Coherence part 3: This is not a wave.
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- Опубліковано 11 чер 2024
- Trying to find analogies between the wave energy confined in a string and matter interacting with light.
0:00 Intro
6:38 Experiments with waves in a string
15:40 Analogies with electron behaving as waves
22:50 Changing the standing wave mode in a string using phase manipulation
26:49 A hypothetical model for demonstrating quantized wave behavior in a string
32:26 Elastic-Inertial Poetry
For this video I used a a few short clips from the following videos and websites:
Spinning ball (from Mike Shake):
• How Difficult is it to...
Charged ball (from Plasma Channel)
• Insane 500,000v from r...
Refracted wave: (by Ulflund)
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
If you like the painting then visit the Rene Magritte website:
www.renemagritte.org/the-trea...
Wave animation at 32:25 by Nils Berglund: / @nilsberglund
Did I forget anybody? let me know an I will set it straight. - Наука та технологія
This man’s journey from polishing mirrors on UA-cam to challenging the public’s basic understanding of quantum mechanics is remarkable.
We should give that man a professorship. Every University needs talented explainers like him.
Yeap. All I know is there’s a plug in for my TV. and an outlet sends all kinds of waves to it, add waves to it and probably when it on does a lot of other trampoline tricks. Sorta glad someone figured it out.
Agreed.
@@jakobwagner7097 How many universities do you have? Because there is no place for another professor in any of mine.
Break this down to me, because I am not the brightest lightbulb.
He is challenging the basic understanding of photons here and attempting to create a quantized system behaviour using a mechanical system which is known not to be quantized, right?
Photonics engineering student here. By coincidence, about an hour before seeing your video I was looking for an intuitive explanation of a similar problem being it why the intensity of light is a square of its complex amplitude - I've been dealing with the maths for almost a year by now but that connection had never simply clicked in my mind. I've been really bothered by that the whole today, and then miraculously came across this presentation, and found it stunning. Dear Sir, you've got an outstanding intuition for linking how the reality itself works with the mathematical theory. Then demonstrating that with descriptive language and experiments. Deep respect. Thanks!
re: "why the intensity of light is a square of its complex amplitude"
Possible analogy? voltage squared / resistance = power ... voltage is the amplitude, and power is Joules per second ... also current squared * resistance = power.
In fact, we owe the link you mention between reality and maths to others, like Paul Dirac, about a century ago. But you are very right that we enjoy a didactic video here.
Oh, where do you go to school?
I saw one youtube video once that simply showed a drawing of a transverse wave, and then animated that this wave was rotated in space, with the rotational axis being the direction of propagation, thus circumscribing a volume. I don't know how much explanatory power this really has, but I'm sure it can help in a teaching situation.
when he sez "space" replace it with Aether, also the driver on the string is the Energy in the Aether. we cannot get away from it, you can pull a vacuum to remove air, but we have no way to get away from Aether's energy's that power matter itself.
don't even have words to describe my appreciation. videos from this channel are true gems.
This!!^^^
True.
0:05 it is not a pipe or a painting, it is an image on a Chinese telephone sub-brand.
This video hit a lot of good stuff. 1) The Coulomb model of the hydrogen atom has exact energy eigenstates, which are called "stationary" states. They do nothing but oscillate, and what is oscillating is the "phase" of the wave function. The phase is unobservable. In an energy eigenstate, the electron has a specific energy, and it cannot change, it cannot transition: it is stuck for eternity.
Well that's not physical, so you add an interaction: the electromagnetic field. Now you can't solve the problem analytically, but you treat the prior states as approximate states. Because they now can decay, their energies are no longer well defined, but have width given by hbar / lifetime.
In your string model, if there is no decay, you can't transition from one mode to another. The problem is your decay rate is not coupled to the transition because you're supplying energy from the outside, so that just breaks the analogy.
2) Regarding superposition: when an electron in an atom is in superposition of 2 eigenstates, the two phases oscillate at a beat frequency, and it's very much like your two-mode string oscillation. See "Rabi Oscillation". Note that *many* quantum mechanics homework/exam problems are based on this principle, so any physics BA should know it.
3) What is oscillating in the electron wave function? It's the global phase, which is unmeasurable. The frequency is f = E/h, and represents the rate at which the wave function returns to the same global state. In momentum, the wavelength represents the distance you need to travel for the wave function to return to its same state....so these are symmetries: time or space translation that do not change the system. This is consequence of the celebrated Noether's theorem: for any symmetry of a system, there is a conserved quantity. If the system is invariant under time translation: energy is conserved. If it invariant under a spatial transition, momentum is conserved, in that direction.
