A common misunderstanding about wave-particle duality

The article completely ignores quantum field theory, which forms the basis of the standard model of particle physics, and in which particles are emergent (rather than fundamental) features of the respective underlying field, which is described by wave equations.

To me, Wave&#x2F;Particle means that we have observations consistent with waves and observations consistent with particles.<p>I don&#x27;t think you really have to go beyond that - except that is not how things behave in the macro world. The problem is trying to map Wave&#x2F;Particles to the macro scale. Just don&#x27;t do it.

Good article. If you want to delve in more have a look at the answers to this Physics SE question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;46237&#x2F;is-the-wave-particle-duality-a-real-duality?rq=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;46237&#x2F;is-the-wav...</a>.<p>One unfortunate effect of the presenting it as &quot;wave-particle duality&quot; to the laymen audience is that it&#x27;s as if physicists don&#x27;t have a good understanding of what&#x27;s going on and are puzzled by the behavior, whereas QFT is well-established.

This article seems to get it backwards?<p>&gt; This doesn’t mean that the atoms themselves are smeared out like waves; rather, what spreads is the probability distribution of them being found subsequently in a given location<p>No, it really does mean they&#x27;re smeared out like waves. Prior to the measurement they are in superposition, relative to you. When your experiment images the atoms, that&#x27;s a measurement that entangles you with the atoms.<p>If the observable value takes values in (A,B) then when you get entangled you end up in a state (A, measured A) + (B, measured B), each of which perceives a definite value of the measurement. The whole system would still be (to an outside, non-entangled observer, if you could pull such a thing off) in a superposition which could continue to interfere with itself, but the observer who&#x27;s inside the superposition will never be able to tell.<p>Afaik this is the standard interpretation nowadays. Particles <i>are</i> waves (well, in the sense that what we call a particle is usually a momentum eigenstate that evolves in space like a wave), but the measurement process that entangles us to the causes them to come in quantized packets which we call particles.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m missing the point of the article somehow though...

As an interested amateur, I recommend the book &quot;Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime&quot; by Sean Carroll as a good overview of quantum fundamentals. The book discusses several interpretations of the reality of matter at the quantum level. Dr. Carroll himself believes that everything is waves&#x2F;fields at the lowest level, and a many-worlds interpretation of why matter appears to be particles when we observe it, but also discusses de Broglie–Bohm pilot wave theory and spontaneous collapse theory.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Many-worlds_interpretation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Many-worlds_interpretation</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...</a>

Something that I&#x27;ve been wondering about is whether the original development of quantum mechanics involved a simple &quot;mixup&quot; due to the duality of the mathematics involved in wave mechanics.<p>Imagine implementing a QED simulator: some EM source emitting billions of photons, each with a vector clock rotating to indicate the wavelength. You could code this up as an array tracking each photon.<p>Alternatively, at very large numbers of photons, you&#x27;d notice that each pixel on your screen would have so many (maybe millions!) that you could just simulate the aggregate behaviour of each little square patch of space instead of individual particles.<p>Ta-da... it&#x27;s a continuum. No particles.<p>You can simulate waves in space either using a Monte Carlo particle simulation <i>or</i> by subdividing the space into finite elements and tracking exchanges over their boundaries.<p>Superficially the maths looks different, but the result is the same, and the finite element method has locality and makes the speed of light limit manifest.<p>Why do we keep insisting on covering only the particle model in text books?

The article clouds more than it illuminates. I don&#x27;t think the author knows what he is trying to say. This is common in strawman &quot;mythbusting&quot; articles, but even more fraught when the topic is quantum mechanics.<p>Saying that an electron &quot;isn&#x27;t a wave&quot; when it is in motion, because the wave is probability, not the electron, is equivalent to saying the electron <i>doesn&#x27;t exist</i> between emissions and absorption. This is a valid interpretation, but even more conunterintuitive to novice, and raises more questions. Ultimately, arguing over vocabulary as interpretation is a distraction. What the thing <i>does</i> is what the thing <i>is</i>. Interpretations are intuitive guides.

Tl;Dr: &quot;Wave-particle duality&quot; is not the notion that matter is &quot;sometimes&quot; a particle and &quot;sometimes&quot; a wave. It is, at all times, its own separate category of thing, for which &quot;particle&quot; and &quot;wave&quot; are just metaphors that approximate its behavior.<p>One metaphor usually comes closer than the other depending on what system you&#x27;re looking at, but it&#x27;s never changing back and forth between some &quot;particle state&quot; and &quot;wave state&quot;.

Why is the bicycle self stable?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.1201959" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.1201959</a><p>We can&#x27;t say, in any satisfying way. The mathematics is uncontroversial, but all of the simple natural-language explanations fail under scrutiny.<p>Where is the electron in the double slit experiment? Is it a particle or a wave?<p>Similarly, we can&#x27;t say. We don&#x27;t have a good way of talking about this by analogy, or using natural language. As with the bicycle, the mathematics is bulletproof and boring.<p>This is not to say that quantum mechanics is unmysterious - I think it is very mysterious. However, the bicycle example shows how this characteristic, frustrating elusiveness of good natural-language descriptions is not limited to exotic quantum systems.

This whole article and discussion reminds me of the key idea that physics is a model and map is not the territory. Reality is just its own thing, to me it seems pointless to debate if something is really wave or particle or quubaz, the question should be what insights and predictions you can get. Conversely just because you can model things with waves&#x2F;particles&#x2F;x doesn&#x27;t mean that they are waves&#x2F;particles&#x2F;x.

If you fire a single particle between two slits repeatedly, the cumulative places it hits form a wave-like interference pattern, of course.<p>If you fire a single particle between two slits just once and it <i>still</i> forms a wave-like interference pattern, then surely what is being observed is more than just a probability distribution?

A question for any physicists on here: is Wave&#x2F;Particle duality analogous to Lisp&#x2F;Binary duality? In other words, 2 different languages&#x2F;models but 1 underlying reality that neither perfectly represents?

&gt; there is no reason to say that quantum entities are ever really waves<p>I&#x27;m on the completely opposite end of the spectrum. I see no reason to say that quantum entities are ever really pointlike particles.<p>I&#x27;d rather see them as smeared wave-like entities that occasionally rapidly reshape while exchanging energy and momentum through fields as if the were two small billiard balls bouncing.<p>There&#x27;s really nothing particle-like about those quantum objects apart from this momentum and energy exchanges (and even that is weird because it&#x27;s quantized) and that evolution of their center of mass in time seems like a thing flying in space according to Newtonian dynamics.<p>We draw our simplest intuitions from macroscopic objects that are built of huge number of actual elemental material objects so tightly bound with one another that they are barely smeared.<p>It&#x27;s not an accident that macroscopic object obeys the same equations that a tight quantum objects obey.<p>But it&#x27;s a huge mistake to think that those equations that we wrote for this very bizarre state of matter that are macroscopic objects is anything primary just because the math describing them is as simple as it goes.<p>Take a look at ideal gas equations about pressure volume and temperature. They are childishly simple when compared to the math you&#x27;d need to accurately describe what actually happens in a gas.<p>Framing quantum mechanics in terms of &quot;observation&quot; instead of &quot;instance of momentum and energy exchange&quot; might be a very computationally convenient interpretation of what happens but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s real in any sense of the word.<p>In broader context we have very many interpretations in physics l that are the simplest possible interpretations of the mathematical abstractions of our models. With complete disregard for how sensible they seem. Even though there are completely reasonable alternative interpretations of the same math available.<p>Physics educators seem to delight in the quirkiness of the interpretations that theoretical physicists love because they are just their equations narrated, nothing more, nothing less, instead of exploring more reasonable interpretations or even mention that they exist.<p>In absence of new math, bringing new insights to our fundamental knowledge, one of the goals of physics should be to get real. New, or old but rekindled, more plausible interpretations might inspire new generations of young physicists to visit avenues less explored. Because abstract narratives we globally adopted failed to do that for many decades already.

My understanding is that what we consider as particles can be described as waves of smaller particles.<p>For example, atoms are fluctuating electrons, neutrons and protons, all of which are fluctuating subatomic particles and so on. And what we describe as particles are essentially the maxima of these fluctuations.