“Well… You see… When its a particle it spins. When its a wave its still doing that. How does a waveform spin you ask? Listen. Shut the fuck up. The math is really weird and some of this stuff just happens and you can’t visualize it in your head. We didn’t believe it at first either but after 50 years of experiments we have to just accept that reality is consistent with the math even if we don’t fully conceptualize what that means even”
We are all just folds in this wonderfully weird thing we call spacetime!
The prions of spacetime.
Out here folding along.
Nice reference to PBS Space Time. The YouTube channel where I just get bullied with science, and for some weird twisted reason I like it.
pbs space time is awesome, and this description is even more so.
Bullied with science sounds like a fun band name
Hah! Time. Like that’s a real thing.
- When it’s* a particle
- When it’s* a wave
- it’s* still doing that
Phone stuff. Sorry about that
That sounds nasty.
shrug I mostly browse Lemmy on my phone. I don’t give a shit enough to correct autocorrect mistakes. My message was clear even with piddly little autocorrect mistakes
Totally fine by me. I was just making a bad pun. (I’m not the one who corrected you.)
rude bot
Tits
You wrote a comment so good that I screenshotted it.
Awww thanks
Of course waves can spin, it just does so in some conceptual “dimension”.
Also please don’t look at it
I mean, you can but it won’t be there.
Actually, it can be there, but then you won’t know how fast it’s moving.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” -George Box
My advanced E&M professor said “Imagine a sphere of radius zero. Trust me, it works.”
“…Imagine a sphere of radius zero.”
and a spherical cow. imagining lots of spherical cows helps quite a bit.
Radiating milk equally in all directions, of course.
Which constantly stays as a stream but looses density with r^2 (while still being a liquid!)
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Google “Electron Orbitals”. All the spaces there are all the
possiblehighest likely locations for the electrons. Good Introduction to some Quantum Mechanics 👍No! I will not relive the horrors of that chemistry class again… you can’t make me. I am happily an aerospace engineer now where I don’t need this chemistry nonsense, or quantum mechanics.
Ah let’s see, of the top of my head…
1s² 2s² 2d⁶ 3s² 2p¹⁰ …Edited (iirc now, the d block is in the middle with the transition metals, p block with metallics, Halogens, Noble Gases…):
1s² 2s² 2p⁶ 3s² 2d¹⁰ …
LMAO
This I was fine with. But that fake make believe redox math? Like are all chemist bad at actual math, so they just came up with their own fake version?
You’re a bad person…
All the spaces there are all the possible locations for the electrons.
Close, but not quite - the spaces are the most likely locations for the electrons at any moment in time. There is always a small chance they’ve fucked off over the street for a nanosecond when you take your measurement.
Alrighty then! Thanks for sharing!
Except they only look like that if there is an external reference system imposing some structure on the atom! Otherwise all orbitals are basically spherical because they can all just be in a superposition of all possible orbitals and we couldn’t tell a difference…
And then suddenly you have two atoms meeting and need to explain why 1+1=0 for their molecular orbits -.-
I don’t think so. Orbitals give you the spaces of highest probability! Electrons could be outside as well. And since it is based on probability it is definitely a useful model.
Electronic orbitals are regions within the atom in which electrons have the highest probability of being found.
I’ll have a look at this later, I remember it being any possible existence of an election, not just highest probabilities, from when I was taught this several weeks ago.
Ah yes. And if two fields are too close,
teleportationtunneling can happen.In the end, reality is just one big probability engine.
Then you get to “orbital hybridization” and everything quickly goes downhill.
I swear quantum physics is magic and made up!
Magnets, how do they work?
I think that is electrostatics + relativity.
Nope.
+1/2 h and -1/2 h
Fucking hate the people that insist on using only half of the number as if it was a real value. At least say you are working with natural unities or something.
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 5!"
Except in this context the question is “how many blocks away is your house?” Where “5” is a completely valid response
It’s h-bar, not h. And it really does make sense if you look deeper I to the math.
Using “+1/2” and “-1/2” as vector labels is fine. Using it on the context of “the spin can have those 2 values here” for laypeople without further explanation is just making the subject less accessible.
Also, yeah, I was too lazy to search for the unicode ħ.
This might be a meme making fun of the inaccessibility of modern physics for laypeople.
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 120"
FTFY
Or how about - “Walk around the block TWICE and it’ll be right there, you can’t miss it.”
You sound like my professor
If we theorize that the universe is like a computer program, then maybe the Universe has several layers of abstraction and we only can access our current layer, therefore forever having an incomplete model. If something external to our layer is affecting it, it would probably be impossible to know.
Quantum mechanics (and spin) isn’t really mysterious or inaccessible, it’s just not intuitive.
Ahh… hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can’t observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.
And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that’s just the best explanation we have for what we observe.
Also as Heisenberg found, at a certain point things get blurry not because our instruments don’t have the technical capabilities, but because what we are looking at is fundamentally blurry.
How about dark matter and dark energy.
The idea behind dark matter is pretty easy to understand and not that mysterious. Something doesn’t interact with the EM force so it’s just invisible and passes right through things. Since there’s plenty of examples of field specific quanta, it’s not really an out there idea.
Angular momentum of particles requires math and theories that require too much effort for me to understand them.
So in short, it all make sense in math, but when you try to convert it into actual words it doesn’t make sense or it’s so difficult to understand that unless you know the math you can’t understand.
Exactly!
Another one: photons are particles and waves, but really literally everything is just a wave function.
Makes absolutely no sense in words, but the math checks out.
We can’t see wave functions. It is a tool used to predict observations but itself cannot be observed, and cannot be an observable object as it exists in an abstract Hilbert space and not even in spacetime. It is only “space” in the sense of a state space, kind of like how if I have a radio with 4 knobs, I can describe the settings with a single point in a 4 dimensional space. That doesn’t mean the radio actually is a 4 dimensional object existing in this state space, it only means that we can represent that way for convenience, and the dimensions here moreso represent degrees of freedom.
If you believe everything is a wave function then you believe the whole universe is made out of things that cannot be observed. So how does that explain what we observe? Just leads to confusion. Confusion not caused by the mathematics but self-imposed. Nothing about the mathematics says you literally have to think everything is made out of waves. In fact, Heisenberg’s original formulation of quantum mechanics made all the same predictions yet this was before the Schrodinger equation was even invented.
People take the wave formulation way too literally and ultimately it just produces much of this confusion. They are misleadingly taught that you can think of things turning into waves by starting with the double-slit experiment, except it is horribly misleading because they think the interference pattern they’re seeing is the wave function. Yet, (1) the wave function is associated with individual particles, not the interference pattern which is formed by thousands, millions of particles. There is nothing wave-like visible with just a single particle experiment. (2) Even the interference pattern formed by millions of particles does not contain the information of the wave function, only a projection of it, sort of like its “shadow” as the imaginary terms are lost when you apply the Born rule to it and square it. (3) They also like to depict a literal wave moving through two slits, but again there are imaginary components which don’t map to anything physically real, and so the depiction is a lie as information has to be removed in order to actually display a wave on the screen.
The moment you look at literally anything that isn’t the double-slit experiment, the intuitive notion of imagining waves moving through space breaks down. Consider a quantum computer where the qubits are electrons with up or down spin representing 0 or 1. You can also represent the state of the quantum computer with a wave function, yet what does it even mean to imagine the computer’s internal state is a wave when there is nothing moving at all and the state of the quantum computer doesn’t even have position as one of its values? You can’t point to that wave even existing anywhere, you get lost in confusion if you try.
This cloud is described by a mathematical object called wave function. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has written an equation describing its evolution in time. Quantum mechanics is often mistakenly identified with this equation. Schrödinger had hopes that the ‘wave’ could be used to explain the oddities of quantum theory: from those of the sea to electromagnetic ones, waves are something we understand well. Even today, some physicists try to understand quantum mechanics by thinking that reality is the Schrödinger wave. But Heisenberg and Dirac understood at once that this would not do.
To view Schrödinger’s wave as something real is to give it too much weight – it doesn’t help us to understand the theory; on the contrary, it leads to greater confusion. Except for special cases, the Schrödinger wave is not in physical space, and this divests it of all its intuitive character. But the main reason why Schrödinger’s wave is a bad image of reality is the fact that, when a particle collides with something else, it is always at a point: it is never spread out in space like a wave. If we conceive an electron as a wave, we get in trouble explaining how this wave instantly concentrates to a point at each collision. Schrödinger’s wave is not a useful representation of reality: it is an aid to calculation which permits us to predict with some degree of precision where the electron will reappear. The reality of the electron is not a wave: it is how it manifests itself in interactions
— Carlo Rovelli, “Reality is Not What it Seems”
It is more intuitive to not think of wave functions as entities at all. But people have this very specific mathematical notation so burned into their heads from the repeated uses of the double-slit experiment that it is very difficult to get it out of their heads. Not only did Heisenberg instead use matrix transformation rather than the Schrodinger equation to represent QM, but it is also possible to represent quantum mechanics in even a third mathematical formulation known as the ensemble in phase space formulation.
