/sci/ - Science & Math

Thanks guys, you've pretty much knocked this one out. Science rules.

I think one of the coolest things I read recently was Paul Dirac's prediction of antiparticles. I wish I could do it justice, but I'm a complete novice in quantum theory. It goes something like this.

Dirac predicted that there should be energy levels for electrons far below those that are normally observed. He asked, then, why don't the electrons we observe fall to those energy levels? He conjectured that perhaps this was because these energy levels did in fact exist and were already filled. He went on to say that if you could liberate an electron from this state, it would create a positively-charged "hole" in the state it previously occupied which was like it in every way. Hence, the electron-positron pair. When an electron and positron meet and annihilate, that is really just the electron jumping to a state with much lower energy, and the photons liberated sum in energy to give the energy difference between the electron before and after annihilation.

This part I really can't explain, but the reason I thought this was cool was because, for some reason, after I read that I felt like it was much more natural to conclude that particles should behave as waves rather than as classical objects, that what was in fact counter-intuitive to try to consider them as classical objects. It made me think that it's not that these things we call particles have properties similar to macroscopic waves, but that macroscopic waves have properties similar to particles.