Astrophysicists Try to Resolve the Wave-Particle Duality

Transcript

Charles welcome back to my office thank you for having me all right you know I have an issue with the wave particle duality I don't coming [Music] up so Charles we'll be talking about quantum physics you just wrote a book on quantum physics yes I did the handy quantum physics answer book the word handy and quantum physic in the same title is a little disturbing nah Quantum is all around us we experience it we use it daily and we don't even know it so handy is really trying to convince people that look you don't have to be a Quantum physicist to appreciate and use and enjoy the fact that we live in a universe that has Quantum components when we come of age in physics and then you learn some things that are just true yeah but you're not invited to question it yet that's right we say all right here's a particle electron proton neutron even Photon I don't mind calling that a particle even though it's it totally is a particle absolutely it's massless we say the particle can also be a wave you know that's a very interesting point I want to compare notes with you about how you learned wave particle duality cuz compared cuz I I went through the educational system a few years after you did and it might have been a transition you something magic happened between those two times in the pedagogy not in the physics okay in other words when I was brought in through the system yeah the first thing I was told was that waves and particles everything is a wave and a particle we were that was not the first thing I was talking is really true yeah that's later in the book in high school physics straight up ordinary High School physics I was taught the deboy relation relates the momentum of a particle to its wavelength and the relationship is mediated shall we say by plon constant wait a minute I pronounced it de brogle is that not right my high school physics teacher Walt nazareno uh said right away that first class saying in French it's de Bry in America we say de brogle so be ready to call it the de brogly wavelength okay I wanted to write by the man's name Lou de Bry Lou de boy yeah de Lou he saw the mathematical connection right as early as 1900 when MOX plun published the plankk equation that we call it today now for thermal uh radiation black body Spectrum which many people forget or don't associate that was the birth of quantum physics absolutely in the year 1900 but we wouldn't really develop it until the 1920s and I'm the first out of the box to say that we are now now in the Centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics right because most of that happened in the 1920s the wave particle duality at that point was when the tension was set right because plon showed that he could figure out the thermal radiation Spectrum if he treated photons as particles MOX PL quite a very interesting individual the history of how he went through life uh in his early times he was considered a little bit On The Fringe cuz he was talking about things like the plon length and the plon time and things like that were really short not anything terrestrial he use his own name when he no he just said my name is plunk and here's a plunk if you take the the plunk constant which back then he didn't even call that right the plk constant if you take the constant that sort of knits quantum physics together and then the gravitational constant and the speed of light you start doing dimensional analysis on them you get lengths you get times and he was like you know these were probably fundamental to the universe and people like what you a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of an inch no that couldn't be fundamental little did we know that with well quantum physics right and the wave particle duality so so so you you're saying you never had a problem simultaneously thinking about particles and waves being one and the same that's right why not other than unless it's just it is so therefore I will accept it as so you're telling me you didn't stay up at night wondering about it never that doesn't mean by the way that I was able to do the mathematical calculations okay I was up there struggling with all of them except for some my you know really talented and skilled colleagues uh U Back Then they were just fellow students I couldn't do the math really well so it was really hard for me to grasp the connections but the concept that you and I are particles you know I mean I I shake all the time right I definitely have a wavelength you have a w same wavelength no no but but but there are other Quantum principles that are widely misunderstood but I find intuitive yes all right so one of them relates to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle so the way the way it gets Mis construed of course is people say there's the observer effect and is your Consciousness affecting the experiment oh my gosh let's hand it over to the new age folks and let them solve it and this is a complete misunderstanding of quantum physics and so when you explain it and you say well we are big macroscopic objects if you're going to take a picture of us turn on the lights and we take a picture but the smaller you are no longer are you so immune to the consequences of being illuminated by photons M that's right right and so if I'm a particle and I say I wonder what the particle's doing let me take a picture and then you turn on the light the particle's doing something else yep so there's a limit to how much you can know about the system just because the act of observing it changes what it is you think it's doing so that may complete sense to me but it's a foundational tenant of quantum physics but still sometimes I'm a wave sometimes I'm a particle depending how you think about it or look at it or measure it I'm still I accept it but I can't claim that