Are a group of bosons waves or particles?

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Grurgle-the-Grey
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Are a group of bosons waves or particles?

Post by Grurgle-the-Grey »

Bosons are defined as entities displaying Bose-Einstein statistics.
The core of B-E statistics is that N bosons in the ground state have precisely one way (ignoring degeneracy) of entering the first excited level.
This makes no sense until one considers shots of vodka in a bottle. It does make sense to say there are N shots in the bottle, but also there is only vodka in there so it having one way of getting to the first excited state makes sense (picture the longest wavelength quantized ripple :D :D ).
Unfortunately this strongly suggests that bosons aren't multiple entities, but rather a single entity with a quantum number N like a barrel of vodka with N shots in it.
Thus it would seem to be neither particle nor wave??

Giorgio
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Post by Giorgio »

I am afraid that a general discussion about bosons wave/particle duality will just bring us nowhere.
What we should think about is HOW to experimentally support one hypothesis in respect to the other.

Just my 0,02 $.

ravingdave
Posts: 650
Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2007 2:41 am

Re: Are a group of bosons waves or particles?

Post by ravingdave »

Grurgle-the-Grey wrote:Bosons are defined as entities displaying Bose-Einstein statistics.
The core of B-E statistics is that N bosons in the ground state have precisely one way (ignoring degeneracy) of entering the first excited level.
This makes no sense until one considers shots of vodka in a bottle. It does make sense to say there are N shots in the bottle, but also there is only vodka in there so it having one way of getting to the first excited state makes sense (picture the longest wavelength quantized ripple :D :D ).
Unfortunately this strongly suggests that bosons aren't multiple entities, but rather a single entity with a quantum number N like a barrel of vodka with N shots in it.
Thus it would seem to be neither particle nor wave??
A Guy that uses shots of Vodka to explain something is MY kind of PHYSICIST! :)

ravingdave
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Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2007 2:41 am

Post by ravingdave »

Giorgio wrote:I am afraid that a general discussion about bosons wave/particle duality will just bring us nowhere.
What we should think about is HOW to experimentally support one hypothesis in respect to the other.

Just my 0,02 $.

Can we still drink the shots?

ladajo
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Location: North East Coast

Post by ladajo »

That's the ravingdave I missed :!:

happyjack27
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Post by happyjack27 »

johanfprins wrote:
happyjack27 wrote: the fourier domain is the domain of harmonic oscillation. and harmonic oscillation pervades physics. (as it represents conservation of energy)
I do apologize since you are correct that I did not state that well. What I meant to say is that when using the Fourier domain, one should not forget that the basis functions are used as if there are not any boundary conditions stipulated in the beginning, and the boundary conditions can then be added afterwards. For example, on a violin string, a standing wave is given by the sum of two Fourier waves moving in opposite directions, even though such waves cannot exist on their own on the string, unless the string has an infinite length. In all the other domains, like for example Legendre polynomials, the basis waves are determined by the boundary conditions and thus gives the only solutions possible under those boundary conditions. A superposition of these basis waves does not give a solution that can manifest under the same boundary conditions.
think of a guitar (er.. you use violins i use guitars) string vibrating. the string vibrates simultaneously in all harmonic frequencies - in all solutions at once. likewise an electron confined in a parabolic well would have a number of orbital solutions. the moving waves can exist if you just untether one end of the string - no need for infinite strength. but that means the other moving wave cant exist. so its like a rocket where you remove pressure on the bottom leaving only pressure on the top. you dont remove the pressure on the bottom and you get both waves which as you said creates a standing wave.

in fact on a stringed instrument the vibration of the string is given by the superposition of an infinite numbers of waves of different frequencies. all are integer multiples of the base frequencies. everyone that isn't gets immediately damped or canceled out, depending on how you want to look at it. but the integer frequencies arent damped or canceled out by anything.

it's sort of the principle that if you eliminate everything that can't happen, and there is no mutual exclusionary-ness to what you have left, then everything that you have left must happen.

