Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
No where did I say ping pong balls, so try again to communicate your ideas.
You however referenced ripple tanks, which is incorrect.
Is light a particle or a wave? Explained here.
- Thread starter Jonesboy
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No where did I say ping pong balls, so try again to communicate your ideas.
You however referenced ripple tanks, which is incorrect.
Well, we can't leave off like that ...
Hey Jonesboy, not only is light neither a wave or a particle, so are larger assemblages of molecules!
I'm reading Hawking/Mlodinow's The Grand Design. They note that in 1999 Austrian Physicists replicated the double slit experiment with ... buckyballs! (Of course they had to use something cool!
)
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article...-particle-duality-seen-in-carbon-60-molecules
That's right, 60 carbon atoms in a soccer ball formation. Not some weird stringy-folded-dimensional point thing but something you could 'see' with an electron microscope! Double slit experiment ... SAME INTERFERENCE PATTERN! Even when sent one at a time!
Hawking/Mlodinow then go on to talk about Feynman's Sum Over Histories and that this wildly successful theory seems to indicate that reality is probabilistic.
They summarize our intuitive classical view:
"In fact, given complete data about the present, Newton's laws allow one to calculate a complete picture of the past. This is consistent with our intuitive understanding that, whether painful or joyful, the world has a definite past. There may have been no one watching, but the past exists as surely as if you had taken a series of snapshots of it."
But then, with quantum mechanics, comes certain ... 'unforseen consequences!'
"But a quantum buckyball cannot be said to have taken a definite path from source to screen. We might pin down a buckyball's location by observing it, but in between our observations, it takes all paths. Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history."
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)
Hey Jonesboy, not only is light neither a wave or a particle, so are larger assemblages of molecules!
I'm reading Hawking/Mlodinow's The Grand Design. They note that in 1999 Austrian Physicists replicated the double slit experiment with ... buckyballs! (Of course they had to use something cool!
)http://physicsworld.com/cws/article...-particle-duality-seen-in-carbon-60-molecules
That's right, 60 carbon atoms in a soccer ball formation. Not some weird stringy-folded-dimensional point thing but something you could 'see' with an electron microscope! Double slit experiment ... SAME INTERFERENCE PATTERN! Even when sent one at a time!
Hawking/Mlodinow then go on to talk about Feynman's Sum Over Histories and that this wildly successful theory seems to indicate that reality is probabilistic.
They summarize our intuitive classical view:
"In fact, given complete data about the present, Newton's laws allow one to calculate a complete picture of the past. This is consistent with our intuitive understanding that, whether painful or joyful, the world has a definite past. There may have been no one watching, but the past exists as surely as if you had taken a series of snapshots of it."
But then, with quantum mechanics, comes certain ... 'unforseen consequences!'
"But a quantum buckyball cannot be said to have taken a definite path from source to screen. We might pin down a buckyball's location by observing it, but in between our observations, it takes all paths. Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history."
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)
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