Introduction: The Particle World Versus the Wave World

Marcel Wellner

Brandon Carter

Einstein’s 1905 recognition that light consists of discrete “quanta” inaugurated the duality (wave versus particle) paradox that was resolved 20 years later by Born’s introduction of the probability interpretation on which modem quantum theory is based. Einstein’s refusal to abandon the classical notion of deterministic evolution — despite the unqualified success of the new paradigm on a local scale — foreshadowed the restoration of determinism in the attempt to develop a global treatment applicable to cosmology by Everett, who failed however to provide a logically coherent treatment of subjective uncertainty at a local level. This drawback has recently been overcome in an extended formulation allowing deterministic description of a physical universe in which the uncertainty concerns only our own particular local situations, whose probability is prescribed by an appropriate micro‐anthropic principle.

Joshua C. Bienfang, Jingyun Fan, Alan L. Migdall +1 more

footing. The character of light itself was described by Descartes in the 17th century as \pressure that was transmitted through space from a source to an eye (a detector). This idea was later developed by Huygens and Hooke into the wave theory of light. At about the same time, Gassendi put forward the contravening notion that light was a particle, an idea embraced and developed further by Newton. The diering perspectives of light as a particle versus a wave

Wolfgang P. Schleich

The wave-particle dualism, that is the wave nature of particles and the particle nature of light together with the uncertainty relation of Werner Heisenberg and the principle of complementarity formulated by Niels Bohr represent pillars of quantum theory. We provide an introduction into these fascinating yet strange aspects of the microscopic world and summarize key experiments confirming these concepts so alien to our daily life. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.