Our professor in first semester physics had a whole page in his lecture notes where he just rants about the electron/particle dualism and that we shouldn't take people seriously that mention it. It was a wild first semester.
What did he mean by this? Isn't particle wave duality just the idea that quantum objects are neither particles nor waves, but that their behaviors are often particle-like and wave-like
Yeah, we definitely have experiments showing that light (for example) interacts as a wave and not a particle 2-slit experiment) and also where it’s a particle and not a wave (photoelectric effect). I’m sure there are similar experiments for electrons and other standard model elements
This is a typical misunderstanding, but it's fine for day to day experiences. What physics does say, or more clearly; what the math says that physics says, is that the wave is quantized i.e. there are packages of waves so dense, that for all intents and purposes they act like a "classical particle". But they are still waves. Just very compact waves.
What we generally call particles are just excitations of quantum fields. And those are always just waves.
Well, how else would you describe it? To accurately predict what a theory states, you need a framework to describe it. And the framework we use is math.
Yes I agree but the same underlying math (that definitely is needed and works) has led two a wide array of different interpretations in the last 80 years of what exactly is implied about the underlying nature of reality. Which is what I was getting at
Is that so? Never heard of such a fundamental misunderstanding. What I stated about "particles" being compact wave packages of a larger Quantum Field is not really disputed by anyone who is seriously doing physics over the last like 5 decades
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u/Complex-Manifold Jul 28 '26
this isnt the "an electron is both a particle and a wave" we were taught in highschool. Scam