Category Archives: wave–particle duality

Hologram

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A hologram can be cut in half, and each part still carries the whole picture. That’s because a hologram is the record of a light wave, and the information in a wave is spread over all of the space it occupies.

— arcnets

— physics forums

When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene. When a hologram is cut in half, the whole scene can still be seen in each piece. This is because, whereas each point in a photograph only represents light scattered from a single point in the scene, each point on a holographic recording includes information about light scattered from every point in the scene. Think of viewing a street outside your house through a 4 ft x 4 ft window, and then through a 2 ft x 2 ft window. You can see all of the same things through the smaller window (by moving your head to change your viewing angle), but you can see more at once through the 4 ft window.

— Wikipedia on Holography

2012.03.30 Friday ACHK

Wave–particle duality, 4

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It has been argued that there are never exact particles or waves, but only some compromise or intermediate between them. One consideration is that zero dimensional mathematical points cannot be observed. Another is that the formal representation of such points, the Kronecker delta function is unphysical, because it cannot be renormalized. Parallel arguments apply to pure wave states.

    “Such positions states are idealised wavefunctions [..] Whereas the momentum states are infinitely spread out, the position states are infinitely concentrated. Neither is normaliseable[..]”

— R Penrose, Road to Reality p.521 s21.11
   
— Wikipedia on Wave–particle duality

Particle is a single pulse. Wave is a train of infinite pulses. Both are physically impossible.

— Me@2011.11.29

2011.11.30 Wednesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK