I'm not sure where holography comes into it though. — Kenosha Kid
Maybe a particle is merely a standing wave? — Enrique
The idea expressed in the OP, and expressed by yourself above, is a 4D generalisation of this. Each particle is a 4D standing wave that can be decomposed into parts moving forward in time (retarded wavefunction) and parts going backward in time (advanced wavefunction). They're not exactly analogous: in Bloch waves the operation is additive, in these they are multiplicative, but they are very similar. — Kenosha Kid
I might go back and edit my embarrassing snapping at MU — Kenosha Kid
Generally that's not a good idea. For instance, if I edited out everything I said that was embarrassing to me, there really wouldn't be much left. — Metaphysician Undercover
My next lecture will explicate quantum mechanics as the golden path to fourth dimensional world peace! Its the advanced wave of the future man! lol — Enrique
The erroneously-regarded "interference" pattern on the detector screen will then vary symmetrically in proportion to emitter position, also slit quantity, width and placement, predictable according to some kind of mathematical formula. Is this accurate? — Enrique
In the textbook example, i.e. in conventional quantum mechanics, each particle goes through every slit, which is why there's an interference pattern. To determine the weighting through each, you'd have to solve the wave equation and take the integral of the absolute square across the area of each slit. It will depend on the distance between the slits. — Kenosha Kid
That interpretation doesn't make sense to me. It fails to account for why a detector at one of the double slits only registers a particle half the time, nor the apparent randomness of localized absorber contact amongst even dozens of particles. — Enrique
It's easier to see it in the case of photons. The photon must travel through the undetected slit and not be destroyed or the detected one and be destroyed. There's no possibility in that case of interference. — Kenosha Kid
I'm not aware of any direct evidence that the particle travels through both slits simultaneously as a wave, then recombines into a particle. It might be the case for photons while not for much more massive particles — Enrique
what could possibly be the mechanism? — Enrique
The interference pattern is the evidence. — Kenosha Kid
What is the evidence that a single emitted electron is a wave spanning multiple slits, and does this evidence obtain for molecules also? — Enrique
I linked to an article on the paper. — Kenosha Kid
Probably involves mathematical parameters that are difficult to explain in a simple message board post. Not a physicist, but maybe I'll take a look at it. — Enrique
To get the dark and light bands of the interference pattern, you have to have multiple sources that can reinforce or cancel each other out. You can't get this kind of pattern with a wave and a single slit, and you can't get this pattern with point particles and multiple slits, as these would just produce multiple copies of the same thing you'd get with a single slit.
Putting a detector behind one of the slits basically gets you back to the pattern you'd get with point particles. The wave has to get past the detector or not, so go through one slit or the other. You can't get interference this way. You can only get interference if it goes through one slit *and* the other. — Kenosha Kid
I suggest, if you cannot take my word for it, that you read the article I sent you. It's written more for non-experts. — Kenosha Kid
The key result of the paper is that only one electron is diffracted at a time, meaning that the electron wave must be interfering with itself, meaning it must be going through both slits. — Kenosha Kid
How can a diffuse wave interfere with itself to form a single particle on the screen? — Enrique
How the electron got from a field to a point is called the measurement problem, and different solutions to the measurement problem have yielded different interpretations of quantum mechanics. The oldest successful interpretation was the Copenhagen interpretation which states that, upon measurement, the electron wavefunction collapses probabilistically to a single position, the probability given by the absolute square of the wavefunction (the Born rule).
This idea of the absolute square is important. It is how we get from the non-physical wavefunction to a real thing, even as abstract as probability. Why is the wavefunction non-physical? Because it has real and imaginary components: u = Re{u} + i*Im{u}, and nothing observed in nature has this feature. The absolute square of the wavefunction is real, and is obtained by multiplying the wavefunction by its complex conjugate u* = Re{u} - i*Im{u} (note the minus sign). Remembering that i*i = -1, you can see for yourself this is real. We'll come back to this.
There are other probabilistic interpretations, and also some deterministic ones, such as Bohmian mechanics, wherein the electron always has a single-valued position and momentum (hidden variables), and Many-worlds interpretation in which the wavefunction does not collapse but, thanks to the mathematical rules of entanglement, you can never have a term in the wavefunction in which the electron hit the screen at position y but you observed it at position y′≠y. — Kenosha Kid
In the double-slit experiment a wave packet or "wavicle" travels through one or the other slits, but either option is equally probable across many trials, though fundamentally deterministic (thus far immeasurably so) in relation to a single wavicle. An apparent "interference pattern" is not generated by diffraction through the slits but rather produced by peaks of charge distribution along the absorber's surface rendered symmetrical by the slits, which initiate the various trajectories of wave packets in coordination with the emitter charge and determine the statistical range of possibility for endpoints. — Enrique
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