Can Waves and the physical world be separate?

Originally posted by jiggerj
What I'm getting from the world of quantum physics is that waves of energy become particles, particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become everything that we can see and touch (well, something along these lines anyway).

But, what happens if we try to reverse this process? If we were to take something, say a grain of sugar, place it in a container, and smash the &%$! out of it day after day, year after year...would that grain of sugar ever revert back into a wave?

I'm thinking the grain of sugar will only be pulverized into powder, but I really don't know. If everything started out as a wave of energy, why won't that grain of sugar ever leave the container in the form of a wave?

What do you think?

It doesn't have to do anything to behave as a wave, but this property is exceptionally difficult to observe experimentally because of the high rest mass and high spatial frequency of the deBroglie matter waves.

It is true that in quantum mechanics there are "particley" bases and "wavey" bases, and thanks to the way the linear algebra works anyt thing can be some of each at once.

Now practically, 'stuff', namely macroscopic globs of matter, protons electrons and neutrons, behave very very particley, in the sense of how they work in the experimentally accessible states. There is a professor who has some extreme experiments to directly show the existence of matter waves, but it is very tricky.

And electromagnetism, until you get up to at least X-rays, behaves very very wavey, where the particley nature of electromagnetism is hardly observable until you get to real single-atom interactions.

There is a big physical difference not related to this underlying property of quantum mechanics (which applies to everything), namely that photons can be creaetd and destroyed at will, but there are conservation laws for matter which mean that it is very difficult to get rid of any of them or create any new ones in practical circumstances. So this fact also makes 'stuff' appear to behave in particley way in nearly all practical cases.

reply to post by vasaga

Fair enough.. Then comes the conundrum. Why does the speed of light remain the same independent of the observer's movement speed? Wouldn't the logical conclusion be that the one observing is the one creating? I know it sounds wild but, what other explanation do you have? I'll gladly hear them.

the answer to that comes when you put in the missing puzzle piece that has been neglected. our perspective of time as the 4th dimension. this is wrong. time results from the friction between the 3rd dimension moving through the 4th dimension.

when you understand that, you'll find that it would be impossible to see something travelling faster than the speed of light, because the speed of light travels at the exact same speed that time does. something cannot occur faster than time. if it did, then it would go backwards in time relative to us.

so, when viewing any two objects, if the difference in their velocity is greater than or equal to the speed of light, relativistic effects occur between them. you just can't see something happening faster than time itself (which is one dimension moving through another, like 2D pictures moving through a 3rd dimension, creating a movie)

Hi everyone. Just thought I'd dig up this thread to show how the double-slit experiment is very much affected just by someone viewing it. Some of the comments here explained that it is not the human observer that causes a wave to transform into a particle, but this change happens only when mechanical devices are used to measure a wave. I didn't think this was correct, but I couldn't find any clear example of the observer effect online - until now.

This pic clearly shows the image of a man with his eyes open and with particles flying by, and below that is another pic of him with his eyes closed and a wave flying by.



These images were copied from The Universe Season 7 - Quantum Physics / Microscopic Universe S07E05

Have a good day everyone.

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
since the exact position of something cannot be known, it is said to have "wave-like" characteristics.

So the only difference between an x-ray and a micro-wave is the force at which a photon is emitted? Even though the photon is traveling the same velocity, an x-ray photon is different from a micro-wave photon because...