I don't get the point. The article says that if you "somewhat" measure, then you lose "somewhat" from the wavelike nature. So the photon is a wave by X%, and a particle by 100-X%?

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12_throw_away 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

A quantum object is its own thing - it has both wavelike and particle-like properties.

Measurement here might be better understood to "filter out" any parts of the wave that don't agree with the measurement. So a precise measurement will project out a lot of the wave, giving you something more localized and particle-like. A fuzzy measurement will project out only a bit of the wave, giving you something that's still spread out and quantum and wave-like.

	▲	cpncrunch 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The article says "The fuzzier atom rustles more easily and records the path of the photon. In tuning up an atom’s fuzziness, researchers can increase the probability that a photon will exhibit particle-like behavior". I think we're just seeing decoherence in action here. If the photon interacts with the atom, it becomes entangled with the environment (the atom). Giving the atom a higher temperature results in it having a higher probability of it interacting with the photon, and decohering. And I think the individual photon doesn't have a mixture of a certain % of wave or particle like nature. It's just that there is a certain probability that it will decohere (interact with the atom), so if you turn up the temperature of the atoms, you'll just see a greater % of the photons decohering when they interact with those atoms. That's just my amateur understanding of the situation, so I'm happy to be corrected by someone who knows better. Also, I don't have access to the paper itself (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/zwhd-1k2t) as it's paywalled and not on scihub. Quantum mechanics is fascinating!

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FollowingTheDao 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the biggest misunderstanding. Light is always a wave. It is never a proton. Light becomes a proton when we measure it. Everything is a wave, and nothing is a particle ever.

Waves are just probabilities and the human quantum computer brain collapses those probabilities in an orchestrated reductive capacity to create a certainty out of a probability.