Particle-Wave Duality

Girls demonstrating wave-particle duality by James Guppy

The so-called “particle-wave duality” refers to the apparent contradiction that arises when we try to understand the nature of light.

Light may be understood as a wave phenomenon (i.e. energy) or as matter (i.e. a particle), depending on the experimental conditions under which we observe it.

Philosophers of science say the duality is bound up in the way we use language. And the conflict might be reconciled if we consider what language is and does.

Language, they say, not only describes but also informs our understanding of things spoken and written about. In short, our descriptions of the world around (and within) us shape our worldview.

Consider the moon, for instance. To an Apollo astronaut it might be taken as something to walk on. For an ancient Roman citizen believing in the state religion of old Rome, the moon might be seen as a somewhat mysterious place where the goddess Luna resides.

In ancient Iran, the moon was believed to be “The Great Man” who incarnates on Earth from time to time. And in the fairly recent past, the moon was whimsically said to be made of blue cheese.

In each of these cases, the words and the semantic context within which they’re placed shape the understanding of the thing described.

Although we might overcome the particle-wave duality by maintaining that it’s informed by current modes of describing and categorizing reality, this still doesn’t tell us much about the actual essence of light, energy and matter–or even if these observable phenomena have a ‘true essence.’

At some point language becomes inadequate. And many believe that sciences which use a symbol system, such as mathematics and physics, are equally as imperfect and incomplete to the task of describing reality.

Along these lines, the holistic thinker Peter Russell suggests that we should not confuse the map (i.e. scientific concepts and theories) with the thing mapped (i.e. supposed fundamental aspects of the universe).

The debate around describing and the described gets complicated, however. Some maintain that language is, in fact, adequate and is an integral part of reality. But this argument falls short when we consider how meanings have changed and continue to change throughout human history.

» Berkeley (George), Brahman, Einstein (Albert), Hume (David), Kant (Immanuel), Locke (John), Poststructuralism, Schrödinger (Erwin), Semiology, Tao, Young (Thomas)

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Particle

The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN - uploaded by Image Editor (see excellent notes for this photo at flickr)

In physics a particle is defined as a tiny unit of matter.

Experiments in subatomic physics, together with studies in semiotics have thrown the entire notion of the particle into question.

The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger conceived of the particle as a standing wave–i.e. a relatively stable energy pattern.

For others, particles are seen as wave packets of energy.

More recently, particle physicists have postulated a “God Particle.” If its existence is confirmed, this would apparently resolve some current inconsistencies in theoretical physics.

Independent thinkers, sociologists and philosophers, however, ask how we can confirm the independent existence of something when the longstanding philosophical debate about the relation between subjectivity (i.e. biased conscious observers) and objectivity (i.e. apparently unbiased observations) remains unresolved, and might always be.

It seems that modern physicists are playing a high priced game and probably convincing many people that they’re getting at some basic truth when arguably they’re just creating an historically relative paradigm. In so doing, they carry out experiments within the parameters of that paradigm to, consciously or unconsciously, not only advance but also reinforce and legitimize it.

In other words, many alleged high-tech “confirmations” are an essentially invalid way of saying that a particular game is THE game.

But this is not just an abstract game. It’s no secret that the public is easily swayed by glimmering machines and perhaps Photoshopped results, and this popular enthusiasm most likely makes it easier for scientists to get government funding.

Granted, the results of modern physics are theoretically useful and have many practical applications. And our inherent limitations as a species should not stop us from exploring and developing our mysterious universe.

Nevertheless, we should remember that ideas like the “God Particle” are just a culturally relative story, and certainly not the whole story.

» Democritus, Hume (David) , Lenard (Philipp Eduard Anton), Particle-Wave Duality, Young (Thomas)

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George Berkeley

George Berkeley is credited with the development of subjective idealism. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

George  Berkeley (1685-1753) was the Anglican Dean of Derry (1724), bishop of Cloyne (1734) and an important philosopher belonging to the school of idealism. Born in Ireland, Berkeley moved to Oxford in 1752 and became one of the so-called British empiricists.

