The Double-Slit Experiment II(Natural Science)

誠司 小杉, Seiji Kosugi

Wasney De Almeida Ferreia

The goals of this paper are to analyze cognitively and linguistically the Double Slit Experiment, trying to understand what the functions of the observer in the collapse function wave are. To do it, a didactic video that explains the experiment in great detail was selected, and the audio (Brazilian Portuguese) was transcribed and rigorously analyzed. The theory that enabled to do this analysis was the Conceptual Metaphor, a central theory in the Cognitive Linguistics field. The results were: DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT was conceptualized and understood in terms of TRAVEL; ELECTRON was conceptualized sometimes in terms of OBJECT (CORPUSCLE); ELECTRON was another time conceptualized in terms of FLUID (WAVE). How a TRAVELER is an OBJECT and not a FLUID, the particular ELECTRON properties are highlighted during the measurement, whereas wave properties keep hiding in cognition. As a conclusion, the Description-Prescription Principle was proposed in this paper, trying to solve the problems between the realism of Natural Sciences and the idealism of Social Sciences.

S. Kosugi

Hui Peng

Young’s one-dimension-double-slit experiment represents the basic mystery of quantum world and was extended to which-way-1D-double-slit experiment. To explore the mystery, 2D-cross-double-slit apparatuses have been proposed, which consists of more than one double-slits intersecting to each other. In this article, we report which-way-2D-cross-double-slit experiments by detecting which slit of a double-slit of 2D-cross-double-slit apparatus a photon would pass through. The experimental results show that photons passing through the detected double-slit behave as particle, while photons passing through other undetected double-slit(s) distribute as wave in the same experiment with the same apparatus. Namely the particle nature and wave distribution coexist, which violates Bohr’s complementarity principle. We suggest that photon’s “particle nature” is intrinsic, while the term “wave nature” represents a wave-like distribution, which is a consequence of movement of photon as particle. It is a challenge to interpret mathematically those observations consistently.

Jonathan Allday

Science, as it is generally described at school, starts with experimental data. Scientists then have to find some hypothesis which explains these results. Using this hypothesis, a prediction is made about what might happen in a slightly different experiment. The double-slit experiment is a modified version of the setup first used by Thomas Young in 1801. Young’s version is a classic experiment that, at the time, seemed to have settled the dispute between wave and particle views of light decisively in favour of waves. The idea that particles might display some wavelike properties dates to the mid-1920s when a young PhD student called Louis De Broglie was thinking about the dual wave/particle nature of light. A quantum mechanical description of the double-slit experiment must involve a set of amplitudes governing the passage of an electron through the slits to the far detector.

Gregg S. Jaeger