If the system is invariant under rotations, angular momentum is conserved. This one is more complicated, because rotations don't commute, and as a result: you can't know all the components of angular momentum at once. Moreover, the wave functions that solve it are spherical harmonics, which give rise to the atomic orbitals shown at 19:58 . They have many fascinating properties and are described by "Racah Algebra"....the coupling of angular momenta generalizes "beat frequency" between two energy modes is a most non-trivial way.
I've done calculations on the interlevel transitions of confined elections in semiconductor quantum wells using Fermi's golden rule. An incoming electromagnetic wave perturbs the confining potential of the well at the frequency of the wave. This induces mode coupling between states leading to an electronic transition. The perturbation is highly analogous to the longitudinal potential energy wave that you observe on the second loud speaker. What a beautiful demonstration.😊
One of my favorite days was when the professor calculated Snell’s law by assuming continuity of Electric fields across the surface boundary. It is a reason to believe other basic laws of EM fields can be derived from fundamental principles. This channel presents a perspective that differentiates convenient assumptions (electron is a ball with a minus sign on it) versus fundamental principles. It should be standard course material in Universities … especially for those who want to push forward fundamental understanding versus simply applying cookbook recipe solutions.
This is not a comment.
😂
Well played 😂
This is not reply
Funny, but demonstrably wrong.
@@theothertonydutch perhaps If he had written “This is not MY comment” then that would be demonstrably true, from our perspective anyways 🤷♂️ 😂
I can't express how impressed I am by the way you explain this stuff. The best I've seen. Love it!!
Here are some suggestions:
- Use a circularly polarized wave. This way, the string does not have to expand and contract all the time, lessening friction. It's also closer to what the electron does, what with the phase rotating in place.
- I think your explanation of how an electron exchanges energy with the EM field is known as the "oscillating dipole approximation". There are higher-multipole versions of it, too, but what you depicted (the transition between to s-orbitals) would not work because there is no electromagnetic monopole radiation.
- In the oscillating dipole approximation of an electron absorbing a photon and going to a higher frequency state, it is the oscillating charge distribution of the electron that allows the EM field to latch onto it and yank it around. To emulate this mechanically, you would need to have an interaction with the string that is the stronger the greater the amplitude and/or speed of the string is. Maybe a periodically modulated airstream blowing against the string, possibly stronger on the uppermost part of the wave?
if the circularly polarized wave was introduced as rotational acceleration from a baseline, (idk how feasible it would be but if appropriately calibrated magnetic bearings for example would let you spin and reflect the whole captured wave state below whatever relevant energy conservation thresholds are needed to make useful observations) then would centrifugal force provide the interaction you are describing?
Granted in this scenario you'd probably be better off spinning it up and observing the decay than driving it directly but it doesn't seem like that should matter too much if we're just looking for an intuitive analogy with waves.
This really makes some of these concepts a lot clearer, thanks!
Just fascinating. Honestly, I followed and retained about 40% of this. After watching again and a bit of googling, I can probably understand a bit more than half. That's about as far as my intellect will allow. You gave me some interesting things to think about and your poem at the end is perfect! Thank you so much for the presentation. This took ALOT of time condensed to a very potent and informative 30 minutes just to help educate people just like me. That is very generous and I thank you for it!
OMG, that was the best 32 minutes I've ever seen on UA-cam. Incredible brilliant.
My thoughts:
-You could use a guitar string as they seem have tones not decaying too fast
-A tuning fork or quartz oscillator
-Tibetian songing bowls also hold the sound for quite a long time in my experience
-In general my intuition would vote for an elastic material with high density (more potential energy) and high stiffness (high speed of sound)
-I could even imagine a setup with water or some other nearly incompressible fluid (water waves seem quite stable on lakes and the sea)
Hope I can give some inspiration. Love your videos. It's always a pleasure when a new one gets out. Really inspiring to see questioning and rigorously building the basics, like you do :) Thank you!
Yes! Awesome video Jeroen! the analogy you made between the damped wheels of your system and the permittivity of free space is chef's kiss beautiful! However your advice for the discrete energy transition's and the accelerating electron's change in frequency being a "beat" frequency is the most perfect visualisation of a wave packet "photon" that I've ever seen demonstrated.
I think this is a good set of analogies, I will point out however that you are dealing with quantised momenta (frequencies), while for the photon specifically in quantum field theory one deals with quantised amplitudes. The photons that leave after atomic de-excitation increase the number of photons of a single mode from a continuum of modes (if in free space) by one, that photon's time-evolution through space is given by a wave-like wavefunction but the wavefunction describes a pointlike object.
