Waves or particles? Is everything a wave on a small enough scale? What about smaller than 1x10^-34m?

Answer 1

The current threoy broadcast on nova (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/everything.html ) is that everything can be broken down to strings. These srtings (or waves) vibrate on different frequencies to form particles and waves such as light photons. Check out PBS (Brian Greene)

Answer 2

To keep it simple, in a practical analysis of any quantized system, you can regard that system as either a particle or a wave, at your convienience, but you cannot measure both qualities at the same time on the same subject.

You can set up two experimental devices, each containing electrons, for example, but one apparatus will only test for particle properties, and the other only wave properties.

Theoretically, the DUALITY PRINCIPLE simply says that very small things are a little of both, and are treated as "discrete" particles, and also have a mathematical "wavefunction"

And in order to understand the whole system, you need to do both types of experiments, but seperately.

The experimental apparatus that tests or measures one kind of property, will destroy or change the other property, rendering any data obtained useless.

Answer 3

it's both. It all depends how you look at it.
If you fire an electorn trhough a double slit, it acts liek a wave, but then whenit hits teh screen it hits at a definite point, as a particle would. If you send teh electrons one by one, even though they fomr discrete points on teh screen teh overall pictre you get is that of an interference pattern.
It can be said that things behave like waves as long as you dont make nay measurement on teh system. As soon as you measure anything they become particle like. This is known as teh collapse of teh wave function.
at lengths smaller than teh PLanck lenght, our current pyshical models break down, so that we cannot currently say what happens to particles at shorter length, let even if there is still anything like space and time at those lengths

Answer 4

Nope, energy has no mass and mass may move in waves but are not merely energy waves. Photons, however, are an exception, being energy packets but possessing an estimatable mass. Size isn't the issue, but very small things can behave very strangely.

Answer 5

not everything is a wave.. but electrons are considered as wave like particiles because they behave like them.. plus if its not a wave then its a source of energy

Answer 6

Both of these alternatives are halfway decent models for phenomenon we cannot directly observe and do not understand.

Reality itself is very little the way it seems to you and me in our everyday lives.

Answer 7

Frequency of anything, any size, any, place.