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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Regarding terminology: The back of the bow is the part facing away from you; Belly is the part facing towards you.

And regarding the particle wave duality -- not so much. The interesting part of the particle wave duality is that the "waveicles" actually act like waves in the ocean, spreading in all directions, interfering with each other, diffracting and reflecting, and so on. It gets even weirder when you ask what they are waves of: They're more or less waves of probability of finding the particle.

I don't acutally know of a good analogy for it; I've only ever successfully thought about it in terms of a mind game, instead of a 'real' physical analogy.

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To your point about analogies, there's a wonderful Q/A session with Feynman where he refuses to make an analogy about the electromagnetic force because any analogy that would make sense (rubber bands, etc.) actually only work because of the electromagnetic force.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8&feature=youtu.be...

>Regarding terminology: The back of the bow is the part facing away from you; Belly is the part facing towards you.

So the wood of the bow is called ...?

>And regarding the particle wave duality -- not so much. The interesting part of the particle wave duality is that the "waveicles" actually act like waves in the ocean, spreading in all directions, interfering with each other, diffracting and reflecting, and so on. It gets even weirder when you ask what they are waves of: They're more or less waves of probability of finding the particle.

What I mean is, it's like the "weird" effects in the two-slit setup: the wavelength and barrier locations (and direction the light is shot) determine the locations of constructive interference. The arrow ends up going one direction rather than others -- bypassing barriers in the process -- for basically the same reason.

On modern bows it's called the riser. I'm not sure if that has always been the case though.

It's a good try to connect it to the two-slit experiment but it doesn't work for several reasons: double-slit is about a particle passing through two holes at the same time and the waves go in the direction of the motion instead of perpendicular to it.

You get a good consolation prize though, because it is a little like quantum tunneling which is in the same neighborhood as the double-slit experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling

In the tunneling case what's "waving" would again be (I believe) the probability density function, but it's definitely a case of a particle using some sort of waviness to pass through a classically impossible boundary.

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