wnoise comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong

61 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 December 2010 05:30PM

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Comment author: erikvanderharst 10 December 2010 10:04:39PM 0 points [-]

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".

Comment author: wnoise 10 December 2010 10:11:42PM 4 points [-]

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.)