Really, it’s a misuse of language to describe elementary particles as having ‘wave/particle duality’. If you ask them a wave-like question, they give a wave-like answer. If you ask them a particle-like question, they give a particle-like answer. But that doesn’t mean they’re a combination of the two; just means that our everyday understanding of big things isn’t suitable for describing small things.
We know that general relativity and quantum dynamics can’t be quite right. They have enormous predictive power, but they don’t overlap, which means we can’t model things where they’re equally important; the big bang and black holes for instance. “Higher dimensions” is the string theory way of trying to reconcile them - it might be right. But a theory isn’t scientific if it doesn’t make predictions you can test, and string theory hasn’t been very productive in that so far. Amazing maths though, has been great for expanding our knowledge there.
If I have an integer “1”, that is equivalent to the float “1.0” or the string “1” or the list [1]. Depending if I ask “1” a float question, an integer question, a list question or a string question it will respond as it should for each type of question, defaulting to integer because that’s the “most correct” datatype for it.
As a proponent of strongly typed languages, don’t do that.
Instead, I think of it as one type implementing multiple interfaces, but we’re still working on understanding the underlying type and what other interfaces it implements. Yes, you could implement a “compare” interface that does what you describe, but I don’t think that’s a good way to think about what’s going on. Instead, I think of it as Go interfaces (Rust traits are close enough) where we define a bunch of interfaces, and the particle/wave happens to implement all of them.
We’ve provided a definition for waves and particles, but electrons seem to be something a little different, so it’s very possible neither waves or particles actually exist and are merely manifestations of some other type that can exhibit both types of behavior. Once we figure out what that underlying type is, we can make more inferences as to other behaviors it could have.
Really, it’s a misuse of language to describe elementary particles as having ‘wave/particle duality’. If you ask them a wave-like question, they give a wave-like answer. If you ask them a particle-like question, they give a particle-like answer. But that doesn’t mean they’re a combination of the two; just means that our everyday understanding of big things isn’t suitable for describing small things.
We know that general relativity and quantum dynamics can’t be quite right. They have enormous predictive power, but they don’t overlap, which means we can’t model things where they’re equally important; the big bang and black holes for instance. “Higher dimensions” is the string theory way of trying to reconcile them - it might be right. But a theory isn’t scientific if it doesn’t make predictions you can test, and string theory hasn’t been very productive in that so far. Amazing maths though, has been great for expanding our knowledge there.
I think of it like polymorphism in programming.
If I have an integer “1”, that is equivalent to the float “1.0” or the string “1” or the list [1]. Depending if I ask “1” a float question, an integer question, a list question or a string question it will respond as it should for each type of question, defaulting to integer because that’s the “most correct” datatype for it.
As a proponent of strongly typed languages, don’t do that.
Instead, I think of it as one type implementing multiple interfaces, but we’re still working on understanding the underlying type and what other interfaces it implements. Yes, you could implement a “compare” interface that does what you describe, but I don’t think that’s a good way to think about what’s going on. Instead, I think of it as Go interfaces (Rust traits are close enough) where we define a bunch of interfaces, and the particle/wave happens to implement all of them.
We’ve provided a definition for waves and particles, but electrons seem to be something a little different, so it’s very possible neither waves or particles actually exist and are merely manifestations of some other type that can exhibit both types of behavior. Once we figure out what that underlying type is, we can make more inferences as to other behaviors it could have.