Can wave-particle duality be considered as part of the riddle?
"It's not that it's sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave. It's that very small things have a bunch of properties: some are shared with waves, and some are shared with small solid objects."
We're duck-typing what we see and going "aha! It's a particle! No wait, now it's a wave!" but the class simply has both sets of methods on it and does not care how we classify it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIyTZDHuarQ&ab_channel=Verit...
& one comment which specifically separates pilot waves from the bouncing droplet demo https://old.reddit.com/r/quantum/comments/7crdz6/whats_wrong...
https://youtu.be/citY6G8ePJw?t=223
> But what can I call it? I can say they behave like a particle-wave or they behave in a typical quantum mechanical manner. There isn't any word for it, if I say they behave like particles, I give the wrong impression if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way. Which, technically, could be called the quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is nothing like anything you have seen before. Your experience with things you have seen before is inadequate, is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different ... Well, there's at least one simplification, at least electrons behave exactly in this respect as photons, that is they're both screwy, but in exactly the same way ... But the difficulty really is psychological, and exists in the perpetual torment that exists from your saying to yourself "But how can it be like that?" which really is a reflection of an uncontrolled by say an utterly vain desire to see it in terms of some analogy with something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar. I'll simply describe it
The man truly had a way of speaking that is instantly recognizable.
You are building your expectations of 'what a thing can do' based on the macro world you live in and the things you see and experience 'up here'. But down there, the rules are simply different.
Our expectations and intuition are simply not evolved to handle situations that occur in that level of reality. We've never thrown a rock and watched it self-interfere. But we should throw a lot of doubt at anyone who claims that it's all very natural to them, imho.
So could that interference just be what the path of least resistance looks like in a different frame?
Neither waves or particles exist in the real world, but we do model some features of the world through them. Particles and waves are just the solutions to the differential equations found in classical mechanics, and electromagnetism (which, interestingly enough, rely on the same mathematical framework). Then when teaching about them, we use analogies from the perceptible world. (And those analogies are wrong btw, waves in the sea don't really behave like physics “waves”).
In quantum mechanics, the equations are completely different ones, based on a completely different branch of mathematics. Then unsurprisingly their solutions have little in common with those above.
If the above is accurate I still think the collapse is a strange phenomenon that we shouldn't just take on faith (without probing deeper of course) - the disagreement between Copenhagen and Many Worlds (and the lack of a testable hypothesis) seems to indicate the collapse itself isn't well understood [1]. Many Worlds seems to have an elegant solution but it needs experiment and wasn't (and probably still isn't) 'accepted' by the overall community.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse#History...
Are there reasons to assume that 'random' entanglements cause the waveform to 'concentrate'? it would need to be that the probability of concentration at a given 'point' is proportional to the square magnitude of the waveform? Has this been studied?
The Standard Model is built out of quantum field theories that take as a given our experiment results that matter on quantum scales is unlike the "large scale" matter we see around us.
The problems described in the articles are unexpected results that we see in our experiments compared to the Standard Model, "weird/nonintuitive" aspects of modern particle physics would be a separate article.
To ask "why" some part of the standard model is the way it is, you either invoke some rubric for comparing models, like Occam's Razor; or you indulge in metaphysics and speculate on the nature of whomever is running the Simulation. Either of these is a different meaning than the "why" of "why do rockets work in space."
Given the lack of adequate instruments, our minds and unconventional approaches are our most powerful tools at this point. For example, we generally consider the space between particles as void. We can't see anything, we can't detect anything, so we assume there's nothing there. But for what it's worth, there could be trillions of unknown particles that don't interact with matter. So why would it matter, you ask? Because it's not impossible that under certain conditions some of these might cluster into matter or interact with it in unobvious ways. The existence of dark matter and energy (or the related phenomena) indicates this is not impossible.
But yes, I see your point. However, I hope we get deeper into understanding this phenomenon before I die. Who knows, maybe it's because of some yet-undiscovered aspect of photons, and metaphysical speculation is not necessary?
> the basic version of this experiment, a coherent light source, such as a laser beam, illuminates a plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate.[5][6] The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen – a result that would not be expected if light consisted of classical particles.[5][7] However, the light is always found to be absorbed at the screen at discrete points, as individual particles (not waves); the interference pattern appears via the varying density of these particle hits on the screen.[8] Furthermore, versions of the experiment that include detectors at the slits find that each detected photon passes through one slit (as would a classical particle), and not through both slits (as would a wave).[9][10][11][12][13] However, such experiments demonstrate that particles do not form the interference pattern if one detects which slit they pass through. These results demonstrate the principle of wave–particle duality.[14][15]
This is the part I'm talking about, mainly.
> However, such experiments demonstrate that particles do not form the interference pattern if one detects which slit they pass through.
Once they are measured, you know where they are and they stop acting like a wave.
For instance, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser which demonstrates that the sensor state has to be part of the superposition instead of causing an irreversible collapse: if you store the detected slit until the photon hits the back wall, then delete it, an interference pattern emerges once again.
- travel as unitary time-reversible non-local waves (propagate, interfere, entangle)
- interact as non-unitary time-irreversible local particle events (position, time, exchange, create, destroy)
Your interpretation of quantum mechanics will determine how you imagine the two views connect (Born Law, Many Worlds, ...)