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A K Peters/CRC Press eBooks

Worlds Contain Characters

Jesse Schell

Published Nov 5, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Story/Game Duality At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: waves and particles were the same thing, both manifestations of a singular phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite as well as we had thought.

DOI
10.1201/b17723-21

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Story/Game Duality At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: waves and particles were the same thing, both manifestations of a singular phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite as well as we had thought.
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After eighty years of Quantum Mechanics (QM) we have learned to live with wave functions without worrying about their physical nature. This attitude is certainly justifled by the extraordinary success of the theory in predicting and explaining not only all the phenomena encountered in the domain of microphysics, but also some spectacular nonclassical macroscopic behaviors of matter. Nevertheless one cannot ignore that the wave{particle duality of quantum objects not only still raises conceptual problems among the members of the small community of physicists who are still interested in the foundations of our basic theory of matter, but also induces thousands and thousands of physics students all around the world to ask each year, at their flrst impact with Quantum Mechanics, embarrassing questions to their teachers without receiving really convincing answers. Remember that Feynman once said \It is fair to say that nobody understands
Abstract The particle-wave duality was perhaps the most startling outcome of the conceptual revolution that swept through physics during the first three decades of the twentieth century. That photons—the packets, or quanta, of light— behaved in some respects as particles, in others as waves, had already been noted when the due (later Prince) Louis de Broglie conjectured that the same might be true of other particles, such as electrons. Sitting in an eyrie in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorological observer during the First World War, de Broglie had time to ruminate on these matters and to develop an equation relating the momentum of the particle to its wavelength. This formed the substance of his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted to the University of Paris in 1924 and which earned him the Nobel Prize five years later.
The story of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics has been told a thousand times. This modest contribution is to get back to a few points, including memories of a discussion we had on a possible experimental evidence of quantum effects at macroscopic scale, but in a way totally unrelated to the experiments he and his group made quite later to exhibit a model of wave-particle duality. The more general question of interpreting/understanding quantum mechanics will be also scrutinized once more.
New experiments are revealing the power of large-scale quantum devices . Entanglement is the counterintuitive idea that particles can have an intrinsic connection—a connection that endures no matter the distance between them. The phenomenon remains one of the most bizarre and least understood consequences of quantum mechanics. Measure the quantum properties of one of a pair of entangled particles, and the other changes instantaneously. Researchers have pioneered ways to demonstrate quantum entanglement in mechanical systems. This artist’s conception of one experiment depicts an interferometer’s light field, which “carries” the entangled state. Image credit: Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology/Moritz Forsch. Such strange phenomena typically have been relegated to the subatomic. But recently, physicists have taken entanglement and other quantum effects to new extremes by observing them in large systems including clouds of atoms, quantum drums, wires, and etched silicon chips. Device by device, they are bringing the quantum world into new territory—the macroscopic world. This work is driving new applications. Some experimental quantum computers use loops of superconducting wire as qubits, storing quantum information. Large quantum objects have already been used to help detect gravitational waves; they could appear in next-generation devices such as ultrasensitive sensors and encryption systems. These innovations, though, reach beyond cutting-edge tech. Building bigger and bigger quantum objects even raises the possibility of exploring some of the most pervasive unsolved mysteries at the intersection between quantum and classical worlds—and between quantum mechanics and gravity. Ever since Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger first described wave–particle duality 90 years ago (1), physicists have been probing the boundary between the observable, predictable macroscopic world and the one where probabilistic quantum rules dominate. In the quantum world, a particle exists as a wave representing the probabilities of its location. Once measured, however, the particle is found at a point …