Are We Ripples or Pebbles?

I just finished reading Rodney Brooks' excellent book: "Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein." (2015)  [Thrift Books $3.29 used, paperback].  Also available for Kindle.

Fields of Color by Rodney Brooks

Are we made of waves or particles?  

It seems easy, but this question has bedeviled us humans forever.   Are we made of tiny little billiard balls (Atoms)?   Or are we ripples (waves) in some hard to imagine "ether?"  

Chemistry tells us we are atoms.  Solids, liquids and gases, cars and apples are obviously made of atoms.  Atoms can be counted, weighed, even photographed.  Chemistry is real.  Case closed!

Here is a 1-minute video from IBM showing actual photos of real atoms.  IBM Video

But now (since 1950) there is more and more very real experimental evidence that everything is ultimately made of waves.  Interference is something only waves can do.   Experiments show that matter interferes with itself, so we need to revise our "atomic" picture somewhat.

Rodney Brooks solves this conflict casually but convincingly in this book.  In a nutshell, we are made of waves.  

Everything is waves.  

Often those waves are extremely small - and then they seem just like little particles.  But if we look very carefully, everything (electrons, protons, photons, gravity) is fundamentally made of waves.   We can imagine particles, but everything is ultimately undulating fields.

Big objects like chairs or basketballs behave like solid particles, and this is our daily reality.  But if we zoom way in there are only waves.  Just for kicks, look at the IBM video again.  You will see the electron waves (interference patterns).

Do waves have weight and mass?  

Yes, gravity attracts waves, so waves have gravitational mass.  And yes, it's hard to get waves moving, so that explains inertia.  Every wave has both weight and inertial mass.  

Are the Fields "Quantized?

Rodney Brooks says Yes. 

 "Fields are made of tiny indivisible pieces called quanta (plural of quantum) that can not be further reduced."

"Each field quantum lives and dies a life and death of it own.  For example, a quantum of the EM field can be emitted from an atom in the sun, travel through millions of miles in space, spreading out as it goes, and then interact as a single unit with an atom in your eye." [Page 7].

It's very unfortunate that Brooks did not read Sergei Rashkovskiy's papers that explain where quantization comes from.   Atoms are resonators that only resonate at certain fixed frequencies.  That's why emission and absorption only occur at those specific frequencies.  But that doesn't mean fields are made of pieces!  Fields are continuous and can take on any value.

Every potential well has resonant frequencies.  This explains why a captive electron field only oscillates at certain frequencies and wavelengths.  It does not mean the electron field "is made of tiny indivisible pieces called quanta."  It only means captive electrons have discrete energy, mass and charge.  The electron field itself, like all the others (EM, gravity, weak, strong) is not made of "pieces."

Where is the Mistake?  

The big mistake came from looking at photographic film, the Wilson cloud chamber (1911), and later  Geiger Counters.  The Geiger-Müller tube was invented in 1928.  It counts particles.  Every scientist (until recently) accepted this as proof that our universe is made of particles, not waves.  But Rashkovskiy pointed out that waves are also detected, so it's not proof either way.

Photographic film shows black "dots" when exposed to light.  Almost everyone since 1850 thought each dot was made by one photon.  Actually the "dots" are random crystals of metallic silver, not photon impact sites.  Rashkovskiy pointed out that waves can explain the black dots.

Cloud chambers show "particle tracks" that seem to prove beyond a doubt that particles exist.  But in his Nobel Lecture (1933) Schrodinger himself said "We find it confoundedly difficult to interpret the traces as nothing more than narrow bundles of equally possible paths."  [Brooks, Page 111].  This topic is called the Mott Problem.  

Alpha Particle Tracks

Beta decay produces an Alpha particle (a Helium nucleus) with energy 5 Mev and speed 4% of the speed of light.  These Alphas move in a straight line like a baseball and leave a visible track.  Are they waves?  If so, why don't they spread out?  Because the strong force holds the two protons and the two neutrons together.   Experiments show that Alpha particles do show diffraction, so they do behave like waves in a field.  So we can think of larger objects as "baseballs," but in the microscopic picture they are really waves.  I think of the Alpha particle track as a stream of waves, like a laser beam.