You know that everything around us is both matter and wave at same time (wave-particle duality). Right? I.e. small bit of matter surrounded with wave. (See any of walking droplets videos to develop intuition).
Unlike regular matter, waves are propagating through space, by contraction and expanding of a field. Because of particle-wave duality, when matter is moving, EM field around matter expands and contracts at high frequency. Right?
EM radiation in form of radio-waves can interact with these surrounding waves because of interference. Right?
IMHO, interference between radio-waves and surrounding waves may cause effect similar to used in acoustic levitation.
I think "particle-wave duality" is a bit of an old-fashioned idea that needs to go away. It is true in the sense that we can choose to describe the behavior of elementary particles from both a quantum view point and a Newtonian viewpoint, but that doesn't mean that things (e.g., electrons) are literally particles and waves at the same time or depending on the situation. It's waves all the way down--waves with momentum and kinetic energy and attractive and repulsive forces, just like what we think of as "particles."
> You know that everything around us is both matter and wave at same time (wave-particle duality). Right? I.e. small bit of matter surrounded with wave.
It's not quite like that. Imagine a particle whose location we don't know, so we're obliged to make an educated guess about where it is. That's the wave interpretation. Later on we actually observe the particle at a specific location. That's the particle interpretation. My point is the wave/particle duality idea doesn't mean there are particles riding waves like miniature surfers -- it's more like making a statement about where a particle is likely to be in advance of observing it, given certain statistical rules.
> Unlike regular matter, waves are propagating through space, by contraction and expanding of a field.
Not necessarily contracting and expanding -- that would be true of a longitudinal wave like sound waves in air, but not an electromagnetic wave in space, which is transverse.
But electron and other particles are actually demonstrating interference patterns, so it is not just interpretation. They are particles and waves. Waves are propagating.
Walking droplets demonstration of quantum-like behavior is also done with transverse waves (waves, which are perpendicular to plane of motion of droplet). OK, they are no expanding and contracting, they are rising and falling, thank you for correction.
>>> Because of particle-wave duality, when matter is moving, EM field around matter expands and contracts at high frequency. Right?
>> No. See the transverse/longitudinal link's explanation.
> But electron and other particles are actually demonstrating interference patterns, so it is not just interpretation.
Your comment addresses my objection to the idea that matter expands and contracts, not that there are wave phenomena, which is certainly true -- but that wasn't what I commented on.
I downvoted for basically the same reason as 'danbruc -- the comment contains inaccuracies (as far as I understand physics, IANAP) that don't become accurate just by appending "Right?" to them. I don't really read that "Right?" as condescension like 'humbledrone but more as a verbal tick. I hear it from others and even suffer from it myself sometimes, the idea is that a "Right?" pause offers the other party in the conversation a chance to interrupt and correct you, because you're not entirely certain of your own assertions. But that doesn't work so well in written communication except maybe with instant messaging.
I gave you an upvote for persisting in getting corrections/tips from people like 'danbruc and 'lutusp though. Since you were interested in simulation you might enjoy this article (or others on his site) from an actual physicist: http://oyhus.no/QuantumMechanicsForProgrammers.html
«Although the idea of a pilot wave or realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the dominant view of physics today (which favors the Copenhagen interpretation), it has seen a strong resurgence of interest over the last decade based on some experimental work pioneered by Couder and Fort [13]. Couder and Fort discovered that bouncing a millimeter-sized droplet on a vibrating shallow fluid bath at just the right resonance frequency created a scenario where the bouncing droplet created a wave pattern on the shallow bath that also seemed to guide the droplet along its way. To Couder and Fort, this seemed very similar to the pilot-wave concept just discussed and, in subsequent testing by Couder and others, this macroscopic classical system was able to exhibit characteristics thought to be restricted to the quantum realm. To date, this hydrodynamic pilot-wave analog system has been able to duplicate the double slit experiment findings, tunneling, quantized orbits, and numerous other quantum phenomena. Bush put together two thorough review papers chronicling the experimental work being done in this domain by numerous universities [14,15].»
So it makes sense in paper, but does not makes sense at HN?
I can't speak for anybody else who downvoted you, but I did it because your post comes across as being quite condescending. Take this pattern, for example:
> You know that X. Right?
> Y. Right?
> Z. Right?
The "You know that" part makes your argument unnecessarily personal, when your comment could just as easily be stated without any reference to the person behind the comment you were responding to.
