Quantum mechanics rule life: fields are needed (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 26, 2022, 18:10 (509 days ago) @ David Turell

Particles have fields. There are other fields that exist. All interact:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-fields-quantum-particles/?utm_source=ma...

"One of the most revolutionary discoveries of the 20th century is that certain properties of the Universe are quantized and obey counterintuitive quantum rules. The fundamental constituents of matter are quantized into discrete, individual particles, which exhibit weird and "spooky" behaviors that surprise us constantly. But the Universe's quantum weirdness goes even deeper: down to the fields that permeate all of space, with or without particles. Here's why we need them, too.

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"When you reduce what’s real to its smallest components, you find that you can divide all forms of matter and energy into indivisible parts: quanta. However, these quanta no longer behave in a deterministic fashion, but only in a probabilistic one. Even with that addition, however, another problem still remains: the effects that these quanta cause on one another. Our classical notions of fields and forces fail to capture the real effects of the quantum mechanical Universe, demonstrating the need for them to be somehow quantized, too. Quantum mechanics isn’t sufficient to explain the Universe; for that, quantum field theory is needed. This is why.

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"The more we experimented, the more of this unusual behavior we uncovered, including:

".>.the fact that atoms could only absorb or emit light at certain frequencies, teaching us that energy levels were quantized, that a quantum fired through a double slit would exhibit wave-like, rather than particle-like, behavior, that there’s an inherent uncertainty relation between certain physical quantities, and measuring one more precisely increases the inherent uncertainty in the other, and that outcomes were not deterministically predictable, but that only probability distributions of outcomes could be predicted.

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"But what do you do when you have a quantum that’s generating a field, and that quantum itself is behaving as a decentralized, non-localized wave? This is a very different scenario than what we’ve considered in either classical physics or in quantum physics so far. You can’t simply treat the electric field generated by this wave-like, spread-out electron as coming from a single point, and obeying the classical laws of Maxwell’s equations. If you were to put another charged particle down, such as a second electron, it would have to respond to whatever weird sort of quantum-behavior this quantum wave was causing.

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"...the enormous advance of quantum field theory, which didn’t just promote certain physical properties to being quantum operators, but promoted the fields themselves to being quantum operators. (This is also where the idea of second quantization comes from: because not just the matter and energy are quantized, but the fields as well.) All of a sudden, treating the fields as quantum mechanical operators enabled an enormous number of phenomena that had already been observed to finally be explained, including:

"...particle-antiparticle creation and annihilation, radioactive decays, quantum tunneling resulting in the creation of electron-positron pairs, and quantum corrections to the electron’s magnetic moment.

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"One of the key things that comes along with quantum field theory that simply wouldn’t exist in normal quantum mechanics is the potential to have field-field interactions, not just particle-particle or particle-field interactions. Most of us can accept that particles will interact with other particles, because we’re used to two things colliding with one another: a ball smashing against a wall is a particle-particle interaction. Most of us can also accept that particles and fields interact, like when you move a magnet close to a metallic object, the field attracts the metal.

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"The Universe, at a fundamental level, isn’t just made of quantized packets of matter and energy, but the fields that permeate the Universe are inherently quantum as well. It’s why practically every physicist fully expects that, at some level, gravitation must be quantized as well. General Relativity, our current theory of gravity, functions in the same way that an old-style classical field does: it curves the backdrop of space, and then quantum interactions occur in that curved space. Without a quantized gravitational field, however, we can be certain we’re overlooking quantum gravitational effects that ought to exist, even if we aren’t certain of what all of them are.

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"In the end, we’ve learned that quantum mechanics is fundamentally flawed on its own. That’s not because of anything weird or spooky that it brought along with it, but because it wasn’t quite weird enough to account for the physical phenomena that actually occur in reality. Particles do indeed have inherently quantum properties, but so do fields: all of them relativistically invariant. Even without a current quantum theory of gravity, it’s all but certain that every aspect of the Universe, particles and fields alike, are themselves quantum in nature. What that means for reality, exactly, is something we’re still trying to puzzle out."

Comment: this is the basis of reality. dhw will complain God should have made it simpler. But since it is like it is, it must be required as God views its need in His design.