# Tag Info

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A Possible Macroscopic Analog for the Wave-Particle Duality The answer entitled "The Trouble with Models" give a good explanation regarding the limitations of our current models. However, I just came across a possible macroscopic analog (link provided in the references) which could help explain the wave particle duality. It involves suspending small ...

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The trick to wave/particle duality is that the phrasing "light IS a wave" or "light IS a particle" is misleading. Light BEHAVES as a wave, or Light BEHAVES as a particle, depending on circumstances. Wave/Particle duality is a construct that appears when we try to model subatomic things like electrons and photons. As best as we understand, everything is ...

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What I am wondering is, is light a wave that only behaves like a particle at times or is it an actual particle. Or is an electron a particle that behaves like a wave at times or can it be an actual wave. The first framework modeled with mathematics is what we now call the classical framework. This by the end of the nineteenth century had elegant ...

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A quantum particle (entity) resists description in macroscopic, classical terms. If we attempt to detect the presence of a quantum particle, we find that it interacts with our detector at (more or less) a point in space; it was detected here and not anywhere else (certainly not two or more places at once). This is the particle-like nature. On the other ...

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The Trouble with Models An honest answer is that we use models to simulate how the universe behaves, and sometimes our models just do not accurately display what something is. This is why there have been, are, and will be so many models in physics. Our models fail every so often. We try to keep the best models by updating and replacing as needed. Light can ...

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You ask what happens if matter (de Broglie) waves interfere coherently, expressed in a particle picture. That is adding two quantum states coherently, either in-phase (constructive interference) or 180 degree out of phase (destructive interference). If you have seen (light) interference patterns, you have basically already observed this effect: Your eyes or ...

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Under normal conditions, each photon can be thought of as a purely coherent entity with a definite polarization at all points in momentum (wavenumber) space. I discuss this notion in more depth in several other answers, notably this one here but the essential idea is this: lone photons propagate following Maxwell's equations (which are pretty much the Dirac ...

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The picture of the wave you are looking at is already polarized and that is plane polarized light. But this is not the general case, waves emitted by any one molecule may be linearly polarized but an ordinary light source contains large number of molecules with random orientations,so the emitted light is random mixture of waves linearly polarized in all ...

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The second approach is wrong. You cannot use the relation $E_{total} = h\dfrac{c}{\lambda}$ because this is equivalent to saying that $E_{total} = pc$ which is true only for massless particles. In this case it should be $E_{total} = \sqrt{p^2c^2+m_0^2c^4}$.

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An electron is a tiny charge that revolves at the speed of light in a Compton wavelength circumference orbit. If you calculate the current of that charge as it passes an observer near the orbit, and then the area of that orbit, you can calculate the magnetic moment, which is the Bohr magneton, identically. The mass is contained in the field of the ...

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I'm going to try to give a very concise answer. Your illustration and presumably your intuitive picture are predicated on the superposition principle. You're thinking that if each wave packet is separately a solution of the wave equation, then their sum will be as well. That is not the case. The superposition principle is a property of linear wave ...

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The second screen makes it two separate Fraunhofer single slits with their independent diffraction pattern, if the slits are narrow enough. On the vertical screen there will be spots uncorrelated, the same as would be found on the second screen if one closed off sequentially each slit. If the second screen were made partially transparent the degree of ...

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Assuming you mean some special screen 2 that "lights up" when hit from either side, then no, there won't be a pattern, because the length (or rather:time) from hole A to some spot on the screen will be the same as the length/time from hole B. There will be no destructive interference "on" the screen 2.

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Wavelike properties usually means interference first of all. This is the first wavelike property of light that was demonstrated, I believe, and that's usually what you want. So, yes, matter can interfere with itself, as in the electron double-slit experiment. Often when people talk about matter behaving "wavelike" they're talking also about the fact that ...

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Wave/particle duality is present across all particles, an equation to show this is: $$p=h/\lambda$$ where p is the momentum of the "particle", lambda is the wavelength and h is Planck's constant. From this it can be seen that anything can be considered a wave, but they must have a very small mass to have a wavelength that isn't negligible.

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You are probably familiar with the relation $$c = \lambda f$$ where $c$ is the speed of light, $\lambda$ the wavelength and $f$ the frequency of a photon. The general formula for Compton scattering is normally given as $$\lambda' = \lambda_C (1-\cos \alpha) + \lambda$$ where $\lambda'$ is the wavelength of the scattered photon, $\lambda$ the initial ...

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"The wave is actually probability in the sense that it assigns probability to the space coordinates of detecting photon at a certain time." No, the emergence of the classical EM wave from the quantum wavefunction of the photon is not trivial, because a classical EM wave is made up of many photons. In particular, it is not the case that the classical EM ...

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"The wave is actually probability in the sense that it assigns probability to the space coordinates of detecting photon at a certain time. Now, the wave transports energy & momentum." As you say that you quote words from a book, then, you have to know that there are many books and many authors, each one with his/her opinion. There are four basic ...

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are there things called infrared photons, or ultraviolet photons etc, as there are infrared waves, or ultraviolet waves? Yes, absolutely. Certain aspects of the photon notion can be thought of as even more like a classical wave than even the above. One photon alone can be in a pure quantum superposition of energy eigenstates, or polarization ...

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About quantum mechanics connection through the USM www.kanevuniverse.com and is it flowing towards the general relativity? First of all congratulation to Brian about very interesting point about quantum mechanics and general relativity compatibility! First of all let me begin with this: Now let talk a little about the last episodes (there is talking about ...

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Bragg appears to to try to explain wave-particle duality by waving his hands rapidly. The moment of observation (the present) is now. Extrapolating backwards in time from that moment (when I observe a particle) I can deduce that this thing I observed was a particle in the past. But I cannot deduce much about its future - the further out you try to predict, ...

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What Bragg meant by now, I cannot know. There is a huge amount of writers who meant all sort of things, and it's impossible to know all these views. The question whether the quantum system (quantum particle) is a wave or is a particle, preoccupies the physicists even today, 91 years after de Broglie formulated his $\lambda = h/p$ formula. You see, both ...

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