Most of the wavelike properties you show come from a superposition of many photons within many modes distributed with a poisson-like distrubution which does have true wavelike behaviour within the electromagnetic field, but these do not arise from interactions with single atoms. The problem with most of these analogies while vaguely true is they do not support a quantum superposition and subsequent measurement in the same way as reality.
Of couse as you describe, ce n'est pas un photon. I could be wrong, and of course all theories attempt to describe something we cannot see. This is just what I have come to learn after studying quantum optics and quantum field theory.
"The problem with most of these analogies while vaguely true is they do not support a quantum superposition and subsequent measurement in the same way as reality"
That's a problem of modeling the measurement, not the photon, and since we lack a coherent measurement theory that's really a moot point. The whole reason the photon exists in our theory is the photoelectric effect, and this channel has a video giving an intuitive understanding of what is going on there as well (spoiler: it's matter-field interactions that are quantized, not the field itself).
"Reality" does not support anything, whether your model predicts results depends on the mathematics you employ, but there is no single way to interpret mathematics with a picture. For example, Lagrangian interactions are calculated using virtual particles, but wether you interpret these as actual particles with negative momentum (whatever that means) is a matter of interpretation. Current QFT is like a magic box, you put numbers in and it spits numbers out. But there's no clear understanding of the underlying reality the math describes.
Look up his video on optical Fourier transform. You'll see wavelike objects appear point like. What if measurement works like a lens? No wavefunction collapse or similar hocus pocus, just optics.
@@FunkyDexter what do you mean by "like a lens" ?
@@wbeaty I've read that. I also read Oliver Consa's "Something is rotten in the state of QED". The QFT description relies entirely on fields (quantum FIELD theory, not quantum PARTICLE theory). But it still sweeping under the rug the measurement problem. The waves in the fields are "probability waves", and the coupling constants are basically inserted ad hoc in the theory since they rely on experimental measurements of particle masses. So in a sense, the theory doesn't really explain much at all, it just crunches numbers.
@Nomad FPS by like a lens i mean that measurement might be akin to an optical Fourier transform. Lenses translate a real image into an image of the reciprocal fourier space, and funnily enough for an extended entity like a wave this tends to look like a point.
You make a great point that I was going to comment about as well. While it's helpful to think about photons as "particles" or "waves" or both, they're really just photons. Things like the "phase" of a photon doesn't really make sense because phase is an emergent property of a superposition of many photons. This is especially evident when you consider that phase and photon number are conjugate variables so the more you know about how many photons you have, the less you know about their phase (amplitude squeezed states). And this brings up a final important point, which is that experimental results for a single photon can NOT be obtained through limiting cases of coherent states. You can definitely get approximations to how a single photon will behave, after all we use classical sources at work all the time to characterize our equipment. But it will never be 100% accurate to an actual single photon. So in the end if you want to know what a single photon will do you either have to do the experiment with a proper single photon source (not just a highly attenuated laser) or work through the math.
@@sekeetaheliastraatmans8190 ??? I'm sorry but what you said did not make any sense.
I have been interested in the physics of light for many years now. While was watching your videos , I had so many enlightenments!
Your videos were more helpful than classes in uni I had.
I hope you will continue a good work you are doing.
And if you are reading , I want to pass a big human thank you.
30:15 "spatial inertia" feels like it should potentially correspond with the permittivity and permeability of free space
This is my favorite video from you so far! It's one of your best examples of explaining an initially unintuitive concept in a very understandable way. Loved the physical analogies.
17:10 Obligatory link: ua-cam.com/video/MBnnXbOM5S4/v-deo.html
The video by Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) that gives the definitive introduction to the nature of Heisenberg uncertainty. Title of the video: 'The more general uncertainty principle'. Grant Sanderson puts Heisenberg uncertainty in a wide perspective, going back to way before introduction of quantum mechanics.
Ah well, it seems exceedingly probable to me that anyone with a craving for the next Huygens optics video will have absorbed Grant Sanderson's Heisenberg Video.
I did not known this particular video, but it's absolutely fantastic. He does a way more rigorous job explaining it than I do. Thanks!
@@HuygensOptics Yeah, in my opinion that video lays down a foundation for all physics content makers to build on.
Before I even continue watching you video: +1 for including the wonderful Tony Benn. :)
Just last night I was wondering when you would post another video. How cool it was to wake up to one this morning!