Berkeley believed that the material world exists as an idea created in our minds, ultimately by God. In his New theory of Vision (1709), he argued that our sense of distance isn’t directly perceived but inferred from the repeated association of visual and tactile cues. All of existence, itself, is a group of interacting minds, connecting with archetypes, which themselves derive from God.

He uttered the famous line, perhaps adapted from Shakespeare,

To be is to be perceived or a perceiver.

This means that existence is either a mind or stimuli in a mind.

One way that Berkeley tried to support his view was to note that the idea of heat – what the philosopher John Locke called  a “secondary quality” – is somewhat relative. If one of our hands is cold and the other hot, and we place them into warm water, the one hand feels hot and the other cold. Anyone can do this little experiment and see that it’s true. However, Berkeley added that Locke’s so-called “primary qualities” (e.g. shape, quantity) were also dependent on a perceiving mind. Berkeley, in fact, challenged the entire distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as elaborated upon at Wikipedia:

Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oil on canvas. 76×64 cm. Britain, 1697. Source of Entry: Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Berkeley maintains that the ideas created by sensations are all that people can know for sure. As a result, what is perceived as real consists only of ideas in the mind. The crux of his argument is that once an object is stripped of all its secondary qualities, it becomes very problematic to assign any acceptable meaning to the idea that there is some object. Not that we can’t picture to ourselves (in our minds) that some object exists apart from any perceiver—we clearly think we can do this—but rather, can we give any content to this idea in any particular case?¹

A slightly different take on the belief that the material world doesn’t exist independent of the mind has been popularized in many books reporting recent discoveries in sub-atomic physics, such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters and Fritzoff Capra’s The Turning Point.

Related Posts » Particle-Wave Duality, Schrödinger (Erwin), Standing Wave, Young (Thomas)

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction#Berkeley.27s_Criticism

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Causality

Spurious Causality by y3rdua via Flickr

Causality is the belief that a second event is the consequence of a first event. This is usually described as a relationship between a cause (first event) and an effect (second event).¹ Not everyone sees causality as a belief. But from a mature philosophical perspective, that’s exactly what it is.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle saw causality in terms of four interrelated causes or explanatory factors:

• The material cause: The raw material used to make an object (e.g. wood)
• The formal cause: What the object will be (e.g. a chair)
• The efficient cause: How the object is created (builder)
• The final cause: The object’s function or purpose (it is used for sitting)

This teleological perspective is based on Aristotle’s belief that a valid distinction can be made between a thing’s essence and its observable form.²

Perhaps in keeping with Aristotle’s idea of a “formal cause,” Michelangelo said that, when sculpting, he simply removed the stone that hid the figure already existing within.

The idea of one event causing another event has been critically examined. The philosopher David Hume suggested that the idea of causality is nothing more than an expectation based on past experience and human limitations.

David Hume (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hume’s critique of the belief in cause and effect challenges our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.

In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:

Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination.³

Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” But ideas they simply are. Although we expect the billiard balls to move, we have no way of proving or knowing that they always will.

At first, this may seem absurd. But Hume’s critique of causality had a profound effect on one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant. Mortimer Adler says “…Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.”⁴

Particle tracks in a cloud chamber by Ethan Hein via Flickr

In addition, developments in subatomic physics, especially concerning particle reaction chambers, have challenged many longstanding assumptions about causality. On a quantum level of reality, contemporary physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.⁵

This radical uncertainty is reflected in the arts and in the depth psychiatry of C. G. Jung, whose concept of synchronicity suggests the possibility of non-causality or acausality.

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¹ Wikipedia gives a standard definition that most would accept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

² A distinction that the Catholic Church adheres to when explaining the efficacy of the Eucharist.

³ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.

⁴ Adler, Mortimer J. (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Simon & Schuster. p. 94, cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#cite_note-2

⁵ Some argue, however, that it’s invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects which they make up.

