Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Nescio224 t1_j8mv0p5 wrote

I've always disliked the term "wave-particle duality" and I think Feynman nailed it when he said that quantum objects are neither.

>“Quantum mechanics” is the description of the behavior of matter and light in all its details and, in particular, of the happenings on an atomic scale. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen. Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century), it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found that in many respects it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: “It is like neither.” There is one lucky break, however—electrons behave just like light. The quantum behavior of atomic objects (electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and so on) is the same for all, they are all “particle waves,” or whatever you want to call them. So what we learn about the properties of electrons (which we shall use for our examples) will apply also to all “particles,” including photons of light.

I would recommend the Feynman lectures for further reading.

2

Grand-Tension8668 OP t1_j8n4uz4 wrote

That definitely helps me grasp the idea that really we're trying to apply the closest concepts that we have, but that they're sort of just touchstones to use as you work to understand the full picture. ...Of course on some level that's true of how we understand most things in science, you work with what's good enough until it isn't any more.

1