The "Right?" ending each line is also very patronizing. This sounds like how an adult might talk to a child, walking them through a line of reasoning.
Maybe you did not intend to sound condescending, but you did, and this is no place for that.
(Also, your post is worded as if the pilot wave theory is a fact, when it is actually not even particularly widely accepted. It is one of many interesting views of QM, but certainly not the only one.)
Oh, sorry. I forget about that effect. After lot of endless battles in newsgroups, I learned that text contains no emotions, so all emotions, which I may draw on my opponent, are in my head only.
How I should rewrite that text so it will not cause unwanted emotions, but will not look like a dictionary article? Can you help me, please? My level of English is not strong enough to be sure.
PS.
Even when (if) Pilot-Wave theory will be widely accepted, it will be theory, not a fact. :-)
Actually, PWT explains some effects much better than GTR. Moreover, walking droplets shows that relativistic and quantum effects can be described in terms of Newtonian physics, which is much easier to imagine and argue, which may cause significant advance in physics, after almost 100 years of "shut up and calculate".
> How I should rewrite that text so it will not cause unwanted emotions, but will not look like a dictionary article?
That's easy to answer. A "good" post, one likely to generate light, has many topical references and almost no, or no, first-person ("I") or second-person ("you") pronouns.
A less desirable post, one more likely to generate heat instead of light, has fewer topical references and more first-person and second-person pronouns.
So when composing a forum post, a post to be read by strangers, it's desirable to either remove or edit all constructions that might be taken to describe a distinction between oneself and others.
One could go so far as to write it as an equation:
Forum post Q factor = (topical references) / (1+sum of first-person and second-person pronouns)
The advantage of the equation is that it could hypothetically be automated and added to a forum post editor, so one's score could be seen to rise and fall as the post is typed. The drawback is that it's a classic case of reductionism -- the possibly misguided idea that everything can be reduced to (for example) mathematics.
There's obviously more to quality forum posting than this, but it's at least easy to explain and apply.
You need to replace statements of the form "X, y, z, right?" with statements of the form, "I believe X because of this evidence, and y because of this other evidence, and z because of this third piece of evidence, and that leads me to believe, or supports my understanding of Q."
In the first form you are trying to stipulate facts, and others reading may not agree with those facts. Since you have no reasoning or evidence that you have used to convince yourself that the facts are accurate, the only response to such a stipulation is "I don't believe you" or "that is rubbish", which is often reflected as a down vote here.
Let's look at your first such statement: "Unlike regular matter, waves are propagating through space, by contraction and expanding of a field. Because of particle-wave duality, when matter is moving, EM field around matter expands and contracts at high frequency. Right?"
I've read a lot of physics paper and had several years of study of it in University, and I don't recall any characterization of electro-magnetic fields as "contracting and expanding". Sure they kind of look like that if you show them on an oscilloscope in the time domain, looking like the waves on the ocean, but in my understanding they they are nothing like pressure waves in their existence.
I am pretty confident your first statement goes against every characterization of EM field theory I've seen, even pilot wave theory. Thus if you are going to start there, you have to explain to how you got there.
The referenced paper shows some good examples of this, the authors know that what they are looking at is disallowed by every existing, mainstream, theory of physics. They are very careful to explain exactly how they did their experiments, the things that affect their observation (thermal expansion, fat fingering the setup) the ways they tried to avoid those confounding factors, and the data they recovered. They don't claim some new theory or some new understanding but they do look at some theories that have been debated in the past which looked promising in terms of having a bearing on the experiment.
So now the hard work for the theoretical physicists is to thoughtfully re-examine the relationships that are called out here, a tapered container, radio frequency energy, and changes in momentum, and then explain them with theory. That explanation has to be consistent with all of the other observed effects and behaviors and include this new effect and behavior, ideally it should predict a still newer effect or behavior so that an additional experiment, one that has not yet been run, would have the outcome they predicted.
Your comments appeared to just want to bring the pilot wave theory back as is. That is fine, except that like the paper here, you need to recognize there are some pretty strong counter arguments that it is not "the" answer and the current quantum mechanical theories answer a lot more questions and have a lot of experimental data backing them up.
You can't just pull this old theory out of storage and say, "Because of this one experiment this is correct and the others are wrong." (and that was how your original comment read to me) You have to say, "Here is this new theory based on the pilot wave conjecture which not only explains this experiment, but all of the experiments that have confirmed quantum mechanics for the last 70 years, starting with the slit up through entangled photon teleportation.
