Particle Model

Full Title or Meme

The Particle Model was created for quantum mechanics to extended the physics of Newton's Planets to sub-atomic phenomenon.

That model is treated here as though it were a myth. Extraordinarily helpful perhaps, but, all the same, just a myth.

Context

Richard Feynman was ambivalent about the reality of either waves or particles, sometime talking about a particle being at a place at a time. The following though is what he told his students at Cal Tech.

Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century), it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found that in many respects it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: “It is like neither.”

Problems

The universe seems to be running with no energy loss although no one really knows what the Boundary Conditions are. See the entry Eventful Universe#Irreversibility and Power Consumption

There is a red-shift recorded in the spectral lines from light sent very long in the past. This could be viewed as energy loss, or it might be more to do with the shape of spacetime itself. One explanation is that the thing conserved is not the scalar energy, but the 4-vector of energy and momentum. This effect is so small at local levels as to not be worth the impact of the increase in model complexity for most purposes.

Solution

• The results from using the particle and wave models (as appropriate) gives results of spectacular and consistent accuracy.
• If something seems to good to be true, it typically is to good to be true.
• Something there is that rebels against such complex solutions.
• Nothing seems to be lost if we regard the wave equations as an information probe that is searching for a place to deposit a quantum of energy which just disappears at one point in spacetime are reappears at another.
• In other words, energy is preserved even though some of it is in-transit and not in existence at any one point in spacetime.
• The only purpose time serves (or derives from) is the measurement of the propagation of information.
• Matter cannot move faster than information.
• When particles are Entangled, they cannot be measured. They arrive when an event occurs that establishes their reality.
• Our reality is just a string of events. The eye does not "see" photons, it records events. In this case the absorption of one or more photons in a retinal cell.