juanrga

The speed limit of c refers to the ordinary velocity of a body moving in spacetime. The cosmological speed of expansion is not related with an ordinary velocity but it is the rate of metric 'creation' of space itself and can be larger than c without violating any known law.

Thank you for taking a quote from a closed thread and use it for sharing your wise point that [math]\Psi[/math] is a variable. Although I will ignore you and continue to consider that [math]\Psi[/math] is a function. But thanks again. When I wrote that he was warned in "another forum" I did mean one of those in the menu Forums (above between the Homepage link and the Members link). Evidently, I did not mean that you as moderator would eliminate insults and nasty behaviour in forums outside SFN, but in any case thank you by the clarification. It was very helpful! Thank you for your very informative post and the "appeal to authority", although your sources do not represent any real authority. As you wrote in the OP, those sources say you that the state of a quantum system is given by a wavefunction [math]\Psi(x,t)[/math]. In more advanced and rigorous literature we rewrite this as [math]\Psi(x;t)[/math], and next we generalize this formalism [math]\Psi(x;t) \rigtharrow \hat{\sigma}(x;t)[/math] to a broad kind of quantum systems beyond those considered in your "trustworthy sources". Following your explicit desire I will not explain why advanced and rigorous references write [math]\Psi(x;t)[/math] instead of the outdated [math]\Psi(x,t)[/math] that you can still find in many sources. I will not give the references (are not at the undergrad level evidently) and I will not explain the differences between both functions, neither why the outdated form is mathematically incorrect and physically nonsensical. I have just deleted my vote from your poll giving you and other participants in this forum more freedom to share your thoughts. Thank you again. After reading this, I have stopped from watching this thread.

The wave-particle myth arose in during the development of QM, when the subject was being developed and was not still understood. That myth has been completely eliminated from any modern and rigorous treatment of the subject. Although it persists in some circles. An electron is not sometimes a particle sometimes a wave as some believe. Chemists and physicists define the electron as a particle not as "sometimes a particle sometimes a wave". Links to the CERN and to the official definition of electron by the American Chemical Society were given, quotes from textbooks were given... Those are the facts and those facts will not disappear by you ignoring them and insulting to others. Regarding physics forums, I kindly asked one moderator (in a personal message) to close the account. And I am considering to do the same here because it is a waste of time to debate with people who do not know the most elementary stuff but still pretend to be experts: Questionposter is an excellent example of this, but he is not the only. My posts usually include reasoning, advanced details, citations to academic references, quotes and links. And I agree that this seems to be uncommon among posters here. It is curious that you appeal to "some sort of imaginary competition", because this is exactly the impression I get when I read the replies of other posters. Some of them systematically change what others wrote and then reply just to try to submit some post giving them the impression that they are winning that "imaginary competition". Whereas other posters pick some unrelated stuff from Wikipedia and post it in their reply, giving them the impression that they are not still out of the "imaginary competition"... Several people have noticed, in public way and several times, the silly behaviour of those other posters, but this seems to be the first time that you write something to one of them. Moreover, this is the second time that 'Royston uses ad hominem and insults against me. If my memory does not fail he was warned by a moderator in another forum. Although I was warmly received when I joined the forum, I am seriously considering if I will continue here or not. Regards.

Where in the chapter "1.1 Mechanics of a Particle" of Goldstein's classic textbook you find that a classical particle must be zero-dimensional? I do not find necessary to introduce such requirement in the concept of particle. Precisely the concept of "classical electron radius" was obtained in classical physics. Of course, I am not saying that this classical model was realistic. The next is not clear for me. Do you consider a massless object a particle? This is not true. As Cohen-Tannoudji states in his textbook on QM: There are many more examples of quantum systems whose state is not described by a wavefunction. In the double slit experiment, what is measured is the position of the particles (plural), the particles are always detected (we know that the particles are there). Next is the typical sequence of such one experiment. (a) is the detector when only eleven electrons were used. (e) is the detector when the experiment is repeated with thousand of electrons: There exists an old interpretation of QFT, where particles are excitations of a field. But there is a problem or two... First, a field is not observable, by definition. It makes no sense to select as basic building blocks of nature non-observable stuff. What one detects in experiments as those made at CERN are particles never fields. Second, the model of fields is based in many approximations (infinite N, harmonics, free fields...). Third, it is possible to explain all the phenomena associated to QED without fields. This is the no-fields approach to QED, sometimes named the action-at-a-distance-approach. This is my favourite approach. Today field theory is considered an effective theory, not a fundamental theory. Therefore, another reason for which is not reliable to associate the concept of particle to the field is that a field is not fundamental. I do not know what do you mean by "still requires a wave and particle description". I do not know a single experiment in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, cosmology... which cannot be explained by the known theories of particles. In fact this fact is the reason for which S. Weinberg and other Nobel winners use the Wigner definition of particle. As the CERN emphasizes in its own website: By "everything" they mean everything known up to now.