The scenario of particle has been extensively written in the past, but its incompleteness is serious enough to break the connection of microscopic and macroscopic world. The 19 th century’s cathode rays experiments by Perrin and Thomson are unable to prove whether the cathode rays are negatively charged or not. Here we propose, the elementary particles in the atom are organized in a series of hierarchical two-body systems to orbit, particle wave feature demonstrated in double-slit interference experiment is likely to be an aggregation of the movement of many fine particles. Along with previous work, it is hopeful to see that hierarchical two-body gravitation may unify different level structures and their motion together. 1
The scenario of particle has been extensively written in the past, but its incompleteness is serious enough to break the connection of microscopic and macroscopic world. The 19 th century’s cathode rays experiments by Perrin and Thomson are unable to prove whether the cathode rays are negatively charged or not. Here we propose, the elementary particles in the atom are organized in a series of hierarchical two-body systems to orbit, particle wave feature demonstrated in double-slit interference experiment is likely to be an aggregation of the movement of many fine particles. Along with previous work, it is hopeful to see that hierarchical two-body gravitation may unify different level structures and their motion together. 1
The years of the third decade of the present century were heady times. Old social orders were being swept away, monarchies becoming republics and the United States of America was emerging as a world power. In physics too, revolutions were taking place, none more potent than that which resulted in the emergence of quantum mechanics as a model for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles. It was Newton who first suggested that light was particulate but during the nineteenth century this view had fallen into neglect. Indeed a number of experiments, for example the classic Young's slits experiment, demonstrated quite conclusively that light was a wave motion. How else could interference fringes occur? However, the experiments on the photoelectric effect demonstrated just as conclusively that light energy was carried in packets, or quanta, and that a continuous wave description was not applicable. This ‘wave or particle’ dilemma was not unique to the behaviour of light. J. J. Thompson showed that cathode rays were charged, had a well defined mass and had all the properties expected of a beam of particles. Nevertheless, Davisson and Germer showed that diffraction of electrons could take place, an effect made visually much more dramatic by G. P. Thompson's transmission electron diffraction patterns. Nowadays, electron diffraction is used as a routine analytical tool in all advanced metallurgical and materials science laboratories (Fig. 2.1). Clearly new axioms were required.
The description of the physical and chemical properties of matter is a central issue that has occupied the minds of scientists since the age of the ancient Greeks. In their route to dissect matter down to what cannot be divided any further, they coined the term atom , the indivisible . Matter became then a collection of atoms. More than twenty centuries had to pass until the development of a more precise concept of atom, thanks, amongst others, to the systematic studies of Mendeleyev and the establishment in 1869 of the periodic table of the elements (Mendeleyev, 1869). The discovery of the electron in 1897 and the first modern model of the atomic structure by Sir Joseph Thomson were soon refined by his student, Sir Ernest Rutherford, who in 1910 showed that an atom was made of a positively charged small nucleus and a number of negatively charged electrons that neutralize the nuclear charge. Much in the spirit of planetary systems, and drawing from the analogy between gravitational and electrostatic interactions, scientists in the beginning of the twentieth century built an image of the atom that consisted of a number Z of electrons – of elementary charge – e – orbiting around the nucleus of charge Ze . A number of experimental observations, though, were incompatible with this idea of orbiting electrons. In particular, according to the successful electromagnetic theory, charged electrons in orbital (radially accelerated) motion should radiate energy, thus decelerating and eventually collapsing onto the nucleus. Clearly, such a picture would imply that matter is essentially unstable, in flagrant contradiction with our everyday experience of the very existence of matter.
In the early 1900s more and more experimental evidence was accumulated indicating that microscopic particles show wave-like properties in certain situations. These particle-wave features are very evident, e.g., in measurements where electrons are diffracted from a double slit to propagate toward a screen where they are detected. Based on the classical averaging of particles discussed in Section 1.2.2, one expects that the double slit only modulates the overall intensity, not the spatial distribution. Experimentally, however, one observes a nearly perfect interference pattern at the screen implying that the electrons exhibit wave averaging features such as discussed in Section 2.1.2. This behavior, originally unexpected for particle beams, persists even if the experiment is repeated such that only one electron at a time passes the double slit before it propagates to the detection screen. Thus, the wave aspect must be an inherent property of individual electrons and not an ensemble effect. Another, independent argument for the failure of classical physics is that the electromagnetic analysis of atoms leads to the conclusion that the negatively charged electron(s) should collapse into the positively charged ion because the electron–ion system loses its energy due to the emission of radiation. As we will see, this problem can be solved by including the wave aspects of particles into the analysis. In particular, as discussed in Section 2.3.3, waves can never be localized to a point without increasing their momentum and energy beyond bounds.
The discovery of the microworld presented a serious trial for many systems of views held by mankind, including its logic. This world was found to lack the familiar solid bodies, the unchanging particles and interrelations between them, the reflection of which, in one way or another, is the logic of the macroscopic world. What elementary particle physics encountered in the microscopic world seemed illogical: the rest-mass of a particle equals zero; a part that is not smaller than the whole; a particle that in diffraction experiments moved like a wave; and much else that was unusual and strange in the properties of elementary particles. One of these properties was actually so named by physicists — "strangeness."
Those defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truthy who confound real quantities with their relations and sensible measures. —ISAAC NEWTON, Principia Before we say anything about quantum mechanics, let us take a quick look at the Newtonian (or ‘classical’) view of the physical universe. According to that view, nature consists of an enormous number of particles. When Newtonian physics is combined with the theory of the electromagnetic field, it becomes convenient to think of these particles as dimensionless (even if there is a kind of conceptual strain involved in trying to think of something as having a mass but not any size ), and as possessing electrical properties – negative charge, or positive charge, or neutrality. This leads to the well-known ‘solar system’ view of the atom – with the electrons whirling around the nucleons (neutrons and protons) just as the planets whirl around the sun. Out of atoms are built molecules; out of molecules, macroscopic objects, scaling from dust motes to whole planets and stars. These latter also fall into larger groupings – solar systems and galaxies – but these larger structures differ from the ones previously mentioned in being held together exclusively by gravitational forces. At every level, however, one has trajectories (ultimately that means the possibility of continuously tracing the movements of the elementary particles) and one has causality (ultimately that means the possibility of extrapolating from the history of the universe up to a given time to its whole sequence of future states).
The traditional theory of wave-particle duality holds that microscopic particles are both particles and waves. This view arises from the limitations of early experimental techniques, which equate the statistical wave behavior of a large number of particles directly with the essential properties of a single particle, leading to problems such as logical inconsistency and vague physical picture. Based on modern single-particle emission experiments and basic physical logic, this paper proposes a new explanation: the essential nature of microscopic particles is always particle, not wave; the observed wave property originates from the inherent, continuous, and omnidirectional tiny vibration of particles themselves, which is an external manifestation of particle motion rather than an intrinsic attribute. The strength of a particle’s wave property is closely related to its mass: the smaller the mass, the more significant the vibration and the stronger the wave property; the larger the mass, the weaker the vibration and the less obvious the wave property. Wave-like phenomena such as double-slit interference are the statistical distribution results of landing positions caused by the inherent vibration of numerous particles. This paper reconstructs the physical essence of wave-particle phenomena with concise and self-consistent logic, providing a more intuitive and unified new idea for understanding the microscopic world.