No. "Particle" and "wave" are analogies. They're not even wrong, because they're not descriptions of what actually happens.

The real problem is we don't have an analogy for what actually happens, because - by everyday expectations - the traditional interpretations are beyond weird. And the more recent interpretations are even weirder than that.

It's likely - after Bell - that there's something non-local happening. And after this paper it's likely that whatever it is may not even be compatible with a stable identity for the observer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-021-00589-1

Which seems to be arguing that instead of many worlds, there are many observers - not just simultaneously, but sequentially.

In other words, it's our belief in a consistent self with stable memories that may be wrong.

Not sure how broadly you're willing to draw the borders around "non-local" but I'd argue most quantum physicists take Bell's inequality to suggest that hidden variable theories are impossible because something non-local isn't happening.

Wow I have heard some crackpot theories before, but then I came across "modern physics".

you mean we live in a simulatio n ?

Yes, I never understood why light was considered 'particles' :-(

As far as I understand it is because light can only be emitted by atoms with discrete energy levels, but (IMHO again) light is emitted by atoms with discrete energy levels because it is emitted when electrons jumps from one energy level to another and that the possible trajectory of electrons around the atoms aren't continuous, I don't see how this is related to the nature of light..

I think that with an [undulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undulator) you can tune "continuously" the energy of the light emitted: in the webpage it is written "the emitted radiation is coherent with a wavelength determined by the period length and the beam energy", but as the precise relationship between the beam energy and the wavelength produced isn't specified I'm not 100% sure..

Light is considered a particle - or more accurately has particle-like behaviours in certain contexts - because you can count individual photons. The energy varies with frequency, and it arrives in discrete lumps at discrete locations. You can't have half a photon. It's all of a photon or no photon.

It's one of Einstein's key insights, one of the foundations of quantum theory.

In Quantum Field Theory you have quantum fields. There are no 'waves' and no 'particles', there's only a 3D probability density field which defines the probability of particle-like events at specific locations. It's the probability field that is 'wave-like', and particles are considered excitations of the field.

So you know you're quite likely to see an electron-like or photon-like event in one location, and not at all likely in another.

Calling this a 'particle' is just an analogy. All you can really say is that a particle-like measurement is likely and/or did happen in one region.

What this really means - whether it's an observer artefact, or an exchange of information, or the output of some kind of computational and/or causal substrate, or something else entirely - is still a mystery.

While seemingly intuitive, the idea of a QFT field as a probability field over space is not correct. It usually comes as a shock to anybody entering QFT when they finally realize the actual "probability space" is infinitely larger..

So as a programmer's example you might have an idea that to simulate a QFT you could have an array of floats over space to describe your "electron field", and you draw in values to reflect a probability distribution and you'll write some update rules to describe how this evolves in time. But this won't work, because it's not how nature works.

What you need is that electron field array (and a photon field array to make any kind of non-trivial observations), but in 4D (space + time), and you need to iterate over all possible values in all array bins for all fields, calculate a magic number for each configuration, and weigh all these magic numbers together to figure out the actual probabilities for any configuration.

Even for a 16x16x16x16 array, that is 65536 bins, even with only 2 levels in each bin this is 2^65536 combinations.

All of practical QFT (theoretical, perturbative or non-perturbative lattice methods) is about doing this calculation with (obviously radical) simplifications.

That we can do these enormous simplifications and still get usable results, can be a very good sign that the underlying reality is in fact simpler than what QFT implies but nobody has figured this out yet.

> Light is considered a particle - or more accurately has particle-like behaviours in certain contexts - because you can count individual photon

So how do they produce an inference pattern in the double slit experiment? I know you don't have an answer to that, but that's rather the point - neither does QM. Probability density does not explain an interference pattern. Only one thing does - that light is in fact a wave.

We have several single photon sources, including nitrogen vacancy centers and quantum dots. Nobody has ever produced a "half-photon source" though.

