Physics Lesson

[Brady Kelly]

Please can one of you physicists refresh me on the particle-wave double slit experiment. How are they certain only one particle is being released? Or is the particle just a quantification of the smallest possible pulse of wave light?

[Shahil Shah]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit\_experiment[^](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment "New Window")

modified on Monday, September 22, 2008 6:50 AM

[Anthony Mushrow]

Thats just an example of how light is a wave isn't it? Then the photoelectric effect is an example of how light is also a particle. Wave-particle duality, one of the slightly weird things in physics.

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-SK Genius

Game Programming articles start -here[^]-

[Brady Kelly]

On the other hand, if light were actually a wave then light energy would not arrive in discrete quantities (quanta) and would be spread over more space the farther the detector screen was placed from the screen with the slits in it.[^]

[peterchen]

roughly: We know that light is quantizized due to observation of the photoelectric effect, and we can reduce the intensity of a laser so far that it "emits less than one photon on average". In combination with the photoelectric effect we could probably check that we indeed have individual photons. (But maybe there's an easier way.)

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[Brady Kelly]

Ja, thanks. It was the photo-electric effect I had forgotten. One dot is one photon.

[Liam OHagan]

wave / particle duality has also been demonstrated with buckminster-fullerenes! (i.e. big lattice geodesic balls of carbon)

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[Brady Kelly]

Bucky Balls!

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty… The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

[Dan Neely]

IIRC someone did it with a virus (bacteria???) a year or two ago.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall