Uncertainty principle is just wave mechanics proving electromagnetic radiation is wave-like and particles (photons) are (non-fundamental) interpretation emergent from underlying wave-like field.
Uncertainty principle is just wave mechanics proving electromagnetic radiation is wave-like and particles (photons) are (non-fundamental) interpretati...
Idk nigga, just take a Fourier transform or series or some shit bruh fr
i've never seen a totally convincing argument that photons are particles. perhaps one does exist, but if so it's just not in the "science communicator" repertoire of explanations.
everything from deflection to constant velocity to even energy quantization (basically geometrically defined by the electromagnetic configuration of the atom that produced it) can be completely accounted for with a wave in the EM field.
even the photoelectric effect could just be a resonance phenomenon (i.e. correct wavelength to oscillate an electron free) where other less energetic wavelengths are scattered into thermal energy or deflected. it doesn't prove particle light, it just proves different light wavelengths have different energy. it doesn't even refute classical mechanics, as energy is still a function of intensity (what would now be considered "photon flux") - it's just also a function of wavelength, and certain interactions with certain electromagnetic geometries have a threshold wavelength (that is likely closely related to physical structure, not some esoteric "binding energy" intrinsic single variable)
sometimes i wonder if particle physics was a mistake.
If you take a beam of light of fixed frequency (and energy above work function) and vary its intensity, the number of electrons per unit of time being ejected changes, but their kinetic energy stays the same. If you vary the frequency and keep intensity constant, you get varying kinetic energies but same rate of ejected electrons. The implication is that each individual ejected electron gets their energy from 1 photon.
>The implication is that each individual ejected electron gets their energy from 1 photon.
that's still consistent with a purely wave phenomenon. the amplitude (intensity) defines the number of electrons ejected, and the wavelength defines the resultant ejection energy. it's like the whole explanation forgets that a wave has two variable components that carry energy, amplitude and frequency.
even still, the "1 photon" thing doesn't work to prove photon particle status either: a wave is already quantized into integer peaks/troughs without needing to be quantized into particle "force carriers". the implication could just as easily be each individual electron gets their energy from "1 wave".
i appreciate the explanation, but i still don't see anything here that requires photons to be a particle and not simply a name for an individual wave where intensity/amplitude would be energy at a given frequency and frequency would actually be the speed of the oscillation. higher amplitude "photon waves" oscillate larger numbers of electrons the same way (freeing more of them at the same velocity), and lower wavelength "photon waves" oscillate the electrons faster (freeing them with higher velocity) because their oscillations (frequency) are faster even if their speed is constant.
to keep "intensity" constant in a particle model, you'd use more power (e.g. more energy per photon) at the emitter for lower wavelengths, whereas you'd use the same power (lower "duration"/wavelength means faster oscillations, so you reduce power proportionally to yield the same number of waves) for the wave model. thus, a "constant photon particle flux" test varying wavelength would be unable to measure frequency dependence of ejection chance (electron flux) if it reduced proportionally to the increase in frequency (such as a cross-sectional reduction by the same factor as the reduction in wavelength - the same mechanism by which grates of a certain hole diameter block longer-wavelength photons)
i get quantizing light, but i don't see why particles must be the way to do that.
>i get quantizing light, but i don't see why particles must be the way to do that.
Why don't you consider one quantum of light, a photon, to be a particle?
I read your other posts. I see what you're saying. That light is quantized when it interacts with matter, but not when it's traveling as a wave. Yeah, I agree. Light traveling through space isn't made of a bunch of particles. I didn't realize this was controversial.
i can see where a particle can make sense as a way to describe specifically the exchange of energy between emission and absorption, but extending it to a discrete body in transit for all light doesn't seem to satisfy the rest of light's behaviors. i think the biggest problem here is a sort of conflation with macroscopic kinetic energy that exists in a lot of photon descriptions - popsci treats them like little billiard balls with intrinsic energy and constant speed that pass through each other but bounce between the particles making up matter, and trivial diffraction patterns are treated like some kind of simultaneous contradiction.
however - since subatomic particles still have wave-like behavior, i still have to consider the possibility that the problem is one of combining two unlike analogies for both matter and light, and a purely corpuscular description in one is simply incommensurable with a purely wave description in the other. i suspect the wave description for both is closer to reality, but it's hard to deny the consistency and accuracy of the corpuscular treatment of subatomic structure - if subatomic particles are fully wavelike, the waves are INCREDIBLY discrete and uniform, and i don't understand wave mechanics well enough yet to see clearly how that could be achieved.
It's not just the photoelectric effect, the discreteness of light and Einstein's argument were motivated by Planck's insights into the UV catastrophe, which alone, already showed that the classical conception of light had serious problems.
