The Quantum Deck

The whole house of cards built on quantum physics falls at the lightest touch. It is pseudo-science. Its subatomic alchemy, and its time we stopped taking these people seriously.

First, the double slit experiment states that if you send light through a slit in a wall it acts like a particle, but if you send it through two slits it acts like a wave, even if you only send one photon at a time. Further, if you place a camera to record the single photon, it acts like a particle again.

Upon these facts many have conjectured that the act of observation determines whether quanta will behave as a wave or a particle; that until we look at something it is merely a wave function, a mathematical framework of possibilities that collapses into a solution when we look.

Some even say that this means we are creating the world around us simply by observing it, that we are God. Rather than dabble in the mystical, let us go back to the experiment and see if we can’t increase our understanding of the phenomenon we call light.

What is light? Is it mass or energy? Let us look at light.

“The shadow your body makes in sunlight suggests that light travels in straight lines from the sun and is blocked by your body. In this, light behaves like a collection of particles fired from the sun. Place two sheets of glass together with a little water between them. With care, you will see fringes. These are formed by the interference of waves.”

Physics uses both the wave (energy) and the particle (mass) mathematical models with equal abandon, and it has produced some pretty ridiculous results. But it still hasn’t answered whether light is a wave or particle, or both, and refuses to try and reconcile how this could be.

Does Science not understand? Maybe the phenomenon of light is merely the result of an interaction between a wave and the particles it passes through. This could explain it’s dual nature. I remember standing up during my fifth grade science lesson and asking my teacher whether fire was a solid, liquid, or gas. After a moments thought, she replied that it wasn’t any of them, that it was a chemical reaction.

Of course it wasn’t until years later that I learned that fire is actually a release of energy brought about by the application of energy to certain matter. For years we’ve been taught that mass and energy are the same thing, but maybe they aren’t.