I've been thinking for a very long time about the true nature of the electron. Your model is one i've considered many times, because it just makes sense and explains a lot of experimental observations. The issue though is including spin and charge: how do these properties arise from a "space" wavelet? You'd need some kind of torsion that makes it antisymmetric under 360° degrees rotations. Topologically this is realized in a mobius strip, but it's hard to say how such a strip can come to be in empty space.
Look up "hopf fibration" which is basically a 3D moebius strip (well not really, but it does support half-spin rotations)
I think we can safely say that nobody knows what charge is at a very fundamental level.
@@HuygensOptics the sad part is particle physics seems to be fine with "conserved quantity of the abelian U(1) symmetry group".
We are lost in math, and your channel is literally one of the few that tries to go deeper.
Best video yet. You very clearly express the limitations and power of scientific models.
This is such an intense presentation. I love it! Wonderful video, thank you for your great efforts!
true, had to pause the video a few times to better digest the information presented. Those videos are always so meaningful and eyeopening, even for people who work with this stuff on a daily basis.
@@vaakdemandante8772 Same!
Nobody gets me to pause the video and think about things as much as this channel does!
Holy crap I finally understand what's vibrating to generate em waves during energy transitions!
Both your channels are stupendous !
Both channels? I just have one.
🤔
Definitely watching this again. I thought I knew some vibrations stuff but the question of how it gets from one frequency to the other nearly blew my mind as seems an obvious question once heard. I now need to understand it backward so watching again.
This has become one of my favorite channels on youtube and I’ve watched your last few videos several times. I don’t see anybody else exploring light, quantum physics and wave-particle duality from this angle (at least with my limited layperson’s knowledge). It seems to me like your analogies are illustrating something fundamental about the nature of light and matter. Even if these are imperfect demonstrations due to the practicalities of our macro world I think they are brilliant. These standing wave demonstrations seem to hint at some fundamental characteristics of reality, though I am by no means qualified to know exactly how. At least the idea of resonance and standing waves happening at certain frequencies explains how even something at the macro level can be quantized. There can be no standing wave in the string of 4.5, 2.7, or 3.33333. Only 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
Also, I really think your idea of photons not being particles but instead just being the way that light has to transfer energy to matter (i.e. in a quantized way) is ingenious. It completely removes the weirdness of wave-particle duality and instead allows light to just be a wave, which is completely more intuitive. Your videos are fascinating and I have to thank you for getting me to think about these things in a new and different way than before.
This fresh look at energy/ momentum transfer connects to so many other phenomenon. Earthquake seismology with compression waves & transverse waves that propagate at their respective velocities depending on the fundamental properties of the medium. Acoustic wave vibrations of violin strings with sawtooth function shaped input of energy every time the bow stretching the string slips. Acoustic vibrations of a guitar string with base frequency, harmonics, decay rates dependent on string mass & elastic energy. And of course quantum mechanics and Electromagnetic radiation. I had to back up many times because my mind would wander to so many other related phenomenon.
these videos are excellent for a couple of reasons... wave mechanics is arguably the most useful single abstraction to describe & develop intuition for real world systems (not just physics, though perhaps because physics describes "everything" :). your videos, and those of a couple of other creators, do an incredible job of reinforcing and simplifying the concepts (there's probably a resonance joke in here, but it's too convoluted and i don't want it to interfere with my point 🙃)
also, you put extremely nuanced physics topics in some of the simplest possible terms without ignoring reality, which is a challenge when the universe doesn't really care about our capacity to understand or our aesthetic sense. my expertise isn't in optics, but your seeing your progress through these ideas has lately become one major inspiration for me to really sit with my thoughts and challenge assumptions, to advance our understand of some things even a little
I've been following you for a few years, but only now realize how carefully you chose "Huygens"! 😀
Dude these videos are so insanely valuable
Your videos too.
I find this perspective extremely insightful and sort of novel. It seems that here is always a perspective that demystifies the seemingly mysterious quantum behavior.
My mind is absolutely blown from what I am witnessing...
Thank you so much for creating and sharing such brilliant content - I can't express my admiration enough 🙏
Brilliant! You show how confined standing waves of electrons in an atom are analogous to standing waves in a string changing from one standing wave harmonic to another, and in that transition a difference beat frequency is created (energy emitted or absorbed) and why atoms hold electrons only in discrete energy levels because they have to fit into a standing wave (but in 4 dimensional space-time along with probabilities of place and time) which causes all those orbitals shapes an electron can take. And because Electrons and Quarks (sub parts of protons) are strings of energy vibrating in open/closed loops of various frequency/harmonics/standing waves/phase/amplitude and in multidimensional space-time just makes it seem so intuitive. Thanks!