or as sherlock holmes once famously put it: when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the answer.
Thus it is my opinion that to superpose them and then relate the coefficients with probabilities is not physics since the basis wave that will manifest is determined by energy considerations which have nothing to do with probability amplitudes
well free-energy can be related to shannon entropy which in turn relates to probability. in a sense energy can be thought of the logarithm of the probability, such that adding energy is multiplying probability - "if this AND this happens...i.e. if work event A happens twice then its twice the energy". but that's a tangent. more on point, i dotn think i understand you here.
. I hope I have expressed myself more clearly. This is the reason why I posted that: There are orthogonal systems where each wave forming the system is a possible solution of the relevant wave equation. These are then used to model other waves which are not solutions of the same boundary conditions to model so called "time-evolution". This is not physics.
i'm not sure that's the case. it sound to me like you are saying that they're doing the math wrong. i've watched video lectures on the math and from what i can tell it checks out. (i mean i didn't actually stop the video and integrate by parts when they said "integrate by parts and you get..", but it looked as it should and i was comfortable with all the steps.)
i'm not sure i follow this either. you mean to say that if you get the boundary conditions wrong then your solution will be wrong? well of course, no argument there.
I am glad we agree. But do you agree that a linear combination of these solutions cannot be a physically possible solution for the same boundary conditions even though mathematically it is the case.
no. i disagree there. this is a basis. it's just a density function. if the sum of the density was different from the number of particles it was supposed to represent, then i'd say it's non-normalized, i.e. its saying a particle can be in two spots at once or something like that and thats not physically possible. but its normalized so thats fine. and you realize that if you transform it back into normal space, well a delta function in position space (i.e. a "particle") transforms into the fourier domain into an infinite series of superposed waves, so if you believe that its all waves not particles then you must be fine with that - with representing a particle as an infinite superposition of waves.
and when was physics anything besides?
Here we disagree: A physics model must be predictive and not just fit the curves; or else you have a model which Pauli called: "It is not even wrong!" The BCS theory gives such a non-predictive model: Just as Bernd Matthias consistently pointed out while he was alive.
i never said a physics model couldn't be predictive. that is the same as saying that it makes hypothesis yet to be experimentally verified. no problem there.

there i would argue - and i'm not sure this meets conventional thinking - that if you can simplify an existing model that's "physics" too. e.g. if you can explain why the different masses of particles are what they are with a very clean, elegant, and reasonable explanation (i.e. NOT nuemology), and perhaps maybe it doesn't make any predictions (well, besides exact measures for the masses, which would be testible), well then maybe there's something to be said there.
my god, if you think our present explanations are ridiculous, you should see the ones they came up with before!
That is why we should never accept in physics that any model is the final word and should always approach new inputs with an open mind to see whther we can make our models "less ridiculous".
i presume by "contrived" you mean it lacks generality. and you're suggesting time-slicing? not sure what you're suggesting, but if its mathematically valid you'll get no objection here.
Thanks we are getting somewhere on this topic. "Time slicing" means that in the case where the boundary conditions change with time, the only valid solution will be to solve the wave equation for each instant in time, since the boundary conditions change from instant to instant. Obviously, this is not required when the boundary conditions do not change.

In the case of an electron-wave, the wave does not change with time when the boundary conditions do not change with time: Thus you do not need a time-evolution generator. A free electron is a localized standing wave within an inertial reference frame since it has mass and must then have inertia: And when the observer is within the same reference frame, this wave will not evolve with time unless its boundary conditions are changed by an interaction with other entities.
if the observer is going the speed of light, maybe. or if your reference frame is infinitesimally small.. and even then, there still could be a phase angle that evolves with time. (EDIT: sorry missed that: that's exactly what you meant by "standing wave". my bad. i would have to argue that only in the classical approximation do we actually think we "know for certain" the inertial reference frame's position and velocity. i you want to go beyond that approximation; that limit-case, you'll have to drop that assumption. maybe you could drop other assumptions to do the same thing, but that one seems rather tenuous (esp. from an information theory perspective), so it's certainly a good candidate.)