Photons can be emitted one at a time, and these individual photons will show up at one specific location on a detector only. That's definitely not how classical waves work.
sure but the double slit shows why it's not like a particle
>will show up at one specific location on a detector only
You mean will interact with something, which means you can't use it to argue about the photons themselves they way you're attempting.
>Photons can be emitted one at a time.
Take a still body of liquid and add a droplet. it's "one at a time", is it not?
You can divide droplets into smaller droplets, so it's not comparable at all.
and not photons?
Correct, photons are indivisible quanta of energy.
But If it was resonance, the frequency could get too high and the effect would diminish, thats clearly not happening
I saw a great youtube video about this a month or two back. I'll try finding it again on YT, but all the search results are the nagger "scientist", michio cucku, and jeets. Standby.
Was it this guy https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics/videos ?
Everything is particles, it’s just that many-particle interactions have wave-like statistical behavior.
Everything is a wave, it's just that certain interactions have particle-like behavior.
>schizophasia thread
Hydrogen, being the simplest element to work with, has fixed energy states. Exciting that element in gaseous form, or providing an unexcited example of the element with a specified energy source, results in an energy rise in the electron orbitals. Doing so shows (though spectroscopy) that there is a some sort of virtual particle that interacts with the element with a specific quantified amount of energy to change the state of the element. Of course, showing the a visual image of the particle is not possibility, as photons move at the speed of light, which means they don't interface with time, so they cannot be pictured; hence the "virtual" nature of the particle. But the evidence strongly suggests their existence. I'm too drunk to actually provide a detailed analysis, so take this.
everthing in deepest is just derivable from Coulombs law and the finite aether speed c
wrong
correct
I kind of agree with you here, Anon. All particles are just fluctuations of their respective fields, so they really are waves. I'm not sure why they tend to spike up into particles. Like you're saying though, they don't really spike up into single things that are stable, otherwise we wouldn't have the uncertainty principle doing weird shit. I'm going to think about this more; thanks for the interesting post OP
This is correct, the fundamental state of single-particles are waves. Minimally uncertain particles exist in a superposition of multiple-particle states, such a condition is called a 'coherent state'.
The Uncertainty Principle is just smaller, particles we can't (yet) detect, interacting with larger particles like photons. To purturb them to follow a wave-like motion.
The uncertainty principle has nothing to do with the theory of waves. It is a principle, not a theory.
Yes, the modern interpretation of particles is that they are all associated to waves in some underlying field. But you aren't giving the quantum nature of it appropriate consideration. If you have a perfect plane wave in electrodynamics the amplitude of either the electric or magnetic field oscillates back and forth like a harmonic oscillator. But a quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator doesn't have a continuous amplitude, it is discretized in integer chuncks, and likewise the electromagnetic field is discretized into photons.
ignoring that waves are already discretized into wavefronts, the only thing actually shown to be quantized is interaction with matter (which quantizes emission and absorption in exactly the same way) - scattering and interference is unequivocal wave behavior (not a "modern interpretation"), and is a behavior that is not dependent on quantized interaction with matter like all detection equipment (except thermal) but rather continuous wavefronts interacting with each other.
>you aren't giving the quantum nature of it appropriate consideration
he's giving it precisely the quanta of consideration i've thus far seen justification for in this thread, you're just taking offense to it. i get it if you're invested into quantum mechanics as a career/education choice, but try not to get emotional and defensive about how incomprehensible corpuscular light theory is to anyone looking at what's actually happening in the field rather than at electrons displaced from quantized energy states by absorbing energy from the field and then working backwards from that to conclusions about the fundamental nature of the field (while asserting it can't be merely a fundamental property of your detector's interaction with the field - something we already know it is from emission/absorption lines alone, regardless of how corpuscular light is).
any detector relying on discrete electron state transitions ALWAYS quantizes output by that transition regardless of the nature (or other inescapable properties - like interference) of the thing being detected.
think of it like this: a spring is a harmonic oscillator exactly until the oscillation reaches an intensity above the intrinsic, quantized tensile strength of the spring's material and it snaps. if all i can detect is the snap, the truly continuous nature of the energy transferred into the spring is invisible to me - all i see is a discrete reaction past the threshold, defined not by the motion but the properties of the spring.
You didn't understand my post at all, and you're projecting some kind of offense taken by me for some reason. I am just teaching you guys how particles are actually understood post-qft, since that viewpoint is not communicated well in pop-sci or even in undergrad physics.
I didn't care to read most of your post but you seem to take the viewpoint that photons are not real. How do you explain blackbody radiation? This was the original motivation for quantum physics in the first place, and it has nothing to do with electrons.
>I didn't care to read
it shows.
>you seem to take the viewpoint that photons are not real
"not corpuscular" and "not real" are not the same. maybe you should learn to care about reading.
quantized EMISSION and ABSORPTION are how Planck described blackbody radiation - and he continually insisted it to be a mathematical tool rather than a fundamental description of the physical realities the mathematical tool described. as a mathematical tool, it describes quantization of emission/absorption - it doesn't make statements about the field (or any corpuscles within it), it makes statements about the nature of energy transfers to and from the field by matter as a result of matter temperature.
Einstein demonstrated a quantized interaction with matter in the photoelectric effect, but again the subject - even with his conclusions of a corpuscular light energy packet - was light/matter interaction, NOT the light itself.
as the atom was concurrently being characterized, Bohr then used this quantum mathematical tool to predict emission lines of hydrogen, which clearly demonstrated the atomic reality of the quantization. this is, if you're paying any attention here, a BLOW to the corpuscular light theory - it showed that the interaction with matter was quantized because matter itself had quantized energy structure. the light didn't need to be a quantum particle, matter itself was quantized in the way that matched Planck's quantized blackbody description.
in optics, where light can be studied interacting with itself, said interactions are entirely wavelike.
so, we have matter with atomically discrete, quantized energy states, interacting with a continuous field. the interaction is quantized by the quantized matter structure (including blackbody radiation), but not the field itself.
photons are perfectly real - but they don't need to be particles. they're the energy in a continuous field to cross the threshold of absorption into a quantized MATTER reaction.
>photons are perfectly real - but they don't need to be particles. they're the energy in a continuous field
If that's the case,
why does the photoelectric effect begin as soon as the """photon""" first reaches the metal (or gas in photo-ionization)
The use of those mathematical methods implies a particle nature, because otherwise "le quantum" explanation is just as good as any other classical explanation.
A certain amount of energy is associated with each photon, but the whole photon cannot all arrive at once, which is why the particle stuff is often used in conjunction with quantum/planck/einstein theories.
since the whole photon cannot arrive at once, and as you claim "le energy is of le continuous field", how can photons be generated non-continously (ie. in a quantized nature rather than a classical wave form) immediately upon illumination?
>why does the photoelectric effect begin as soon as the """photon""" first reaches
because that's when the first oscillations of the field sufficient to exceed the reaction threshold reach the interacting matter - it just means the oscillations (i.e. the waves) propagate at c. this doesn't really have any bearing on particle/wave status; transit time would be identical
>use of those mathematical methods implies a particle nature
no, it implies quantization - Planck specifically rebuked using it as a literal description of the field, he was just trying to explain blackbody radiation (a MATTER dependent phenomenon). the solution required only quantized field reactions with matter, not corpuscular energy packets in the field - probably why Planck continually cautioned against using it as a description of the field; it couldn't be distinguished from a description of the detector until Bohr demonstrated any detector using mass interactions was inherently quantized (then it clearly was describing the detector, not the field)
>but the whole photon cannot all arrive at once
the mistake you're making here is not realizing the emission threshold is the same as the absorption threshold (see:spectral lines) - the "arrival" is not instantaneous, but neither is the "departure"; what's closest to instantaneous (potentially - it's below the temporal resolution of our ability to detect it AFAIK, since our fastest detectors rely on similar transitions) is the quantized electron state transition. it happens precisely as the threshold is crossed, and since emission does too, there's no way there to distinguish between an instantaneous particle or a wave crossing a threshold because transit time is identical.
sorry, but it's not a useful argument in either direction.
>using mass interactions
*using matter interactions
Babys first hence
>incomprehensible off-topic gibberish
>namefag on LULZ
name a more iconic duo
The blackbody radiation spectrum just follows by putting the electromagnetic field in thermal equilibrium at some temperature, but the correct formula requires that the excitations of modes are quantized as integers. The whole point of thermal equilibrium is that it doesn't depend on what the system interacts with, it is a state of the electromagnetic field itself. I didn't read your whole post because you don't know how to be succinct and ultimately you are wrong, so I am not going to waste too much of my time and effort on you.
>don't know how to be succinct
this is midwit for "this is too complicated for me"
You say the words "wave-like" and "particle" but don't think you really understand either of them
>want to know the position of a car racing a track
>take a photo of it with a very fast shutter speed
>the car looks completely sharp and immobile
>easy to see where it is, extremely difficult to derive its speed
>want to know its speed
>take a photo with a slow shutter
>measure the extend of the blur created by the car and divide by exposure time to obtain the speed
>car is a blurry mess so you can't really say where it stood precisely, only probabilistically
there, uncertainty principle explained with classical mechanics
Fallacy fallacy. 'Nuff said.
Nice non sequitur. I recall you from another thread. What's it like having an IQ in the 50th percentile?