Thanks for this awesome presentation … including the 30 seconds of poetry
As someone who loves guitars and science, I found this video particularly interesting, insightful, and enjoyable. Great Channel. Thanks
25:38 I think you should inject only 1 wavelength of the beat frequency, and as soon as it runs out of string (after a number of standing wavelengths), inject the next wave. Gotta find a way to make it resonate. It's like I'm swinging in a hammock. A wavelength with a specific frequency will have a certain velocity.
Awesome video. You explain what is real and what is an analogy to explain something - that is very important. I am going to make your video part of my STEM class on standing waves, modulation, audio, RF, light, and electron orbitals.
It's amazing how well your demonstration also explains the intensity modulations in lasers
You're really good at making these videos. Will have to watch this in full soon.
21:40 omg I finally got the idea why different state of the electron transition can emit different frequency of light now.
I think that there is a lot of loss in your system due to gravity and you could simply turn the whole contraption so that the string hangs. It'll make the distribution a bit uneven but it should still maintain the properties, while having less loss. Since you're not fighting gravity on the standing wave over the entire length of the string anymore, although it might need a bit more energy (volume of the speaker) to get going. Because gravity wants the string straight and not saggy in the middle, if that makes sense, you can compensate with volume (energy), instead of tension (kinetic energy).
Hmm, why didn't I think of that... It could also have helped to reduce the friction I experienced in the transverse speaker, because of the sideway forces exerted.
About gravity: imagine a rollercoaster ride that is frictionless. (Hard to achieve on Earth, so for the sake of the through experiment: imagine the rollercoaster is on a levitating track, in vacuum.) In the absence of any friction, would gravity eventually bring a rollercoaster to a halt? It will not: every time the ride drops you down your speed increases, and uphill that momentum takes you all the way back up to the height where you came from.
The same applies in the case of the vibrating string. The effect of gravity averages out; in the end there is no loss to gravity. The sag in the middle is a very minor factor. So: horizontal or vertical will make negligable difference; in both cases the energy drain to friction loss in the elastic band itself is dominant.
@@cleon_teunissen - Gravity operates like regula electromagnetic friction. It will bring your ideal rollercoaster to a halt indeed. We can see that at astronomical scales, in which gravitational friction is very real and measurable.
@@HuygensOptics Hanging the string vertical makes the string tension a function of location on the string, and thus introducing significant dispersion.
embed the whole contraption in a rotating frame to cancel out gravitational effects lol
3:53 those pictures immediately triggered me, I've seen them so many times
You are confirming what I’ve always intuitively told myself. Photons do not exist!! A photon is a convenience to describe the energy transfer from one place to another. It seems to me that a photon is actually the difference between 2 oscillating electron energy states. The difference is during emission and is is additive during absorption. As far as going from one fundamental mode to another there must be something in music theory that can describe this. Typical notes are n/m integer fractions of the fundamental where n and m are integers. Phase will definitely play in this since a “beat” will always have a rotating phase that is fundamentally related by n/m. Eg sin(p/2)+sin(p/3) etc. Very thought provoking stuff! Love it.
Remarkable series - you deserve a medal
Awesome ! I won't pretend to understand the maths but at some basic level I now understand a hell of a lot more than I did at the start and enjoyed every minute of it, my mind eventually slipped into AC and capacitance for no apparent reason ! my mind has a mind of its own so thanks for exercising them.....cheers.
You could also measure the power required to drive the speaker at various frequencies. It should be different depending on whether a standing wave can be formed or not. If the oscillation is not a multiple of the natural frequency of the string, there should be more push-back on the speaker, requiring more power to be applied to drive it. It would be interesting to graph the energy consumption vs the frequency.
this is really similar to back-EMF in motors, and would work (with some caveats) in a continuous manner (i.e. not just as a resonance detector)
Thank you for all your videos!!! I wish I could pass a vague sense of how many subjects that you covered along time and helped me either understand complex and unclear concepts or at least accept the way things are most of the time: impenetrable but admirable. The way you calmly puts your thoughts is really beautiful and inspiring. I which we had more people with the same humble and honest approach instead of presenting definitive "truths". If you are still looking for video ideas, I have been struggling with the comparison between the effective aperture in RF antennas and the equivalent in optical devices. Take care!
Alsw ik het goed beluister kun je dit lezen. Wat een heldere uitleg. Ook als ik het niet helemaal begrijp, Het is iets dat ik hiermee zou kunnen begrijpen. Dank je wel.
Thank you. If I understand, an EMF pertibation (photon) interferes with the harmonic frequency of an electron around an atom. At the right frequency, the interference is constructive and bumps up the electron's harmonic mode. As this mode relaxes, a photon is emitted.
This video was mind-blowing and beyond impressive.
Good work!
Thank you for this. Ill have to rewatch it several times before I can
conceptualize it, but thankyou for reminding me that I have so so much to learn.
You, sir, are the universe trying to understand itself. This is engaging, funny, beautiful, insightful, deep and, yes, poetic.
Thank you, for helping this piece of the universe in its efforts to understand itself.
You are undoubtedly one of the best science educators on UA-cam. You should be teaching in a university, publishing papers, and going to conferences instead of polishing glass, but then your have to deal with overzealous administrators and lazy students. You're probably better of polishing glass 😁
Lots of stuff to chew on, TY. I'm keeping this in my watch later list because I really want to watch again, very suggestive.
genius view. thank you for helping solve an issue with my model that has been bugging me for ages
I like your point that the electromagnetic radiation doesn't need to be quantized at all but only the energy transfer
For the way that you made the string switch modes, I think you told one of the speakers to vibrate in such a way that mimics how the string would vibrate as if there were a "shadow node" some distance beyond that speaker, gradually shifting the frequency until a node (either real or formerly shadow) lands on the speaker, which effects a change in mode.
You are warm, but I'm afraid that is not the way I did it, sorry!
This is such a fantastic channel. Thanks mate.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!! This is a topic i have wondered about for YEARS. The photon as a beat frequency betweenstanding waves, i just never considered it.
This has changed the way that I don't see things, thanks!
Following are two speculations, on the 22:54-26:50 and 26:50-32:29 sections respectively.
1. When you have a standing wave, the ends of your medium (a string in this case) will be either alternating between crest/trough or be stationary, depending on your boundaries.
In this case both ends can be approximated as stationary, since the speaker (on the right) amplitude is relative small and the string is rigidly attached (on the left).
If you want to add or remove one half wave, I imagine you could use your right speaker to do so by using a transition wave in the shape similar to the photon pictured @ 1:22.
Visually, imagine you have one half wave to the right, outside of your standing wave and slowly shove it in.
I imagine it would be a different transition wave depending on which two n-states you are going between and that the phase matters. I.e with phase miss match, you get the transition behavior you showed, bouncing back and fourth. While a phase match could make it look like I described above, shoving in a new half wave. Also it may be possible to pause the transition, getting a new steady state with a non whole n-number of half waves.
2. I don't see a reason to make the string infinitely long, since as long as the boundary conditions are correct the section should behave accordingly. The boundaries are there so you can control the experiment by measure/control of position, speed, acceleration and tension.
You may be trying to combine two different models/thought's into one (a standing wave and a @ 1:22 packet). The goal from here (as I see it), is to find and model the transition wave with the speaker to add/remove a_half_wave(/energy).
That was remarkable. Thankyou. Those who know the Master's personal biography & predilections will feel how the mechanical aspects to the thought experiment (wheel inertia, etc.), combined with the poetry, resonates with distinct Clerk-Maxwellian overtones!
If you have contact info, pass him the Willis Lamb paper "Anti-photon," and the AJP paper by Art Hobson "There are no particles, there are only fields." Carver Mead is another EM maverick, with his book Collective Electrodynamics. All these authors went public, used their real names and take huge amounts of s**t for their trouble. Lamb figured it out: don't go anonymous, instead only publish just before you expect to die of old age! Heh.
I like the explanation of the emission of the photo to being due to the beat frequency between the two standing wave states. This would imply that there is a discrete amount of time that the transition occurs over, debunking the idea of an instantaneous "quantum leap" between the states. Of course the idea of a quantum leap also violate a lot of other "laws" in physics, so it's not surprising, but this is a really nice, hands on example of how it works.
I never considered how the particle nature of light would be radically different in a way than particles with mass. Kudos.
Fantastic video! Well explained. Let me put in a few not-expert considerations:
There can be a wave only if there is a medium and that is the string.
There can be a wave only if the medium is "elastic" otherwise the string wouldn't elongate enough to form the crests and the valleys.
At the beginning of the video you show that waves reflect, so also when you make more oscillations there still must be reflections, so a standing wave forms when the reflected wave is in phase with the source wave.
One way to reduce the wave nodes could be that suggested by @Marcus Österback: instead of having the left speaker pulse in a regular way make it pulse in such a way that it transitions from an higher frequency to the lower one in a non-uniform way supposedly by incorporating the beat frequency.