On the Web:

• “Aristotle on Causality“
• “Causation: Eastern and Western Views“

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Democritus

Crying Heraclitus and laughing Democritus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Democritus (460-370 BCE) was a Greek Presocratic philosopher born in Thrace whose surviving fragments reveal that he wrote on physics, math, ethics and music.

His atomic theory, coming to us through Aristotle, posits an infinite number of differently shaped and everlasting atoms(tiny indivisible particles) that randomly combine to create an infinite number of worlds throughout time. Each world displays natural laws but since randomly generated, they are not intelligently directed by a creator.

Democritus was keenly aware of the now common distinction between macroscopic and microscopic reality. This is quite remarkable considering he lived over 1,900 years before the first primitive microscope was invented in 1590 CE. As he writes in Fragment 9:

Conventionally sweet, conventionally bitter, conventionally hot, conventionally cold, conventionally color, but really atoms and void.¹

He was also aware of the need for some kind or locus of consciousness (i.e. the soul) which he sees as the underlying cause of life as perceived through the five senses. For Democritus the soul is composed of tiny round atoms, and instead of being eternal, is subject to death. And again, remarkably, Democritus believed that the soul perceives things when its atoms are impacted by the atoms of worldly objects.²

David John Furley notes that Democritus’ theories met with significant opposition. With the exception of Epicurus and Lucretius, the leading figures of the ancient world preferred the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics over his own. And by the time of the scientific revolution, when the importance of his ideas became clear, almost all of his complete works were lost.³

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¹ John Palmer ” Democritus of Abdera ” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Ed. Michael Gagarin. © Oxford University Press 2010. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. Toronto Public Library. 5 July 2012 http://www.oxford-greecerome.com/entry?entry=t294.e362

² David John Furley, The Oxford Classical Dictionary Oxford University Press 1996, 2000.

³ Ibid.

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David Hume

David Hume's statements on ethics foreshadowed those of 20th century emotivists via Wikipedia

David Hume (1711-76) was a Scottish philosopher who developed a naturalist perspective on all aspects of human life.

For Hume, the highest good is based on the pursuit of happiness. We are personally happy when we’re good to others, not due to some high spiritual reward but because this approach leads to a harmonious social whole. So personal and social well-being go hand in hand.

This means that morality isn’t based on austere rational principles but on the desire for enjoyment. Accordingly, Hume believes that reason cannot determine anything without experience. And he goes as far to say that reason is the “slave of passion.”

Hume’s metaphysics, in particular his critique of the belief in cause and effect, remains an important challenge to our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.

In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:

Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination.¹

Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” But ideas they simply are. Although we expect the billiard balls to move, we have no way of proving or knowing that they always will.

At first, this may seem absurd. But Hume’s critique of causality had a profound effect on one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant.  Mortimer Adler says “…Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.”²

In addition, on a quantum level of reality, contemporary physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.

However, some say it’s invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects which they make up.

This debate continues to this day, the answer to which might depend on one’s core beliefs and related worldview. Or in Hume’s terms, one’s “customs of thought.”

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¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.

² Adler, Mortimer J. (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Simon & Schuster. p. 94, cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#cite_note-2

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Hawking, Stephen

President Barack Obama talks with Stephen Hawking in the Blue Room of the White House via Wikipedia

Stephen Hawking (1942- ) is a British theoretical physicist and an outstanding summarizer of recent ideas in physics. His bestselling book, A Brief History of Time (1988, 1996), helped to catapult him into the public eye.

In that work Hawking didn’t entirely dismiss the idea of God. However, his comments about God were usually couched in the language of theories that depend on sense observation (e.g. The Big Bang, Black Holes, Relativity Theories, the Beginning and End of Time).

Not much serious discussion is given to the possibility of immanent, spiritual powers (and realms) existing beyond yet influencing the observable universe. This isn’t surprising because Hawking is a leading physicist, and not a leading mystic nor theologian.

