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"Quantum Physics and Reality"by Ronald C. Pine
This article is a reproduction of parts of a chapter from the
Ronald C. Pine
book :
"Science and the Human Prospect"
source :http://sourceenergyportal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=11
 
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
"-
Werner Heisenberg
"Anyone who has not been shocked by quantum physics has not understood it."
- Niels Bohr The 20th century is a remarkable story of technological achievement. Within a few decades,electricity, radio and TV, not to mention lasers, fiber optics, plastics and computers, have all become an everyday facet of our lives. I take for granted that I can turn on a TV set in Hawaiiand receive, almost instantaneously, a program that originated in Atlanta or New York. Only ashort time ago exchanging information between New York and Hawaii required the same time ittakes to send a spacecraft to Mars today. Except for power failures, few people in the developedworld know what it was like for most of the human species every night, throughout 99 percent of our history, to face the blackness of space and its sea of stars alone without the reassuring lightsof civilization. We live in a special time. Never before has such intense, radical technologicalchange taken place. In this chapter we will see that there has been another radical change:Something very strange has happened to reality along the way.
What Is an Electron?
 
"O amazement of things--even the least particle!" 
- Walt WhitmanOur story will begin here because it is the electron, and our knowledge of it, that has beenresponsible for so much of the technology that we take for granted today. Without the electronthere would be no electricity, no electric lights, no TV and no radio. We would not havesupermarket doors that open automatically or computers to play video games and do word processing and spreadsheets for business. But what exactly is an electron? In the early momentsof the 20th century, scientists found themselves asking this very question. The discovery of radiation and the atom promised to open up a strange new world of knowledge, understandingand power.At first physicists assumed that the atom was like a miniature solar system. At the center was anucleus consisting of particles glued together somehow, and circling this nucleus were theswiftly moving electrons, like little particle planets. This model did not last long. Although westill use a version of this model today to have some visual handle on what the atom looks like,scientists discovered fairly quickly that mathematical calculations based on this model predictedthat the electron would crash into the nucleus in an instant.Physicists also discovered that electrons could be stripped from the atoms and made into beamsof radiation. This was a great breakthrough, because scientists could manipulate these beams and being to deduce from the beams' behavior the nature of the electron itself. A similar channel of investigation was taking place in attempting to understand the nature of light. From this, another remarkable discovery was made: beams of electrons behave very much like beams of light!
 
We saw in our study of Relativity that the speed of light was considered a paradox at the turn of the century. By this time the nature of light was also highly controversial and something of a paradox. Under some conditions light seemed to behave as if it consisted of very small particlesof matter (now called photons). Under othe conditions, however, light showed clear signs of  being a wave of energy, a disturbance of a medium, the intensity of which could be measured. Tounderstand how this is a problem, we must first clearly understand that a particle and a wave arevery different phenomena.A particle is a piece of matter, like a baseball, that at any given time has a definite size, speed andlocation. It can only be in one place at a time. A baseball thrown in Hawaii cannot be in NewYork at the same time. Furthermore, we assume that we may discover in this marvelous universesome very strange objects, but regardless of how strange they are, if they are objects, then theywill have a definite location at any given definite time. Any object such as a baseball cannot bein two places at the same time.A wave, on the other hand, is a very different kind of thing. In fact, it is appropriate not to refer to it as a thing at all, but rather as an event or phenomenon. Things by definition have a definitelocalized size at a given definite time. Waves do not. Imagine dropping a pebble into a still pondof water. At first there is a small splash, and then circular waves move away from the spot wherewe dropped the pebble. The wave spreads out; it does not stay in one place, but it can be in many places at the same time. Also, it is the medium of the water that transmits the energy of thedropped pebble. The wave is simply a disturbance of the medium. It does not have an existenceof its own like the smile of the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland". Without the water in the pond, there would be no waves.On the north shore of the island of Oahu in the State of Hawaii, every winter large waves poundthe shoreline. These waves are caused by the seasonal winter storms migrating northeast of thestate in the jet stream on their way to make life miserable for people in the Pacific Northwest andeventually much of the rest of the United States. The winds from the migrating storms cause asignificant disturbance in the sea and a series of undulations or transmitted many miles untilfinally, reaching the reef on the north shore of Oahu, spectacular waves of 20 feet or higher break and push forward a mountain of water and foam toward the beach. On the cliffs overlookingWaimea Bay you can watch a gigantic half circle of water march relentlessly toward the beachand then simultaneously, across a quarter mile area, surge onto the beach. It is a spectacular sight. Tourists travel many thousands of miles to see it, and single-minded surfers wait inanticipation all year, hoping to be the first to ride the biggest wave on record and survive.It would be a strange event indeed if one day, while watching wave after wave break, we saw onewave flow in its normal way toward the beach and then, just as the wave was about to touch thefirst fingers of vulnerable sand, the entire half circle of water collapsed instantly to a singleunpredictable point on the beach and exploded! The wave would have turned into a massive particle located at one place, rather than spread out as waves normally are. Imagine wave after wave doing this, with the location of the collapse being unpredictable each time. Strange indeedthis would be, but something like this is what electrons and photons seem to do!
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dimitris114

Hi, nice post but why can't be downloaded? Thanks.

reply05 / 17 / 2009
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