What would half-photons look like? I guess photons with half the energy expected given their wavelength and the Planck relation E = hc/λ?

No, that's a complete photon, just one with a different wavelength. A half photon would have E = hc/2λ; that is, half the energy for the same wavelength.

Could you point to some articles on this? It's way outside of my field, but it sounds very interesting.

The person you are replying to is either wrong or has stated it very badly.

The idea of their being both a wave and particle based description of photons that don't mix well is basically physics as known in the 1920s. The modern theoretical framework of light is quantum field theory (special relativity + quantum mechanics, but actually not quite that for [insert qft textbook] reasons...), which doesn't fit into either of those old ideals particularly well because they are basically shadows of an underlying model projected at different angles.

Edit (further detail): The way physics is taught in British secondary schools is a tragedy - ignoring that you don't even learn the fundamentals properly (no calculus!) - you aren't given a non-mathematical outline of these modern theories. In their eyes quantum mechanics has not really advanced beyond the photoelectric effect, which is where unhelpful weirdness like you'll see in this thread comes from.

We need to go back to the 1920s and start again. As the article explains, modern QM has hit a dead end, and it's little more than mathematical games that have not helped us understand reality.

Those mathematical games quite literally have helped us understand reality. The standard model made predictions, which were then tested.

Has it though? Do certain predictions presuppose a particular intepretation of reality? Does QM actually predict the double slit experiment?

> it's little more than mathematical games that have not helped us understand reality

i dont think that's true. A lot of people would assume that this "mathematical game" is like theories with air pressure. The statistical methods used for computing heat and pressure can be "explained" as little particles of atoms moving about due to their vibrations, and the ultimate observed behaviour is just that - a lot of particles pushing and shoving dependent on the temperature of these particles. this simple explanation can be understood without the maths - after all, the maths is only there to tackle the large numbers and statistical inferences needed. The statistical methods "isn't the theory".

However, such views restricts the mind imho. To seek a simple, understandable explanation that is not mathematical is probably a wrong goal. A lot of people have tried to explain laws such as gravity using such simple rules - a particle that moves and hits in all directions, but bigger bodies will block certain direction (thus resulting in a net force from the opposite side - aka, gravity).

This is cool IMO (2016):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY

Apologies if its considered off topic - I see double slit experiment and I always think of this. It blew my mind.

Of course "consciousness is special" is what you'd expect someone with a consciousness to say, so we shouldn't trust it unless we can prove the video was made by a p-zombie.

I'd be curious to hear what happens with a fake tone or indicator.

I would expect that to decouple the experimenter to the experiment and should result in no change to the output.

Pretty fascinating stuff, seems like it's time to implement some quantum CAPTCHAs

Crackpot vibes

Where did he go wrong in the experiment?

It is more than just interesting, it's the central unsolved conundrum in physics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_m...

I thought GUT was at the core of modern physics studies?

aiui, professional physicists don't think particles are "real" but a phenomenon that appears as a result of attempting to localize a wavefunction through a measurement

Professional physicists are so lost in the mathematics of wave functions they have lost touch with reality.

You seem to be arguing an old version of pilot-wave theory, which has a version that's wrong (because it predicts real life incorrectly) or isn't known to be wrong but isn't falsifiable either (because it predicts real life exactly the same as QM). It also doesn't work well with special relativity, so it's less correct than QFT.

what is the reality then? when you get down to those scales, there really does seem to be uncertainty when you try to localize parameters. on one hand it's troubling but it's also lovely because we get stuff like the casimir effect, and who knows what other futuristic technology we might end up making, which we all want

There's a viable alternative to this called "superdeterminism", but it makes everyone in the world except Sabine Hossenfelder unhappy if you bring it up because it's even worse than telling them they don't have free will.

alternative to what... the uncertainty inequality?

Is this different from the conventional, orthodox view?

I feel like I've seen experts say that yes, the fields are real, and particles are approximate descriptions.

But if it means anything, it's math.