The point here is that the Schrodinger equation is just one mathematical formalism in which there are multiple mathematically equivalent ways to formulate quantum mechanics, and so treating these wave functions wave really existing waves moving through a Hilbert space which you try to imagine as something like our own spacetime seems to be putting too much weight on a very specific formalism and ultimately is the source of a lot of the confusion. Describing the whole universe as thus a giant wave in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrodinger equation is thus rather dubious, especially since these are entirely metaphysical constructs without any observable properties.
It’s not that it doesn’t make sense in words, it’s more that it isn’t something we can intuitively understand. Basic physics is intuitive. Advanced physics is much less intuitive but you can sort-of get it if you use analogies to things that are understandable. Truly advanced physics is so far removed from the world we experience that you just have to trust the math.
IMO, everything being a wave is not quite pure math territory. Things like constructive and destructive interference are ideas you can understand using water waves or sound, so when concepts are explained in those terms you can sort-of get it. But, things like electron spin or quark flavours are things you just have to accept.
Precisely! Language is a tool we use to understand the world around us and english simply lacks the vocabulary to describe many aspects of physics that the language of mathematics has
The name was too cool. If they called it something super long like Non-electromagnetic interacting granular happening (NEIGH) we would all say it’s too confusing and I don’t understand, as opposed to “I get it and it must be wrong for reasons so simple a layman has thougnt of them.”
Actually that does have a confusing name: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. WIMPs. Yes, really.
It’s a common misconception that Dark Matter = WIMPs because it’s the leading theory right now. Dark Matter really just means “whatever happens to be the cause of certain cosmological measurement discrepancies” even if that cause isn’t in any way “matter” at all. It’s a very misleading name.
Additional variables introduced to make current theoretical models fit the observed data.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel pbs spacetime if you want a good explanation. It goes slightly more in depth than other channels which is what I like but its not math heavy. They have series to slowly build up knowledge as playlists too.
This is basically “hidden variables hypothesis”.
You can absolutely know if something external is affecting it. Dark matter and energy might be such a thing. What you might not be able to tell is how those mechanics arise, you’ll only know the aggregate result on your layer.
Stupid Java-ass AbstractUniverseControllerFactoryBuilderSingleton reality we live in.
Now everything is clear. Thanks!
they don’t actually spin but they’re little bar magnets as if they do. if you charge a sphere and spin it, you’ll generate exactly the same kind of bar magnet, but they don’t actually spin. and just like bar magnets, like repels like. but they’re neither bar magnets nor spinning. why don’t they spin? because they’re point masses, which don’t have any extent. but actually, you can’t really observe them as point masses because they’re waves.
^^ this was the exact point at which I said quantum mechanics wasn’t for me and I’m done with physics, after completing most of a degree. it sort of all makes sense but at the same time it completely doesn’t. it all makes sense as pure math but the second you try to make sense of the math, sense goes out the window.
It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.
The universe is under no obligation to be understandable to the bits of it that can think. In many ways it’s a wonder we’ve got as far as we have.
It all makes sense and the more you dig deeper the more it makes sense, but then you zoom out a little and then realize it actually doesn’t make any sense in any sort of palatable way.
yeah, I was lucky to have already taken Classical Mechanics prior to Quantum Mechanics (it wasn’t a prereq so most of my classmates jumped straight into QM), so the math was all perfectly sensible. but the second any prof started trying to use English to interpret the math, I started having these moments where I’d have to sit back and think about the words coming out of their mouths, and sitting with how it was all actually gibberish. Feynman’s “shut up and calculate” started to feel incredibly valid really fast, whereas prior to QM, I was under the impression that physics was natural philosophy. it’s not and QM was the breaking point, at least for me, personally.
The closest representation is that cliche television shot where someone’s thinking really hard and equations fly around their head.
We haven’t even started with quantum fields yet.
A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested