On Friday, September 5, 2025 at 12:59:54 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 9:44 AM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *>> A "free particle" is a particle that is not subject to ANY external force or have any potential energy, so its total energy is kinetic. That makes things simpler and as a result the quantum wave function is just a plane wave. But in the real world things are more complicated because "free particles" do not exist. * *> But we can imagine a free particle in empty space* *If you're forcing a particle to go through two slips in a wall before it reaches a detector screen then it is not a free particle. * *Right, and that's why the double slit experiment cannot exactly reproduce the wf results for particles, inclusive of photons. AG* *>and we do that often. * *College professors often do that because it makes a problem much simpler, so simple he can give it as a homework problem and his students might actually have a fighting chance of actually being able to solve it. But nobody does it because we often (or ever) see a "free particle" in nature. * *Einstein and other notables also do that, habitually. And that's the reason S's equation is used in teaching QM, because it is easily solved. I've never seen a solution to Dirac's equation. AG * *> So, IMO, there's no way to get a particle's wf from a double slit experiment,* *Perhaps you should consider changing your opinion. In his book "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", Richard Feynman said "the two slit experiment contains all the mysteries in Quantum Mechanics, a phenomenon impossible to explain in classical terms". * *> Has the solution wf for the electron been solved? If so, by whom? Dirac?* *As I've mentioned before, Dirac found a way for Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity to live together in harmony, and he did it 97 years ago. To this day nobody has been able to do the same thing for General Relativity, it's the holy grail of physics. * *But did Dirac actually SOLVE his equation? What does the solution look like? This raises another important issue IMO. He needed a special equation for the electron, implying, unlike S's equation, that all particle wf's can be determined as solutions to a single, the same differential equation. AG * * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* nws -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/15b593b5-5623-4155-a8b5-945639c2f85en%40googlegroups.com.
