Not just light: Everything is a wave, including you

[Kornee]

Hey Korn, I get it. I just don’t let my scepticism abruptly cut things off. Why not push it and see how far it goes? Maybe I’ll learn something like finding more things to be sceptical about. lol. It’s a forum, people shoot the shit.

There's something profound in that bit Zinja. I just know it. Don't ask me to explain. Kind of a personal inward reflection/discovery thing. Which then blossoms outward - somehow.

Been around forums long time, ever since I paid $3500 for an HP PC with less computing power than a Fitbit. That was 35 yrs ago, starting out with Discovery Forum but there was another couple before that, can’t remember the names. Do you remember Time Travel Forum? That one had some characters I’d being seeing over and over again in different forums. Some Forums died thanks to trolling which was very popular even early on. Forums no where near as popular today. I’ve had many imitators (username) and one guy I pissed off saw fit to have my username entered in the Urban Dictionary. Zinjanthropos I deliberately misspelled to avoid the obvious if I had used the (us) ending. I was a Louis Leakey fan at the time.

Hope that clears up a few things and let’s move on.

Hope it was understood I was being lighthearted Zinja - no putdown intended.

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Like Kornee suggest.. if reality is too inconceivable complicated we have to simplify it 'a bit'.

Here's Feyman on the double slits..

..each individual electron actually traverses every possible trajectory simultaneously.  “It goes in a nice orderly way through the left slit.  It simultaneously goes in a nice orderly way though he right slit.  It heads toward the left slit, but suddenly changes course and heads through the right.  It meanders back and forth, finally passing through the left slit.  It goes on a long journey to the Andromeda galaxy before turning back and passing through the left slit on its way to the screen.  And on and on it goes.  The electron, according to Feynman, simultaneously ‘sniffs’ out every possible path connecting its starting location with its final destination”, and you add up the probabilities of all conceivable paths.[2]  The probability that the electron (or photon - any particle) arrives at any chosen point is therefore built up from the combined effect of every possible way of getting there,

More:
https://elwynsbigbangpage.weebly.com/fey...rview.html

Right. Feynman himself never afaik committed as to whether that picture was reality itself or just a calculational tool that worked.
No-one will ever be able to prove there is not a natural cutoff that excludes e.g. 'that path to Andromeda galaxy and back'.
Since then, it's been shown that while Feynman's approach was a great advance on previous state of the art, it has in turn been eclipsed with a newer conceptual framework that drastically further simplifies the effort required.
See my YouTube link and recommended start time here: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-13331-...l#pid55133

[confused2]

Some models are going to be good in the near field and maybe not so good in the far field and vice versa.
Consider the electrostatic field of an isolated electron or even many electrons - does the field extend to Andromeda (and beyond) or not?
Any idea what you might expect to find more of in a strong field and less of in a weak field?

Edit ... would have been better posed as high v low electrostatic potential but I think 'field' works well enough.

[confused2]

a thing I've never been able to sort out - the slits in the double slit experiment obviously 'diffract'. Is the diffraction a 'new' effect caused by the presence of the slits or is diffraction something that would already have been there but only revealed by removing some 'straight' paths? By removing some of the straight (most probable) paths you start to see what is really going on in a beam of light? IDK.

[Kornee]

Some models are going to be good in the near field and maybe not so good in the far field and vice versa.
Consider the electrostatic field of an isolated electron or even many electrons - does the field extend to Andromeda (and beyond) or not?
Any idea what you might expect to find more of in a strong field and less of in a weak field?

Edit ... would have been better posed as high v low electrostatic potential but I think 'field' works well enough.

The infinite 1/r^2 range of both electrostatic and static gravitational fields is put down to the zero rest mass of the respective spin 1, spin 2, bosonic force carriers.
That's the QFT 'virtual particle' picture. Classically, the experimentally observed inverse r^2 character guarantees infinite range.
Note for gravitation 1/r^2 is strictly true only as r -> infinity, but that's sufficient.

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a thing I've never been able to sort out - the slits in the double slit experiment obviously 'diffract'. Is the diffraction a 'new' effect caused by the presence of the slits or is diffraction something that would already have been there but only revealed by removing some 'straight' paths? By removing some of the straight (most probable) paths you start to see what is really going on in a beam of light? IDK.

With no slitted barrier to interact with, there is just a spray of quanta that individually have variously particle-like and/or wave like properties. One expects collectively a completely random pattern at the detection screen, that will represent just whatever collimation the source provided, nothing more.

A barrier with slits brings out the wave-like behavior that happens to approximately coincide with Huygen's principle of 'virtual sources' at each slit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2..._principle