Hold on to this: "Actually, PWT explains some effects much better than GTR.", when you have a theory that explains all effects better than GTR and can explain effects that GTR can't, then you have something (and everyone would be really excited to hear it and understand it). That will also give you the understanding to propose experiments that would demonstrate the predictive power of the theory even if you didn't have the tech to build them yet (for example the Gravity B experiment that showed frame dragging, Einstein predicted it, but couldn't build an experimental apparatus to prove it).
Actually the comment is mostly wrong, it throws together a random assortment of ideas in a way that does not make much sense. When I initially read the comment I thought about replying to it because I agree that downvoting without a comment is usually not helpful. But I then decided to do nothing because it would require quite a bit of time to address all the misunderstandings in the comment because there are quite a lot.
Okay, then let's start at the very beginning, the wave particle duality. This is nothing like a particle surrounded by a wave, the particle and the wave function live in entirely different spaces. The particle lives in spacetime while the wave function lives in an abstract state space.
Imagine a particle that can occupy any square of a chess board. The space the particle lives in is then a discrete two dimensional space with eight possible positions in each dimension. The wave function of this particle on the other hand lives in a 64 dimensional complex Hilbert space, one dimension for every possible state of the particle, one for every possible location of the particle. If the particle could additionally either have a charge of plus or minus one unit, then the state space would become 128 dimensional, 64 possible positions times 2 possible charges.
If there is only one particle, you can indeed visualize a probability wave on the chess board indicating the probability of finding the particle on one square or another, but that starts failing once you bring in a second particle. The state space for two particles on a chess board is 4096 dimensional, again one dimension for every possible state, one for every combination of the locations of the first and second particle.
And if the particles are entangled, you can no longer simply visualize the state [of one of the particles] with a probability wave on the chess board because the probability of finding one particle on a specific square may in general depend on the other particle. At best you can integrate over all possible states of the second particle but this will destroy a lot of information contained in the wave function.
Can I ask a dumb question? If I will create model of our Universe in a computer language and I will chose to use five-dimensional array for ease of computation, will our Universe have fifth dimension then?
Despite that randomness is used in calculations, it is very unlikely that our Universe is random, thus "probability wave" is just mathematical abstraction, disconnected from reality, not a real thing. It just a particle, with concentrated rings of magnetic field around it (like rings of magnetic field around magnets). It moves fast, and it motion is influenced a lot by fluctuations in quantum field, so it is impossible to measure position of a particle precisely, like motion of a single atom in plasma, so random distributions and averages are very helpful in calculation.
Well, if you want to model our universe, you have to model our universe. If you decide to use 5 dimensions - do you mean 5 or 4+1 dimensions? - the simulation will have 5 dimensions but that will obviously have no effect on our universe. I actually don't understand what you are aiming at.
Nobody knows whether the universe makes use of randomness or not. Quantum mechanics is essentially deterministic, the evolution of the wave function is described by a unitary operator, the Hamiltonian. Randomness only enters in the Copenhagen interpretation due to the Born rule and the collapse postulate. Note that the unitary evolution of the wave function and wave function collapse are not really compatible. What or who decides whether something constitutes a normal physical process with unitary evolution or whether it is a measurement that leads to the non-unitary collapse of the wave function? So this is definitely an open question whether the universe is deterministic or not.
I don't understand the rest of your comment, from the thing with the magnetic field around particles on, and that again doesn't sound right to me. Especially the uncertainty in the Heisenberg uncertainty relation on the one hand and the uncertainty in the description of a many particle system due to ignorance of the microscopic states on the other hand are of very different nature. The former one is fundamental, the later one is just due to ignorance.
I have seen those videos and they are kind of nice models for simple quantum mechanical systems, but one should really not try to stretch them to far, there is no way those system can accurately model quantum mechanics. They are classical systems and we know from the violation of Bell's inequality that quantum mechanics is not classical, so it is certain that those models will break down at some point.
Unlike regular matter, waves are propagating through space, by contraction and expanding of a field. Because of particle-wave duality, when matter is moving, EM field around matter expands and contracts at high frequency. Right?
EM radiation in form of radio-waves can interact with these surrounding waves because of interference. Right?
IMHO, interference between radio-waves and surrounding waves may cause effect similar to used in acoustic levitation.