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Clearly particles individually pass through slits, be it a single or a double slit experiment. The fact that wave interference is evident in their trajectory may be due to their interaction upon entering the slits. If water particles, or sand particles can together form waves, one can assume they will act in such way that their individual trajectories will reflect the wave they form, and once that wave, if it were to pass through a couple of slits will alter their individual trajectories to satisfy the interference pattern we see on the plate in the double split experiment.

In other words, the interference pattern in the double slit experiment (based perhaps on the my sorely naive point of view), are the result of particles, that together form a wave, and upon the entrance to their respective slits, their altered trajectories through the slits reflect their wave relationship.

I need to know if any of this is absurd.

S.G
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Gilles Lamoureux
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    "Clearly particles individually pass through slits..." Oh really? I think you are missing the whole point, my friend. – hft Nov 24 '23 at 03:46
  • Please review: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html – hft Nov 24 '23 at 03:48
  • I need to know if any of this is absurd. It’s not absurd; it’s just wrong. – Ghoster Nov 24 '23 at 04:37
  • It's good thinking. Let's use a photon, a wave disturbance in the EM field, (the standard model defines it as a particle but in that model you only get 2 options excitation of field or field ... so it's BS) .... the EM field is cable of carrying forces (virtual photons) and energy (real photons). If we say a photon has a real and virtual part in the EM field than you are correct! Also of interest is that all particles have EM fields ... as do all detectors .... so possibly when we see interference it is the effect of the virtual field! WE only need one "particle" for this theory. – PhysicsDave Nov 24 '23 at 14:44
  • How is the slit material not considered an observer? – HolgerFiedler Nov 25 '23 at 05:28

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One way to test your idea is to send electrons through the double-slit one at a time. You could send a single electron through once every month, or once every decade. However long we wait between sending each electron, the interference pattern still appears after many electrons pass through the double-slit. This tells us a single electron may interfere with itself, and exhibits wavelike properties as an individual! Evidently electrons are not particles nor waves. Rather they exhibit properties of both.

Aiden
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  • I guess the big question for me is: are single electron trajectories ever self-determined , that is, even if they are singly propelled, can they not incorporate in that single trajectory the influence of a wave of electrons prior to being propelled? – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 24 '23 at 19:32
  • @GillesLamoureux What do you mean by single electron trajectory? – Aiden Nov 25 '23 at 05:47
  • If you mean the path an electron follows through the double-slit to the screen, such a trajectory does not exist. That would imply the electron is a point particle, and there would be no interference pattern. Experimentally this is not what we see. – Aiden Nov 25 '23 at 06:03
  • Only if you assume the interference pattern, which comes at the accumulation of electrons on the back-stop, comes from individual electrons, which logically, it does not show that. The pattern shows the outcome of a large wave, larger than any wave that can come from a single, or even a few electrons. I don't see how single electrons make for the interference pattern, unless many of them act together to bring the pattern. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 26 '23 at 16:21
  • Shouldn't it at least be asked, how a wave is generated by a slew of electrons, if we can grant one to exist based on the pattern shown, and how do single electrons behave in light of their joint presence in such a wave? – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 26 '23 at 16:23
  • "Only if you assume the interference pattern, which comes at the accumulation of electrons on the back-stop, comes from individual electrons, which logically, it does not show that." I disagree. This is precisely what the double-slit experiment shows - see my answer above. – Aiden Nov 27 '23 at 03:25
  • "The pattern shows the outcome of a large wave, larger than any wave that can come from a single, or even a few electrons. I don't see how single electrons make for the interference pattern, unless many of them act together to bring the pattern." This issue is critical to the idea of measurement in quantum mechanics, see this answer. – Aiden Nov 27 '23 at 03:28
  • Thanks Aiden. But, it's still confusing to me. From the page you refer to: "This single electron at a time double slit experiment shows both effects. The individual electrons leave a point on the screen which seems random. The accumulation gives a probability distribution that has sinusoidal variations." – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 28 '23 at 04:41
  • It's an accumulation of electrons. An accumulation shows the interference distribution, not the behavior of any one single electron on its own. Granted, probability may be a way of measuring the trajectory of any one single electon, but that does not rule out, not logically that its behavior is the outcome of an accumulation of electrons that together obviously to me act jointly like a single wave. I suspect I'm still missing something here. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 28 '23 at 04:41
  • How can the electrons act jointly as a wave if only one electron goes through the experiment at a time? – Aiden Nov 29 '23 at 19:05
  • You could also do the double slit experiment where no electrons are near each other. For example, buy one million identical double-slit experiments. Set up each in its own room, separate from the others. Then fire one individual electron through each double-slit, and no more. This way no electrons are influencing one other in any way! On the screen behind each double-slit you'll have one dot from the single electron. Once all the experiments are done, combine the dots from the separate screens onto a single screen. You would find an interference pattern on this combined screen. – Aiden Nov 29 '23 at 19:34
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Yes they can and do. Sound waves are caused by the collective actions of atoms. Individual atoms vibrate back and forth and don't really go anywhere. But each is well approximated by having a definite position. The atoms bounce into each other all the time because of thermal energy. Some do bounce back and forth in one or the other of the slits. None bounce simultaneously in both.

