nature and weirdness are not aspects of the matter independent of the measurements.
No comments:
Post a Comment