They’re just different ways of saying the same math. However, if you represent identical particles as a symmetrized wavefunction, photon emission and absorption becomes a huge pain. It’s sooo much simpler (in a Occam’s razor sort fo sense) to just say that rather than keeping track of photons, the universe keeps track of “photon,” which is a sort of substance (well, it’s a field—the quantum electromagnetic field).
The position of a particle is a dimension in configuration space.
It seems mathematically simpler to do math in a space where the dimensions are distinct. That is, dealing with stuff like (1,0) and (0,1), rather than {0,1}, which is zero in one dimension and one in the other, in no particular order. Thinking about that, it might just be the same. That’s just with bozons though. With fermions Ψ(1,0) = -Ψ(0,1). It has a weird parity thing. That seems easier to work with if it’s a symmetry.
It seems feasible that you know more quantum physics than me, and it will look more like there being only one particle than a symmetry if I learn more. I know how the Schrödinger equation works with entangled particles and all the conceptual stuff on the quantum physics sequence, and that’s about it.
Well, the big trick is that photons really are excitation of the electromagnetic field, just like in classical mechanics. But at low energies the field is quantized, just like a harmonic oscillator. And we associate these quantized chunks of electromagnetic energy with particles. But it turns out that you still have to ask the question “what does the electromagnetic field look like with two photons?” The electromagnetic field is more “real” than the photons.
They’re just different ways of saying the same math. However, if you represent identical particles as a symmetrized wavefunction, photon emission and absorption becomes a huge pain. It’s sooo much simpler (in a Occam’s razor sort fo sense) to just say that rather than keeping track of photons, the universe keeps track of “photon,” which is a sort of substance (well, it’s a field—the quantum electromagnetic field).
The position of a particle is a dimension in configuration space.
It seems mathematically simpler to do math in a space where the dimensions are distinct. That is, dealing with stuff like (1,0) and (0,1), rather than {0,1}, which is zero in one dimension and one in the other, in no particular order. Thinking about that, it might just be the same. That’s just with bozons though. With fermions Ψ(1,0) = -Ψ(0,1). It has a weird parity thing. That seems easier to work with if it’s a symmetry.
It seems feasible that you know more quantum physics than me, and it will look more like there being only one particle than a symmetry if I learn more. I know how the Schrödinger equation works with entangled particles and all the conceptual stuff on the quantum physics sequence, and that’s about it.
Well, the big trick is that photons really are excitation of the electromagnetic field, just like in classical mechanics. But at low energies the field is quantized, just like a harmonic oscillator. And we associate these quantized chunks of electromagnetic energy with particles. But it turns out that you still have to ask the question “what does the electromagnetic field look like with two photons?” The electromagnetic field is more “real” than the photons.
Isn’t it always quantized?
Is the answer “the same as with one photon, except with six dimensions instead of three”?
I thought those were pretty much the same way of saying the two things.