Did you know that if you lower the frequency of sound down enough it becomes a discrete sound particle/wavepacket?
As to Stern-Gerlach, doesn't that require an enormous vacuum? I'd never heard of the experiment before you mentioned it, but I've been searching google since then, and find that most sites speak only very abstractly of it. But from what I've gleaned, a diffusion type pump or something that gets to 10-6 Torr is needed. I'm assuming your whole apparatus was inside a vacuum chamber, on the centrifuge.
Yes but the centrifuge is in the vacuum. and the primary problem is getting the d*** atoms to individually go where you want them to go. This is the kind of experiment that really should be done in space.
I guess you must have been detecting the silver atoms with photographic plate and must have done everything in a dark room?
It is all in an evacuated box.
As to light being a wave - I'm certain of that due to interference patterns. As to it being a particle, I'm not convinced. I realize that light does tend to arrive in quantum sizes, but I also know that in many cases it is generated in quantum sizes. For example, any fluorescent or chemically generated light will be due to an electron falling down a quantum number of level(s). What about incandescence? Do we actually know that it doesn't produce light in quantum sizes for its own reasons?
Hmmm, if the double slit experiment doesn't convince you that light is both a wave and a particle how about Planck's formula for black body radiation and Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect? That is what he got his Nobel prize for after all.
This explanation may help. Everything is a wave/particle, particles are emergent properties of waves. Much like water is an emergent property of water vapour and ice is an emergent property of water, each phase has different properties.
Furthermore, I'm not certain that our ways of detecting a single photon aren't applying their own quantization: If we were to play a low power continuous wave light beam on a photo-sensitive emitter in a photomultiplier tube, how do we know that the atom doesn't start ringing up like the glass in front of the loud voice singer, then finally, like the glass breaking, reach such a high energy state that it throws an electron, thereby quantizing it?
LOL Seriously, read Einsteins theory. Your reasoning is very similar. If you had been born a 150 years earlier we might be calling it Mr Jesse's theory : ) I will have to start treating you with more respect.
Interestingly, some even claim to have demonstrated that super tiny antennas which are half a wavelength of visible light behave with light just like radio waves do with normal antennas.
Light and radio waves are the same, just different wavelengths. You are on the right path : )
As to all matter being waves, I'm not ready to accept that one yet. How does the Stern-Gerlach experiment prove that matter is waves? I would be most amused to see some photos of the photo plates from a good Stern-Gerlach experiment, if you know where I might find such a thing.
Stern-Gerlach doesn't prove that matter is waves. It is demonstrating the spin of the particles.
About pictures, I will let you in on a dirty little secret. Except for the double slit experiments all of these QM results are dirty and probabilistic in nature. What you get with the S-G looks like just what you would get if you shot a shotgun twice at a target. Two areas where a lot of the BB's went through and then tons of random holes where the scattered BB's went through.
The result is precisely (and I do mean precisely) what the equations predict, but they don't produce a nice clean image. An analogy is the fuzzy edge to a shadow.
Another oddity of QM is that even though it is fantastically precise it can only provide a probability for any particular event. With a large enough number of events though it makes Newtons equations seem like primitive scribblings. For a particular event though Newton's equations work remarkably well.
So why did you bring it up in the context of "waves of nothing"? And why keep asking people to "look up" experiment X as evidence for P, and then insist that they "look up" experiment Y, when X turns out not to address P in the first place, and so on? How often do you plan to do this? Why not just settle down and discuss how one of these experiments proves that we are all made of nothing?
Hmmm, if the double slit experiment doesn't convince you that light is both a wave and a particle how about Planck's formula for black body radiation and Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect?
It's best not to bring Planck into this. IIRC he didn't believe in photons, and considered Einstein's usage of his quanta of action to be illegitimate or dubious at best. He had his own ideas about electromagnetic radiation.
Another oddity of QM is that even though it is fantastically precise
People often make this comment about quantum electrodynamics. But there are dissenters, such as E.T Jaynes.
Did you know that if you lower the frequency of sound down enough it becomes a discrete sound particle/wavepacket?
In fact I do not know that. I'm not even sure what you mean :-)
What you say doesn't make to me any sense if we take sound to have its common definition. Could you please elaborate? Thanks!
Hmmm, if the double slit experiment doesn't convince you that light is both a wave and a particle how about Planck's formula for black body radiation and Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect? That is what he got his Nobel prize for after all.
I have long considered light a wave and a wave only. The double slit experiment clearly demonstrates it as a wave. But what part about the double-slit experiment demonstrates that light is a particle as well?
Anyway, this weekend (Friday and Saturday) I did several interesting double-slit experiments. I even discovered (I'm sure I'm not the first) a formula that at least roughly describes the distance between bands on an interference band pattern. (Distance_To_Target/Distance_Between_Slits)*Wavelength)
(The formula should probably have a reference to sine in there too. But I didn't go that far.)
I also made a javascript simulator for testing my calculations against. and I also verified that all the colors (at least R,G,B) from the sun also form interference bands - but each color forms its own at a slightly different size. Anyway, I had a lot of fun and took a lot of pictures. See them all here!
And by all means feel free to let me know if you see errors - I was definitely in a rush and it's just fresh up.
But please do explain how the slit experiments demonstrate light as a particle. THanks!
This explanation may help. Everything is a wave/particle, particles are emergent properties of waves. Much like water is an emergent property of water vapour and ice is an emergent property of water, each phase has different properties.
How could you best demonstrate that to me?
Light and radio waves are the same, just different wavelengths. You are on the right path : )
This we agree on!
Stern-Gerlach doesn't prove that matter is waves. It is demonstrating the spin of the particles.
Or perhaps it demonstrates the spin of electrons.
Thanks, and do let me know what you think of my primitive and simplistic experiments for the weekend! (By the way, the pictures aren't clickable because I haven't uploaded the high-res ones yet since I'm on 256kbit dsl and well it's slow enough. I'll try to get them all uploaded tonight.)
-Jesse