The idea of the wheels in the ideal setup is incredible! You talk about them as a "property of space" or "spatial inertia", think of it, I would call them "magnetism", I mean the magnetic part of electromagnetic waves, while their going up and down is the electric part.
You show radiation as coming from outside the string, I think you should have shown it as another wave in the string but outside of the "confinement" that possibly, thanks to the wheels and or the ability to also move the wheels, is able to interfere with the standing wave making it 1) pass thru 2) reflect 3) create another wave 4) absotb it by changing the internal frequency 5) anything else ?
About the cause of the confinement I also have an idea but I think it is a bit too radical and naive so I'll wait for a better inspiration or explanation...
This is interesting but as usual I think I am missing something that physicists that know QFT know, because I am pretty sure you cannot get out weird superpositions-like behaviors that do not exists in the classical world like entanglement. Sometimes I wonder if someone has ever simulated a small potential well with the electron field and the EM field together and visualized all the variables changing during an interaction. I think it could be very helpful for many people to get a more intuitive understanding of how it works, since any content on the subject is either pure descriptive or just the raw math
To say that you sir are intellectually stimulating, is an understatement. You are inspiring! Thank you!
Regarding your experiment with the standing waves, you are changing frequency and phase, but I do not see you modulating (on purpose) the amplitude of the waves in your apparatus. In order to account and counteract the quick energy loses to friction and other factors, what if the speakers would fade off or decay the amplitude gradually not suddenly (as I assume you did) therefore allowing for "some degree of cheating" to counteract the quick losses in the amplitude. Now, what exactly that amplitude decaying envelope should look like, I have no idea yet, this is just a thought.
I would too have words to appreciate your efforts in this which is (I think) one of the most complex fields in physics and led to the true nature of our world. Most of the time I' really cant' follow you, due to the lack, on my side, to lot of basic math & phisics acknowledges.
But the fact that you do such experiments in the Kitchen encourages me to make more efforts on this. Thanks Sir, for your explanations, and the final touch of poetry, makes all this a masterpiece! *THANKS!!!*
briliant, thank you. I think you are entering the space of art...
That was a beautiful composition unfolding the dynamics of energy state jumps. Roger Penrose called the unfolding of how the collapse of the wave function works, the most important discovery to be made in physics. Your classical elastic string experiment and hypothesis was brilliant, and a tour-de-force of clear reasoning. I am hungry for more, this topic is very important and very rare it seems.
Perhaps you can try different kinds of oscillator mediums, radio cavities, springs, maybe coupled pendulums?
Early pendulums had cycloid-shaped bumpers for the cable that supported the swinging weight; these might be like your adjustable pulleys in the string model.
You mentioned phase becomes important in the transition, so ok complex numbers in the math.
Wonderful how the beat frequency is the photon in the analogy. In radio mixers, we had the sum the difference, and the two original waves, and downstream filters with select which one you wanted. I wonder if they all show up here as well if you were too closely, analyze it.
My first thought was, The waves are decaying fast so you need something with more energy storage, so I guess something like a pendulum might give you a much clearer signal to noise ratio, or perhaps heavy piano wire properly tensioned? Ha just shop brainstorming there. This work is too important to just change the subject and move on. This work should be optimized for the big leagues, as a vital physics demonstration.
I have yet to have seen anyone make an effort to show what’s really happening during these energy transitions between standing wave modes, except this work of yours. Well done, sir, and would love to see the better model you outlined done. People need to start thinking this way, in order to have some ideas on to get past the whole quantum mystery blockade of physics.
the wavelength should be the Compton wavelength....h/mc, it's frame independent. But props for saying "spin state", because the actual spin is sqrt(3)/2 [with hbar=1, ofc]... ppl forget that a lot.
edit...and you did this at 31:37. and the reason it has the frequency of gamma's is b/c the Compton wavelength is the limit to which an electron can be confined before the momentum uncertainty gives it enough energy to make a e+e- pair from the vacuum...so 2 x 0.511 MeV = 1.022 MeV...a gamma ray
This video is a timeless masterpiece
Pausing early to say I'm here for the nerdy brain tickles. This is the first vid on the channel I've watched, and I'm torn between going back to the earlier referenced videos first, or continuing watching this. Curious about waves, but coming from messing around in the audio realm.
Amazing job!
I think you might be on something. Your approach to explain quantum physics is remarkable. Finally fundamental physics feels less mysterious and more fundamental!
"The experimental setup is not complex, and I actually built it on a kitchen table."
One week later:
"... I've built a vacuum confinement for the setup."
That poem was straight bars
This video inspired me of this.
