Wave-particle duality question

[ollypenrice]

Wonderful thread. To come back to the cat in the box, the need for a fork when you open the box (one branch leading to cat death, the other to cat life) is locked into the tensed theory of time to which we all, in our daily lives, subscribe. (Past, moving present, future.) But if this theory of time is inadequate, as I'm sure it must be, then the fork may be something we impose on the wider reality by virture of our insisting on this time theory. Likewise the notion of simultaneous 'many worlds' may just be another way of stumbling towards a more complex, non-linear theory of time. What that theory might be I have, of course, no idea whatever, though Michael Lockwood has a go at outlining what one might look like in The Labyrinth Of Time.

Time for one of those beers.

Olly

[brianb]

(Past, moving present, future.)

Hmmm. Most of physics manages perfectly well without an "arrow of time", but the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't (the one that resolves to the impossibility of perpertual motion machines).

Reccomended light reading around this area:

"Cryptozoic" by Brian Aldiss

"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut (only partly fiction ...)

[themos]

Isn't this duality an obvious product of something that is solely a particle?

No. A particle is necessarily localised, at a point. It's not allowed to spontaneously split into two, go two different ways at the same time and then merge into one again.

But waves are not localised, they pretty much have to spread out and meet.