I’ve been meaning to write about the recent news regarding a new experiment tackling the wave-particle duality of quantum objects – in this case using “relatively large phthalocyanine (C₃₂H₁₈N₈) and derivative molecules (C₄₈H₂₆F₂₄N₈O₈)” rather than the typical photons.

The idea is to try and pinpoint where classical (macro) physics ends and where quantum effects (micro) take over and using larger particles gives scientists a chance to do this. That’s an interesting idea to be sure.

I don’t want to get into that particular experiment per se, but rather to unpack the language and explore the general implication of a ‘wave-particle duality’.

This article and most other writings on the subject use phrases similar to ‘sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave’ when describing the actions and interactions of quantum particles. I’ve even seen the uncertainty principle invoked in ways that make it sound as if the photon or other particle ‘chooses’ what to be as it goes. (Please someone save us all from anthropomorphic particles!) Or that photons exhibit both qualities simultaneously. The implications of these observations seem to always end up being something like the sub-atomic world is ‘stranger than fiction’ or some such sentiment.

This quality of ‘weirdness’ and duality has its root, I think, in the fallacy of empty space. If light can travel through a vacuum, and it exhibits both wave and particle properties, then we have to invoke the phrase ‘sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave’ because empty space contains none of the mass necessary to propagate waves in a classical sense.

So to me the implication is far simpler: it implies a medium of some kind. Call it ether or dark matter or whatever, but as a hard determinist and physical infinity proponent, I subscribe to the notion that there can be no empty space. Therefore it’s ‘particles all the way down’ as it were. If this is the case, then light is simply particles compressing on each other in different ways to form what we call light or radio waves, etc.

All the arguments against ether (or gravity construed as a particle effect) usually get poo-pooed because of drag – too much frictional heat for the idea to be plausible. That’s just a non-sequitur. Just because drag occurs with air particles, doesn’t mean that the interaction of these very small particles – that we know little about – works the same way.

Particle or wave? Waves are made by particles. By definition. That’s either true, or we need different words to describe what scientists are seeing in these double-slit experiments.