Now comes the interesting part: if the observer is stationary within another inertial reference frame moving relative to the inertial reference frame of the electron, the boundary conditions, of the electron, do change according to the observer. This change is modeled by the Lorentz transformation, and it is then found that every point within the electron's wave intensity now has a different time coordinate, as it must have to be a moving wave. Only now does the wave has a de Broglie wavelength. A standing electron wave, like an electron orbital around a nucleus has nothing to do with a de Broglie wavelength since it has no momentum.
no net momentum, i presume you mean. it's a superposition of orbits whose momentums all cancel out.
perhaps this profound short-stop is precisely what prevents you from hearing truly me.
This is of course always possible and if one is not willing that it can be so, you should not be doing physics. But perhaps, in this case, it might be you that is so caught up in main stream dogma that it prevents you from truly hearing me?
more likely you're not being mathematically precise enough for me to grasp what you're suggesting.
but i don't think you'd get a different result, presuming you're careful enough. (dot all your mathematical i's and cross the t's, so to speak.)
I think that when you do get the correct physics you will not have to use dubious mathematical procedures like "renormalization" and being forced to assume that a circular integral over a conservative vector field can be no-zero, in order to claim a paranormal physical result like Aharanov and Bohm have done.
i'm sure a lot of people have thought that throughout the ages. one might go so far as to say that's the prevailing wisdom. but it is one thing to think, and quite another to do.
one, first finding the eigenvalues and then the eigenstates, and then the time-dependant solution usually turns out to be the time-dependant solution times a phase-angle (e^something), which is exactly what you'd expect it to be, seeing that energy is conserved and all... if you're talking about open systems; more complex time behavior such as a dissipative system, well that's still an open problem as far as i know and on that i wish you luck.
This is what I find exasperating with you. You keep on telling me physics which I know as if I have never heard of it. I find it insulting. The fact is that by following that routine, they use the phase angle as if it is a boundary condition.
i'm sorry, i don't mean to be offensive. i have no idea what you know and what you don't. they don't use phase angle as a boundary condition. you can have any intitial phase angle. it's sort of like an integration constnant "+C", "+phase angle" (well, _times_ phase angle, to be more precise) all possible phase angles are solutions to the time-independant equation. there's no boundary condition on it.
It is not! It is the boundery conditions that determine the phase angle of a wave, not the other way around.
err... perhaps our ideas of boundary condistions and phase angles are a little different, cause that statement doesn't make any sense to me. to constrain the phase angles of a wave you'd have to be talking relative to another wave of the same or possibly integer-multiple frequency, that or you're making it so its no longer a wave.
again i don't know what you mean by non-paranormal. for it to be visually intuitive, yes, certainly not all basi are alike. but i'm speaking as you gathered mathematically, they are all logicaly the same - any statement you make in one representation is true of the system in any representation. or false in all, if that statement is false. logically consistent, by definition.
I do not want to go into a long discussion here, that will be better done face to face in future. When it comes to deriving paranormal physics the most convincing example is the derivation by Aharanov and Bohm that an electron can respond to a magnetic field without its charge center moving through the field.
'cause its path is the sum of all possible random walks. the feyman path integral. it may seem crazy ibut if you think bbout it its the only thing possible. the electron doesn't have a map of the known univese so all it can really do is a random walk.
And this is derived in terms of a "phase-angle" instead taking cognizance of the actual boundary conditions which apply; and by also violating the mathematics on which vector calculus is based.
i assure you, no mathematics is violated.
Last edited by happyjack27 on Sat Jan 08, 2011 6:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.

ladajo
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Post by ladajo »

Ever heard of Rogue Waves?
in fact on a stringed instrument the vibration of the string is given by the superposition of an infinite numbers of waves of different frequencies. all are integer multiples of the base frequencies. everyone that isn't gets immediately damped or canceled out, depending on how you want to look at it. but the integer frequencies arent damped or canceled out by anything.
I conceptually think of a damped out oscillation as a high energy storage point in a sense. A small change elsewhere in the system can create a large peak where the was none. It may look like nothing is there, but a it can be the the entire rest of the harmonies are working to keep anything from being there, and that a proportion of energy can "pop up" if the system is nudged or drifts even slightly.

happyjack27
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Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 5:27 pm

Post by happyjack27 »

a delta function in position space (i.e. a "particle") transforms into the fourier domain into an infinite series of superposed waves, so if you believe that its all waves not particles then you must be fine with that - with representing a particle as an infinite superposition of waves.
in fact when you transform between any two basis (save trivial transformations such as scaling and translation) you end up with a superposition in at least one of the basis. so there's really nothing paranormal about superposition, its actually quite trivial. (and as you see with the vibrating string analogy its perfectly reasonable and realistic)

and this guitar string analogy is actually not so much an analogy as much as a semaphore. that is, if you look closely, you'll notice that the schrodinger equation IS a wave equatoin. so the statement about vibrating strings is in fact _exactly_ how it works.

Giorgio
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Post by Giorgio »

ravingdave wrote:
Giorgio wrote:I am afraid that a general discussion about bosons wave/particle duality will just bring us nowhere.
What we should think about is HOW to experimentally support one hypothesis in respect to the other.

Just my 0,02 $.

Can we still drink the shots?
I don't drink but I will be happy to offer a free shot to everyone :D

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