That was a question posed by an article in the August issue of Scientific American.
The issue seems to be whether subatomic particles are really particles, or are they some sort of wave or excitation of some sort of field or whether they are material at all, or they just have properties that are an illusion of mass.
And that's about as far as I could get with it. I read the full article twice; I think I would have had less trouble understanding the instructions on how to calibrate an antimatter injector in a warp drive.
If subatomic particles are not material things, then how is it that atoms can have mass or, the things that atoms make up?
My head hurts.
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Thursday, August 8, 2013
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57. Refutation of Bishop Berkeley
ReplyDeleteAfter we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html
Clever, Hans. But understanding *why* something works is pretty important. Otherwise you're left accepting things as magic.
ReplyDeleteIt's a good article, but it gets lost in philosophical wordplay. The language of abstruse physics is increasingly mathematics, and it is not new that understanding based on common sense world view doesn't map reality ... all the way down.
So it is sometimes appropriate to use the particle approximations, sometimes to use wave interactions ( much of quantum chemistry is based on this ) and sometimes understanding just symmetry relations leads to new discovery.
"By analogy, consider a mirror-symmetric face. A mirror swaps the left eye for the right eye, the left nostril for the right, and so on."
Reminds me of the old question posed to/by Feynman, "Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not top and bottom? How does it 'know' which way is up?"
By the way -- excellent very readable introduction to quantum electrodynamics theory is his book "QED: The Strange Theory of LIght and Matter".
All you say is true; it's important to keep digging, even though one has a sense that the intelligence required to understand the phenomena described in the SciAm article might be beyond what's humanly possible. Perhaps we'll have to wait until some dreamer whose day job is designing and programing MMOG games to put the solution to that question as a game's endpoint. Then imagine the task of dissecting the gameplay to discover how the solution came about. And yup, my head hurts.
ReplyDeleteDown at the atomic level, we STILL don't know jack... sigh
ReplyDeleteHmmm . . .
ReplyDelete"I quark, therefore I am"???
;-)
EBM, mass is an attractive force between two clouds of subatomic particles, so has nothing to do with the exact details of how those subatomic particles exist. For our purposes it's enough to know that the cloud that is The Earth attracts the cloud that is a rock, and avoid dropping the rock on your foot :). That equivalence of mass and force is why the famous e=mc**2 equation works, energy = force applied over time, and the speed of light is basically equivalent to time in that equation and mass is force so that's a direct connection to classical Newtonian mechanics.
ReplyDeleteNobody knows why mass exists -- what produces this attractive force? -- but past a certain point I shrug and say, "eh, I don't know why, but it exists" (as said rock dropped on toes proves!) and let the physicists ponder the "why" part of things.