Having said that, Hawking is open-minded enough to rethink the nature of time and consider the possibility of backwards causality. And his use of the phrase “angel-eye’s view” to describe this process suggests that he’s not averse to using metaphors that, at least for others, would point to a spirituality existing beyond sensory and conceptual realities (although Hawking’s usage here does seem entirely literary and whimsical):

“Observations of final states determine different histories of the universe,” says Hawking. “A worm’s-eye view from inside the universe would have the normal causality. Backwards causality is an angel’s-eye view from outside the universe.”¹

A black hole concept drawing by NASA via Wikipedia

To this Rob MacRiner adds:

Answer to Question: Why does time seem to exist only in a forward direction?

Time seems to only exist in a forward direction because the universe is expanding. If the Universe reaches Critical Velocity and starts to contract ….then time, as we measure time will reverse according to the Big Bang / Big Crunch Theory. The reason for this is that time does not exist without change or movement….. (change or movement of particle matter or energy as we know it). If matter has no movement either expanding or contracting then time does not exit for that matter. However Time can exist around non moving particle matter if something is either expanding or contracting around it.

If the expansion of matter increases as in the case of our universe, or an expanding object, or even light…then time increases relative to the rate of expansion. Example: if carbon A is heated and expands faster than carbon B (which is not heated) then time increases in carbon A relative to carbon B…However as Einstein pointed out…time is relative to the observer…and you need something of contrast to make that comparison….fortunately our universe offers lots of contrast …otherwise we would have a very difficult time figuring this out. Time being relative to the observer can exist at different speeds based on the rate of expanding matter. If you are on riding on a beam of light than time is much different than your friend riding on a sound wave.Of course time is relative to the observer, therefore your time is much faster only to him, or any body else who is not on a beam of light.

If matter contracts or condenses then time actually reverses…as in the case of a contracting universe…so Planks Quantum would be measured as zero time for the entire Universe…and time starts at the point of the Big Bang (once matter is on the move again)… In the case of a black hole, relative to our expanding universe)… there is also no time. (except for matter being sucked into a black hole….this matter would be reversing in time, until at which point it becomes part of the black hole mass, then time (in a Black Hole) as in Planks Quantum is zero….which is odd because the Universe is still expanding around the black hole…but it is consistent with the theory that. Time can exist around “non moving matter” if something is either expanding or contracting

Time as we know it is measured in a forward direction and will continue until the point of critical velocity…at which point time starts to reverse…and for a brief moment…the point where the Universe changes from expanding to contracting…time will again be zero…as in Planks Quantum. However…during the forward direction of time…(while the Universe is expanding)…black holes are continuing to suck up matter…and should in theory at some point converge with other black holes….Therefore…as the universe is expanding from the big bang…there is multitude of matter which is not expanding (black holes)…which might well be unexploded Planks Quantum matter from the big bang…and the black holes with their massive gravitational force are sucking up matter which was attempting to expand but was not able to overcome the stronger force of the black hole…like mini-Plank Quantum’s converging within the universe …When the Universe reaches Critical Velocity and then all matter in our Universe starts to contract…heading towards the Big Crunch….the multitude of black holes converging (up to that point) should in theory rapidly increase the speed of reverse time …acting as an accelerant force of a contracting Universe with there collective gravitational force …so the reverse of time.(the journey the contracting Universe is taking towards the Big Crunch)…should happen much quicker than the time it took for the Universe to go from the Big Bang to Critical Velocity…That is of course Time relative from the Big Bang to Critical Velocity ……in contrast to …….Time Relative from Critical Velocity to the Big Crunch..… » See in context

Animated simulation of gravitational lensing caused by a black hole going past a background galaxy via Wikipedia

More recently, Hawking has argued that our universe has no need for an intelligent creator.

The laws of nature themselves tells us that not only can the universe have popped into existence like a proton and have required nothing in terms of energy but also that it is possible that nothing caused the big bang.²

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¹ New Scientist, “Exploring Stephen Hawking’s Flexiverse” 20 April 2006, Amanda Gefter, cited at http://okgrouputer.blogspot.com/2006/05/heisenberg-lsd-stephen-hawkings.html.

