Re:There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)
by Ono-Sendai on Sunday August 28, 2016 @07:54PM
(#12379142)
That's a good point, we would have to consider all electron particles identical.
Regarding field quantisation - why should the electron field be quantised?
Re:There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)
by DavidPlumpton on Monday August 29, 2016 @05:57AM
(#12380961)
If I understand it a free particle is not really quantised; it can have pretty much any wavelength. But when it is confined by boundary conditions (e.g. within an atom) we then get interference and reinforcement in the wave equations.
Re:There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)
by Ono-Sendai on Monday August 29, 2016 @09:37AM
(#12381726)
Boundary-induced quantisation does explain the limited set of acceptable/stable wavelengths around e.g. an atom.
However, what it doesn't explain, is why the amplitudes of such wavefunctions should be what they are. For example, why should the integral of the squared norm of the wavefunction for an electron be 1, if it is not a particle?
The field idea, as discussed here, actually explains why all electrons are identical: because they're all quantized excitations of the same field. It's the quantization that really does the trick, but after all that's how we got started here.