Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelfeathers | Hacker News Reader

> Quantum field theory is weird, but there are much more compelling analogies in classical world than particles.

As a teen I read a book by Robert Anton Wilson that made an interesting point. We have experiments showing wave-like and particular-like behavior but all we have is that data and we can accept it at face value without having to impose the idea of a wave or a particle on it. "Waves" and "particles" are, like you say, analogies.

There's no particular reason the phenomena can't behave like both, and, in fact, they do. It's only a paradox if we choose to analogize. We don't have to.

As Korzybski said "the map is not the territory." Trying to resolve wave/particle duality is trying to impose one of two maps from other territories to a new one.

View on HN

Well, we still have the fact that e.g. light is quantized on emission (photoelectric effect) and yet behaves continuously in the double slit experiment. I don't think you need particular preexisting concepts of waves and particles for this combination to be surprising.

It's just the same issue at another level. There's no reason that something can't have both properties. The issue is that it jars our preconceptions, which are formed from the things we've encountered so far. We want to understand things in terms of what we've seen. That's a basis of analogical reasoning.

It's kind of like the "monad tutorial" problem in software. Everyone tries to reach for analogy for that computational structure. Although there are some decent ones, in the end, people who work with monads just have to accept the monad laws (sort of a parallel to the data that physics has on quantuum phenomena) and eventually they develop a sense of what they are independent of cafeteria trays and burritos ( http://codetojoy.blogspot.com/2009/03/monads-are-burritos.ht... )

> As Korzybski said "the map is not the territory." Trying to resolve wave/particle duality is trying to impose one of two maps from other territories to a new one.

As a CS graguate, I would call it the halting problem. A mathematician would refer to the Gödel's incompleteness theorems. No formal system without paradoxies can be used to prove all true statements.

Whilst that may be true until you can prove that that applies to this particular problem it doesn't provide any reason why the typical approach to resolving dualities should apply. Come up with a super theory that contains them both and shows them to be manifestations of a common phenomena.

That's not true. The paradox exists, and it's because particles behave experimentally like particles, and like waves, and the two models are both correct in certain circumstances, depending on intuitively irrelevant details like taking extra measurements of the phenomenon.

The paradox exists because of our choice of models, and would not exist in other models if different choices had been made.

In other words, as michaelfeathers said, "the map is not the territory."

http://inwhy.net/quantum.jpg <- THEY EXISTS!

Technically, then, there are no fields either - claiming that fields are real because the field model matches experiments better, commits the same mistake of taking the map as real, as when we said that particles are really there. As in Kantian noumena, we can't know the territory, we can just build more useful models.

Exactly. Thinking about it more. Imagine we came at it from the other direction. All we know are quantum phenomena and then we encounter this human-scale world. We would be amazed and stunned by things like billiard balls that behave only half like quanta.

I'm surprised this way of seeing the world isn't more wide spread. My opinion is that it should be among people who have a deep interest in science.

Yeah, I'm not sure why you got down-voted. In the 1890s people that everything was a wave but then phenomena like wave function collapse and the quantum Zeno paradox were hypothesized and observed. To combat this you can introduce mathematical tricks like delta functions but this more of a hack.

Perhaps, the biggest philosophical problem with waves are their integration requirements and the potential for such iterations to exceed cosmic speed limits. When the function is continuous a perturbation at one end must effect the other end.

I think the down-vote happens, because he's argumenting too concrete for the question.

I don't know much about physics, but my take on this is:

First you model reality with waves and particles, then you see that particles can behave like waves and vice versa. The next step is to model reality with something different that can behave like a wave AND a particle and suddendly there is no paradoxon anymore.

He's downvoted because he doesn't seem to get what the entire discussion is about, which is on a higher level. Instead he is caught down in the "lesser models". Whenever you have a paradox, like wave-particle duality - but also the "French paradox" in nutrition, it's not because there really is a "paradox" in the universe, it's because the way you look at it is too limited, and if you find a better view you will see there is no paradox. That doesn't make the paradox-creating models untrue - in their context, but we have gone beyond them. That's the subject of the submitted link!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com