RadioBanter - View Single Post - Faraday shields and radiation and misinterpretations

Lostgallifreyan · December 3rd 09, 08:25 AM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna

K7ITM wrote in news:23a4e09e-cb46-49a9-a096-
:

In fact, my advice if you do get into that
situation (where quantization of energy is important), is to NOT think
of particles or waves, but realize that quanta of electromagnetic
radiation behave exactly as they behave, which is neither exactly like
waves nor exactly like particles. One of Richard Feynman's physics
lectures covered what I think is a lovely example of this: how you
can NOT explain the results of the experiment he sets up, using EITHER
wave OR particle behaviour. I highly recommend it, to arm yourself
against people who get into the particle-vs-wave battle. I believe
it's the sixth of what has been published as Feynman's "Six Easy
Pieces."

That's what I kept telling myself when I first read about it 20 years ago,
that light was neither wave, nor particle, but something else that can appear
as either, or both. It felt like a kind of fence-sitting tautology at the
time, but it really seemed the only way to have any hope of resolving
(sometimes foolish) paradoxes, so it's gratifying to know that Feynman says
it too. I don't know if he's written anything a layman can easily work
through, that doesn't come with lots of maths without which accompanying text
doesn't help much, but if he has I'll try to read it.

I have various thoughts of my own, too off-topic to go into most likely, but
I'll indulge in one of them. The duality/exclusion, etc is often expressed in
various ways, but the one I find most intersting is based not in massenergy
but information, that of isolation and continuity. People have made computers
of both types now, basically the Turing machine and the operational
amplifier. I suspect we have a third type, the brain, that isn't 'modelled'
on either type but uses the quanta as they actually are. Though whether
attempts to make actual quantum computers will be anything like what the
brain does, I have no idea. But it seems to imply that there might be a
'conservation of information' law as there are such laws for mass and energy
or mass-energy. Maybe information is more fundamental than either. If so,
some very strange science is going to emerge (and I suspect it won't be
quantum theory that gets us anywhere, as such, especially given the
Copenhagen Interpretaion and what that implies about 'knowing', but the tools
it enables us to build are another matter, I think they're going to show
plenty, once we have enough new info to interpret).

As continuity as well as isolation is a fundamental aspect of whatever is
'underneath', it means I have no reason to reject a wave model of
electrodynamics if it works, so I won't.