that's intuitive let me Express something that might help is that because it's intuitive to you or you just accepting what we know is an objective reality it's intuitive to me something can be a particle and a wave at the same time it's just mathematically hard to express that in the same way that you can be both tall and you can be you said it not me yeah it's just a way of describing things every particle in the universe has a number of parameters we call them quantum numbers right that describe what they are one of those quantum numbers could be its math as a particle and another of numbers is is its wavel it's an attribute attribute so but then you have the double slit experiment so you have two slits and you send waves through it and they interfere with each other on the other side so the crests match up in some places and you get higher intense wave and then they cancel out in other places so it's called interference pattern of course so on the other side you see this but if I send electrons on purpose yep one at a time through one at a time they'll either gather here or gather here and you have two bumps of electrons yeah isn't that funny and you okay with that 100% okay again I accept it I'm just it's a fascinating mystery though is was that that mystery you said it yes it's a fascinating mystery of the nature of things it works mathematically it's shown experimentally over and over again but it doesn't mean it's not mysterious it's a condition attribute so do should we still call it an attribute sure if I am looking at you through say a glass window you look a certain way if I put an aluminum sheet between you and me you look a different way in fact I can't see you at all through visible light but if I had radio eyes or if I had infrared eyes or if I had x-ray eyes I would see different things so it's not at all a conditional reality of are you different when I look through different things if one time it shows up as though it were particles uh and another time it manifest as a wave they're not both at the same time but you changed the way you were looking at them yes right you changed their the way that you were producing them you changed the way that you sent the screen cannot think of them in absolute terms right by the way this was a big problem that Allan Stern Mr Pluto man yeah had he didn't want the definition of a planet to be conditional on where you found the object it should be a planet no matter where it is in the universe just to remind people of course the one of the definitions of a planet is in its location in orbit around the sun it needs to be the dominant mass of that orbit basically having cleared its orbit Pluto has not done that therein comes the more human side of the physics that maybe is the root of this particular problem we use words to express what we mean about things and those words are necessarily incomplete no single term or word or sentence or definition can show all the shades of meaning of any particular thing so if I'm talking about a planet here in our solar system I don't mean a planet outside our solar system for which there's a different definition or a planet that just passing through our solar system right every word is a little bit different and so that causes a lot of problems too okay so I was a big fan of the word wavicle but it didn't catch on because I think it didn't rest comfortably within people it's possible because how could it be a wave and a particle at the same time so I thought maybe the word would influence the way you we think about it as is so often the case with language yeah and that does happen too it changes people's minds as you slowly use different words For Better or For Better worse you think about also the term power pack right we bring power packs with us to charge our phones if we're low on battery they're not power packs they're energy packs the power is how fast the energy gets moved from one thing to the next so we have this fundamental Mis physics precise about right right and and so if you want to be astronomy precise about planet or if you want to be Quantum precise about wave particle duality there in lies I think the main issue that we will have in convincing everybody that everything is a wave and a particle but I think if it was not an issue we wouldn't use the word Duality to describe the two words that's historical also it's not a duality that you are a given height and look differently in infrared light that's not a dual no one is thinking of that as a duality I think you're right in the 1920s 1930s wave particle duality was a problem that's why people coming out of classical physics there's no room for that that's right it got into our world right Lord when he first proposed the two clouds blocking 20th century physics right A lot of people nowadays have misinterpreted that saying he's saying oh there are only two problems left in all of physics there're things that aren't quite adding up exactly and it turn out that one of them was solved with relativity and the other one is solved with Quantum Quantum all right but there still are people out there trying to bring classical sensibility to quantum physics and I think they're just they're barking up the wrong tree they need a different mindset in order order to embrace all the weirdness that quantum physics brings us I don't want to cut off anybody's attempts to interpret the universe however way is most effective and provides ins kind of you yeah but we can live with and we all should live with the idea that we are all waves and particles simultaneously you heard it here first hi Charles I love love chatting with you always a pleasure so you've been eavesdropping on my conversation with my friend and colleague Charles Lou about quantum physics the good the bad the ugly and the Beautiful especially the beautiful till next time keep looking up