Sound is a pressure wave. A moving wall can push forward into a bunch of atoms, pushing them forward. This crowds the atoms. The crowd pushes into more atoms, slowing themselves and pushing the new atoms forward. The wall moves back, leaving atoms less crowded. Pulses of crowding move through the collection of atoms.

A pulse is a big thing, involving many atoms spread out over large distances. The pulse can go through both slits and can interfere with itself.

Next consider what happens when you do the experiment at lower and lower gas pressure. You have fewer and fewer atoms present. The spacing between atoms increases. It takes a larger distance for the atoms pushed by a moving wall to crowd into enough atoms to stop themselves and start new atoms moving.

If you reduce the pressure so low that you have just a single atom at a time, you don't have a wave any longer. You would expect single atoms to get pushed forward and go through one or the other slit. You would expect individual atoms in the screen to get hit. You would have to add up lots of hits to see the pattern. You would expect to lose the interference pattern. You would expect to see hits show the shape of the slits.

You can try this with light. At high intensity you see an interference pattern directly. Your thought that this could be a collective effect of many photons is not ruled out.

If you turn down the intensity of light so far that you have a single photon in flight at a time, you see individual atoms on the screen hit. You have to wait for a lot of hits to see the pattern. If you do that, you see that the hits add up to an interference pattern.

So individual photons have both particle like and wave like properties. They are wave like in that a photon does go through both slits and interferes with itself on the other side. They are particle like in that a photon hits a single atom and misses all the others. It is often said that a photon is like both a classical particle and a classical wave. There is enough truth in this to be misleading. A photon really is not like anything classical.

mmesser314
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  • Thank you for this detailed explanation.

    As you say, "If you reduce the pressure so low that you have just a single atom at a time, you don't have a wave any longer. You would expect single atoms to get pushed forward and go through one or the other slit. " But that is an assumption based on classical physics is it not? How do we know that a single atom, at a time, that there is no wave present to influence its trajectory or behavior? Each electron in a gun emanates from a 'stream' of electrons. It's isolation is not by extraction, but generated by the influence of a field of electrons.

     – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 24 '23 at 19:41
  • Seems to me that as isolated as an electron, or a particle can be, the influence of its prior incorporation in a wave of electrons effectively enabling its projection, will sustain the wave trajectory of the electron through a streaming gun. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 24 '23 at 19:45
  • As you say, "They are wave like in that a photon does go through both slits and interferes with itself on the other side. " But this seems odd to me, because the interference pattern on the plate depicts a larger wave produced I assume by many single electrons working in tandem, which I assume is more likely the result of a wave larger than what can be produced by a single electron that might interfere with itself. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 24 '23 at 20:42
  • I treated atoms as point particles because you were asking about particles. Groups of particles can make waves. That is how sound works. But light works differently. If you treat photons as particles, you will get wrong answers. – mmesser314 Nov 25 '23 at 01:03
  • I think you missed my point. I'm not talking about 'particles' per say, or 'waves', but the case for many particles, or many waves that might make up a single larger wave. Whatever a particle is, photon let's say, whether it fails to act like a particle, or is not one, as an individual photon, by passing through a slit, or two slits, logically it cannot of its own accord display the interference pattern that comes by say of hundreds if not thousands of photons, or electrons. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 30 '23 at 23:16
  • What I need clarified is how if one photon makes for a single point on a back-stop, whether it is a particle or wave, how is it that many such photons make for an interference pattern on the back-stop? Logically the wave that makes for the pattern constitutes all the photons, not one or a few. How does calculating the trajectory probability or the state of a single electron account for this? – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 30 '23 at 23:19
  • Or photon? Sound waves and light waves may be different, but the effect is the same in the interference pattern. The only difference is that one photon makes its way on the back-stop at a time. Then again, if sound comes by way of thousands of particles, if it does or can, will it produce an interference pattern if one particle made its way to a back-stop like individual photons do? – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 30 '23 at 23:26
  • However you look at it, sound waves consist of particles that move air particles that hit the ear drum and produce a sound. A single particle won't produce a sound, nor does an electron produce a sufficient wave to be accounted as a wave in the sense of the back-stop in the slit experiment. – Gilles Lamoureux Nov 30 '23 at 23:28