Related papers: Are All Particles Real?
Photons deliver their energy and momentum to a point on a material target. It is commonplace to attribute this to particle impact. But since the inflight photon also has a wave nature, we are stuck with the paradox of wave and particle…
Up until now, a consistent causal theory of point charged particles (for example electrons) interacting with electromagnetic field is not known. The well-known problem is that the standard Lorentz force alone (in the case of point…
A reasonable explanation of the confounding wave-particle duality of matter is presented in terms of the reality of the wave nature of a particle. In this view a quantum particle is an objectively real wave packet consisting of irregular…
All known elementary vector particles, the photon, Z, W and the gluons, are described by the gauge theory. They belong to the real representation (1/2,1/2) of the Lorentz group. On the other hand inequivalent representations (1,0) and (0,1)…
Several particles are not observed directly, but only through their decay products. We consider the possibility that they might be fakeons, i.e. fake particles, which mediate interactions but are not asymptotic states. A crucial role to…
Energy is no doubt an intuitive concept. Following a previous analysis on the nature of elementary particles and associated elementary quantum fields, the peculiar status and role of energy is scrutinised further at elementary and larger…
A brief account of the world view of classical physics is given first. We then recapitulate as to why the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum mechanics had to renounce most of the attractive features of the clasical world view such as…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
The symmetrization postulates of quantum mechanics (symmetry for bosons, antisymmetry for fermions) are usually taken to entail that \emph{quantum particles} of the same kind (e.g., electrons) are all in exactly the same state and therefore…
If a wave function does not describe microscopic reality then what does? Reformulating quantum mechanics in path-integral terms leads to a notion of "precluded event" and thence to the proposal that quantal reality differs from classical…
A quantum fractal is a wavefunction with a real and an imaginary part continuous everywhere, but differentiable nowhere. This lack of differentiability has been used as an argument to deny the general validity of Bohmian mechanics (and…
Bohmian mechanics, also known as pilot-wave theory or de Broglie-Bohm theory, is a formulation of quantum mechanics whose fundamental axioms are not about what observers will see if they perform an experiment but about what happens in…
Mass is an important concept in classical mechanics, which regards a particle as a corpuscular object. But according to wave-particle duality, we know a free particle can behave like a wave. Is there a wave property that corresponds to the…
Wave-particle duality is one of the fundamental properties of matter and at the same time, one of the mysteries of modern physics. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new interpretation of the wave-particle duality, and propose a new…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
Consider a finite system of competing Brownian particles on the real line. Each particle moves as a Brownian motion, with drift and diffusion coefficients depending only on its current rank relative to the other particles. We find a…
Bohmian mechnaics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr\"odingers's equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at…
Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century:…
If, in a system of identical particles, the one particle state is defined by the partial trace to one of the component spaces of the total Hilbert space, then all one particle states are identical. The particles are indistinguishable. This…
At the primary level of reality as described by quantum field theory, a fundamental particle like an electron represents a stable, discrete, propagating excited state of its underlying quantum field. QFT also tells us that the lowest vacuum…