/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5522197]

so according to de broglie, matter is just a wave?

i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that huge masses are actually vibrating at an enormous frequency

[Anonymous No.5522212]

Don't get the whole wave/particle duality thing mixed up.
Remember how the duality is introduced - photons behave as particles in some experiments, but behave as waves in others. This was mystical for a while, but quantum mechanics cleared it up - matter is particle (corpuscular) in nature, but under very small conditions it has wavelike properties associated with its wave function.
Remember that this wavelength is equal to h/p, and that for a macroscopic object that momentum is HUGE compared to h (10^-34). Any wavelength associated with a macroscopic object is going to be extremely small, so even a high frequency is almost meaningless. These wavelengths are of smaller order than the plank length, many orders of magnitude smaller than the radius of an atom. They're negligible by any measurement we could ever hope to make.

I hope that cleared up something.

[Anonymous No.5522921]

one article i read was stating there actually was no wave-particle duality, what we define as particle can be expressed as a very dense wave packet.

[Anonymous No.5524913]

>>5522921
Well that's what he said.
Wave/Particle duality is not the truth. it's an intermediate model introduced in classes before quantum mechanics has come up, as the QM formalism would be far too misleading and too much of a jump.