The loss in air is a good one, next are
- Friction between strands in medium
- electromagnet impedance loss
If tension in the medium is not compensated can enable moving coil rubbing the magnet wall, hence
- friction loss.
Transducer diaphragms tissue/strand
- friction loss
Amplifier impedance.
Really interesting presentation! Gave me a new perspective on concepts I haven't ever really "understood" (and I don't think I could say I ever will!). The idea that a beat is a manifestation of the transition between stable states in a harmonic system is really interesting and entirely novel to me. To expand on your experiment, could you observe the same beat ("photon") by instead introducing a new constraint to the elastic, like placing fingers on the neck of a guitar? What that action could be physically analogous to, I have no clue, but perhaps someone more learned on the subject might know?
This is the best video on this topic! Thank you! Could you expand on the topic of entangled photons? How to watch them? What are the nuances of entanglement? How to detect spin? If you could show it the way you show other experiments, it would blow the minds of many people! Thanks a lot!
the whole video was poetic! thank you!
This video is a spectacular masterpiece! Even more so as this was the subject of my intense interest for some time now and your presentation of it made it much more tangible with further thought experiments (even tho its just a very simplified model).
On that note I was wondering (not sure if this is exactly in line with the scope of your interests and videos you make) about a video on the topic of weak isospin and weak hypercharge and the consequences of the existence of such (and possibly the approximated reason for it), as the topic of why does nature need charge is yet another one that makes my sleepless nights a bit less exhausting.
In any case thank you for your work
Why are you telling us that you didn't even care to read the Wikipedia article on the topic? ;-)
The best wave surfing teacher on the tube.
A lot like one of my experiments instead I'm focusing on air and ionised material, always good to hear another take on the phase velocities (beat frequency).
The final wave is just a summation of the fundamental Fourier series contained within, so if your signal generator can produce the resultant wave you only need to apply it on one end of the string, the changing phase and wave velocities will manifest themselves automatically.
It greatly helps to blur your eyes when watching the speaker/wave experiments. Or switch to 144p.
It's the one time when 25fps can actually be justified in a UA-cam video in 2023. :)
Thank you, kindly, for your reassuring investigations, and for keeping it 100% demonstrably real.
This is very interesting, thanks for the new perspective
Excellent illuminations as usual. Anything with the Oscilloscope in use is essential to pick out the details of pulse-evolution in "All is Vibration", the ancient sense-in-common experienced understanding.
The MOST honest evaluation of science as we know it.
👍👍👍👍👍
Excellent lecture on basic physic concepts!
I love this channel
What occurs to me is that Audio Speakers are built self-damping; we don't want to hear ringing when listening to recordings of snare drums. You probably want to drive your speakers so that they act as mirrors, if possible, rather than speakers.
This channel is the perfect balance between the accuracy and rigor of a textbook and the simplified explanation of UA-cam videos. Every explanation of quantum mechanics has confused me even further. But these videos made a lot of sense.
Although I still have one question. A wavefront occupies a large area of space, thus it's energy is distributed across that area. So when it is absorbed by an electron, how does it decide which electron to interact with since the wavefront could span multiple atoms
I think quantum mechanics has some correct ideas. Light follows every path, but it will choose the shortest and most efficient path to transmit energy. Just like we install lightning protection lines. Lightning will choose the path with the least resistance.
For light the "resistance" analogy seems to be the difference between the frequency of the light and the resonance frequency of the electron.
The map is not the mountain. I try to tell people that scientific theories and descriptions are merely metaphors, but few understand what I am saying.
There's something wrong with the education system when one finds better explanations on youtube rather than in the lecture class.
Immesuarble joy & wonder listening to you
Absolutely fantastic food for thought!
Relativity has made me think of how photons always see their past self for as long as they exist, this is if ( Data ) moves at the speed of light. It's a fun mental picture thought.
So matter is _not_ both a particle and a wave, or sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave, it is _always_ a wave, and particles are an artifact of wave mechanics. Cool!
Question though: can we apply this insight to the Schrodinger equation to try to understand what a "measurement" is? I always felt like the interpretation that the wave instantaneously sheds its position uncertainty at random when it interacts with something to be lacking any insight into how that change occurs. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with turbulence since the waveform "collapses" in contact with high-complexity matter (i.e. a bunch of other overlapping waveforms that would in every likelihood not be perfectly resonant), but I'm not sure if that's the correct approach or how to translate it into a decent intuition.
My thought is to look at the magnetic wave, by swiching the poles at each end (and/or) in the middle of the wire with a magnetic field at different frequency. Looking forward to the next video, super interesting topic.