= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
erikvanderharst comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (156)
I remembered it the wrong way around. Feynman (and the other 2) went for particles rather than waves. What I was trying to say is that similar to atomic therory moving from "a useful pedagogical device" (1860) to "atoms really exist" (today), photons went from "this curious thing that looks like a particle or a wave depending on how you set up your experiment" to "It is a particle".
Well it went to "it's a particle" because all the other particles became "excitations of quantum fields" as well...
(And there are still significant differences in the phenomenological treatments because the boundary conditions play a very special role in describing and quantizing the field modes in actual calculations.)
In the sense that the word "particle" at that scale now means "quantum probability distribution". BLOB THINGS.
(I still visualise atoms as planetary electrons around a nucleus sun - the electrons possibly in shells - until I catch myself and try to visualise s and p shells. Too much out-of-date popular science as a child.)