yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Is Light a Particle or a Wave?


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

There is a video on YouTube which has Deutsch explain the famous quantum double slit experiment, which is about particle-wave duality. Is light a particle, or a wave? You pass it through a slit depending on whether there's an observer and interference or not. It ends up in a wave pattern, ends up as individual photons, and this is the famous experiment which has baffled people for a long time and caused them to revise their world view.

The one that led Einstein to say, "God does not play dice with the universe." Correct, Einstein was a realist at the time when the founders of quantum theory were trying to develop a good explanation of what precisely was going on with these experiments in quantum theory. Einstein rejected all of them on the basis that they weren't realistic, and he was right to do so because none of them made any sense. To this day, none of the other alternatives make any sense.

Now, Einstein didn't know about the multiverse. We had to wait until Hugh Everett in the 1950s was able to devise a simple, realistic way of understanding quantum theory. But if I go back to this idea of the double slit experiment, it is often claimed that particles have a duality to them. Sometimes they're particles, and sometimes they're waves. The electron, for example, given certain experiments, will behave like a particle, and in other experiments, it behaves like a wave.

People who hear this think, "Well, okay, that kind of explains what's going on." For example, in the photoelectric effect, you shine a light at electrons, which literally means you're firing a photon, a particle of light, at an electron, and you can knock the electron out of the atom. This is supposed to be proof positive that light in the form of photons and electricity in the form of electrons are both particles because they're bouncing off one another, and this is what particles do.

Waves don't do that. You watch water waves at the beach; you'll see they pass through each other; they don't bounce off one another. Waves will bounce off particles, but they won't bounce off each other. Prior to Young's twin slit experiment, we actually relied upon Newton's ideas of light, and Newton's idea was that light was corpuscular, as he said, which means made of particles.

Then Young came along, and he shone a light through two slits cut into a piece of paper. What you find when you project that light onto another sheet of paper is not just two beams of light; you find what's called an interference pattern where the light has interfered with itself, in the same way that when waves pass through small apertures or natural geological gaps, they will interfere with one another. They produce crests in some places and troughs in others; they can cancel each other out. This was supposed to be proof to some of the early physicists that light, in fact, was a wave.

Now we get to quantum theory, and we find that things we thought were certainly particles, like electrons, when we do the same experiment with them, they interfere with one another. So it appears as though we've got particles acting like waves and waves acting like particles. The resolution to this is not to admit nonsense. This is what is often explained in quantum theory lectures at the undergraduate level: that you have to accept that something like a photon is born as a particle, it lives as a wave, and then it dies again as a particle, which is nonsense.

The reason it's nonsense is because the photon doesn't know that it's alive and it's dead. It doesn't know what experiment it's participating in.

More Articles

View All
The Rise And Fall Of Michael Reeves | My Response
So this is going to be a serious video for two reasons. Number one, it’s my birthday today! I’m 32 years old, and my only birthday wish is that you just hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm. And second, I want to address something that I have av…
Entering a Salmon Graveyard | The Great Human Race
Getting deeper, huh? 5,000 years ago in the Pacific Northwest, the seasonal salmon runs sustained huge populations of early humans. Oh, is that a dead fish? But this bounty was only available for a short window of time each year. Look, there’s even skin e…
Different mediums and the tone of the text | Reading | Khan Academy
Hello readers. I would like to show you one of my favorite things I ever wrote. It’s this splash page from a comic I wrote some years ago, illustrated by my friend Core Biladu. You’ll notice it has almost no words in it, at least in this form. Now, let m…
How Does The James Webb Space Telescope Work? - Smarter Every Day 262
This is my dad, and he’s about to finish this major job you’ve been working on, which is the James Webb Space Telescope? Sun shield for the James Webb Space Telescope. Hey, it’s me, Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. The James Webb Space Telescope…
Chi-square test for association (independence) | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
We’re already familiar with the chi-squared statistic. If you’re not, I encourage you to review the videos on that. And we’ve already done some hypothesis testing with the chi-squared statistic. We’ve even done some hypothesis testing based on two-way tab…
Ron Howard and Brian Grazer Talk 'Genius' | National Geographic
I’m Ron. I’m Brian, and we’re here to talk to you about National Geographic’s first scripted show on genius. We’re focusing on Albert Einstein: 10 episodes that encompass his entire life. We, as contemporary people in this contemporary civilization that …