² http://www.christianpost.com/news/stephen-hawking-something-out-of-nothing-is-possible-53589/

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Interference

Interference of light waves coming from two in-phase point sources. Crests blue, troughs red/yellow. via Wikipedia

In the supposedly hard science of physics, interference can be observed when two or more waves of energy interact to create a disturbance in the same medium (e.g. electromagnetic, light, sound, water).

Constructive interference can be observed when two or more wave ‘crests’ meet, the sum being a positive amplitude.

Destructive interference can be observed when two or more ‘troughs’ meet, resulting in a negative amplitude.

In the practical sense, interference patterns can be seen by anyone throwing two or more stones into a lake and observing the interacting ripples.

Thomas Young (1773 – 1829) demonstrated with the double slit experiment that light exhibits interference patterns, which lead to his wave theory of light. However, under different experimental conditions, light can also behave as a particle (i.e. a small unit of matter). This conundrum lead to the idea of particle-wave duality that pertains not just to light but, as it was later theorized, to all objects.

The idea of duality originated in a debate over the nature of light and matter that dates back to the 17th century, when competing theories of light were proposed by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton). Through the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Niels Bohr, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).^[1] This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; but because of their small wavelengths, the wave properties of macroscopic objects cannot be detected.¹

It should be noted that physics, for all its practical success in helping to create technological marvels like the microprocessor or the LED monitor, is still just a set of theories about our world. As Jacob Bronowski puts it in BBC video series, The Ascent of Man, science depends on and, in turn, recreates a human representation of reality, not unlike a work of art.² We can never know the actual thing studied. We can only know how it appears to us (or how it leaves hints or traces of its appearance) as we observe through some apparatus—be it the naked eye, the Hubble space telescope, or an electron microscope.

Since Bronowski alluded to this in the early 1970s, many other scientists and popularizers of science have uttered similar sentiments. For instance, the holistic thinker Peter Russell suggests that we should not confuse the map (scientific concepts and theories) with the thing mapped (fundamental aspects of the universe).

—

¹ Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

² The entire series also appears in book form, with text matching the TV script. The Ascent of Man: Boston/Toronto, Little, Brown and Company, 1973, pp. 321-367.

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Luna

The Greek Diana was regarded as a huntress and also took on attributes of a Moon Goddess via Wikipedia

Luna is the Latin word for ‘moon’ and the oldest Roman moon goddess. The moon later becomes identified with Diana and Hecate.

Luna’s 6^th-century BCE temple on the Aventine Hill was was destroyed by the great fire, for which Nero blamed and persecuted local Christians.

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Her Greek parallel is Selene.

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Lenard, Philipp Eduard Anton

Philipp Eduard Anton Lenard (1862-1947) was a German physicist who suggested that atoms have both positive and negative charges.

His experiments led Albert Einstein to question the nature of light. Most notably, Lenard directed a beam of light at a metal plate and found that an electron was jarred free from the plate the moment the light reached it.

Einstein argued that if light is a wave phenomenon (defined as a pattern of energy transfer), a precise and calculable amount of time would be needed for enough energy to build up to jar the electron free from the plate.

Thomas Young's sketch of two-slit diffraction, which he presented to the Royal Society in 1803 via Wikipedia

Because Lenard’s electron was jarred free instantly, Einstein said that light behaves as a series of particles (defined as tiny, indivisible units of matter). This assertion created quite a stir within scientific circles because the interference pattern previously observed in Thomas Young’s double slit experiment had apparently ‘proved’ that light behaves as a wave phenomenon, and physicists understood waves to be the opposite of particles.

Lenard received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905. And since then, not a few New Age commentators have discussed the importance of his work, and how it has contributed to the idea that the concepts of matter and energy are, to some extent, social constructions informed by the way we observe natural phenomena, especially in the subatomic realm.

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