Feynman Double Slit

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dav57

Extraordinary Thinker Thingy
Registered Senior Member
This is really bothering me lately and I'm trying to determine what are the best and most current explanations. What on Earth is going on here and how can the electron be going through both slits at the same time?

Any callers?
 
You can have a delocalized wave pass through both slits at the same time, right?

Really, it's not that it's passing through both slits at the same time, it's that you don't know unless you measure, and if you measure after your particle has passed through the slits, it behaves like it went through both. Why? We really don't know, it just does. Why do classical particles act to minimize their action integral? They just do.
 
What on Earth is going on here and how can the electron be going through both slits at the same time?
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It seems pretty obvious that it can't if it's like a little marble.

So, because the electron behaves like it's going through both slits, it's obviously not behaving like a little marble. Therefore electrons aren't like little marbles.

So, what are they like? Well, they're like electrons... and that's the way electrons behave, I guess.


Hmmm... I don't think that was terribly useful, was it...
 
Pete said:
Hmmm... I don't think that was terribly useful, was it...
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Ahem, not as useful as you normally are Pete :rolleyes:

You see, I'm thinking that an electron is not what we think it is and this makes me curious.

And so I'm wondering if anyone has any groundbreaking ideas on what might be happening here.
 
Nothing groundbreaking, just that hey subatomic particles aren't what we classically think of as little marbles flying around, they're more like wave packets flying around and acting like waves. We've known this since the Davisson and Germer experiment many decades back.
 
PhysMachine said:
Nothing groundbreaking, just that hey subatomic particles aren't what we classically think of as little marbles flying around, they're more like wave packets flying around and acting like waves. We've known this since the Davisson and Germer experiment many decades back.
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Do electrons fired at 3 or 4 or 5 slits exhibit wave patterns too?
 
Yes. Electrons in free space exhibit wave properties. The slits just create interference patterns which are really telling of wave-like properties.
 
PhysMachine said:
Yes. Electrons in free space exhibit wave properties. The slits just create interference patterns which are really telling of wave-like properties.
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And so if you had, say, 4 slits and were observing an interference pattern, then when you try to look at the electron going through any one of the four slots, I take it you then get a pattern as if there were only three slits, yes?
 
MetaKron said:
Actually, at least one edge of each slit scatters the light that goes through them.
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Hold on, we're talking electrons here, not light.
 
dav57 said:
You see, I'm thinking that an electron is not what we think it is and this makes me curious.
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What do we think it is?
 
If anyone is interested and has any idea of where to find a Physics 101 textbook, they might find a page or two that describes wave-particle duality.
 
Pete,

Well, I know it’s got negative charge and is arranged around the nucleus in quantum orbits. I know it’s a Lepton, which is within the Fermion class and I know its mass and charge etc – that’s about it.

It’s just that I’m trying to work out what the problem is with regard to the double slit experiment.

Science says it can’t explain how the particle can travel through both slits at the same time when it can only be viewed in one slit. And I’m trying to seek an explanation.

For instance, perhaps the electron is emitted as a wave and emanates outwards in all allowable directions, but can only be viewed once, at which point it discharges and disappears. This way, the electron WOULD obviously travel through both slits.

So why can you fire an electron and get a single hit like a bullet? Well, is it possible for the wave to travel outwards but collapse to a single point once it strikes something?
 
CANGAS said:
The famous double slit experiment has been performed with more than two slits and with objects as large as carbon atoms.
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Just a little curious here, would we get the same result if we used a compound, such as water molecules for the experiment?
 
According to quantum theory, if you drove your Hummer through the slits, yes.

Did you ignore or link up to my link?
 
The electron is going through "both slits at the same time". In fact, unless you measure which slit it's going through, it does not even make sense to ask that question. You can't know which slit the particle went through unless you measured it, and as such asking "which slit" doesn't make sense. It BEHAVES as if it has gone through both, so we infer that it has.

As for the Hummer comment, this is, of course, true. However, if you want to think of the Hummer as a single particle and that single particle being in the state of a Gaussian wave packet in free space, it's going to have a really tight wavefunction, so it will behave fairly deterministically.

Just a quick poll here: how many people posting on this thread have actually taken a course on quantum mechanics?
 
The scientific interest may be piqued by truly weird things pronounced by Quantum Physics which, no matter how strange they seem, are claimed to be true.

Formal classes are certainly wonderful in their milieau, although they are not the only method to learn about important subjects.

If someone is interested in Quantum Physics and wishes to start off on the ground level, without any scairy math, there are several good layman language books. One that I consider very good is "Schroedinger's Kittens" authored by John Gribbin. :cool:
 
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