"AS ABOVE SO BELOW": Ain't Necessarily So.

[KaiduOrkhon]

Continuity - Discontinuity: 'Waveicles'

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by K. B. Robertson.

 

The superfluously conflicting schools of thought (Circa 1900 thru 1930 and ever since) on Max Planck's - Helmholtz inspired, Rubens confirmed - Quantum Mechanics'.

 

The 1897 dated observation of black body radiation led Planck to attempt to observe an invariable increase in entropy, which resulted in null thought and laboratory experiments; leading to Planck's 1900 revision of Boltzmann's alternately continuous and discontinuous statistical interpretaton of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (later paralleled by Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy)

 

It is only obscurely known or recognized that, although there are indeed opposing - J.J. Thompson-electron-launched - arguments on this subject, Einstein and Planck were in the same camp, along with Schroedinger, regarding the much misunderstood 'problem' of microcosmic 'continuity' of wave-field theory, and 'discontinuity' of so called 'particles'...

 

Leading to an undrained, ever rising swamp of determinacy and indeterminacy, entanglement, water ripple and shotgun pellets rolling sideways and speeding linearly through vertical and horizontal slits, in the ever imposing shadow of assumptive continuous wave eclipsed by the non-prevailing 'ultraviolet catastrophe' and the newly incumbent black body radiation - vocabularized in electrical theory and thermodynamics - introducing the circle of broken lines forming a sought-after curve but still leading to an apparently non discardable discontinuous 'quantum leap', because energy in discontinuous portions cannot be infinitely divided; establishing that radiant energy is not quantitatively infinite - in unequal units, Planck resolved that the frequency of the considered discontinuous wave is directly related to its duration, or more specifically, its length.

 

This was unexpected because it defined a seemingly antithetical, self contradicting equality in discontinuous and continuous energy packets - 'quantum', which, literally translated from Latin equals 'what quantity'. It came to pass that, depending on how these units are measured and otherwise evaluated, they alternately manifest as 'waves', and, as 'particles' - continuity, and discontinuity.

 

From this arose a further quandary of defining the dynamics of what was projected, compared to the method or conditions of projection.

 

Quantum Mechanics (perhaps better understood as 'quantum dynamics') was not altogether contradictory to the - at that time, much established continuous wave theory - which was often confirmed in delicate laboratory observations as well as more pedestrian observations such as the often exemplified fact that a swinging pendulum loses its momentum in a continuous declination of kinetic energy. Quantum Mechanics contests this.

 

Black body radiation occurs in discontinuous packages of microcosmically indivisible energy units of erg seconds, where the individual, indivisible unit is designated as 'h', for the numerically expressed value of:

 

.0000000000000000000000000066, or, 6,6 x 1027

 

Establishing that ordinary sizes as perceived by human observers were not the end measure of what was occurring in the much smaller realms of physicality and dynamics.

 

Max Planck had not excluded the previous standards of observation and measurement, whereas, he certainly had established that the characteristics of the larger physical world were not aligned with those of the smaller physical world, and that the Latin statement, ut infra, ut supra and conversely ('as above, so below'), was a generalisation but not a law.

Atomic (microcosmic) physics was understood to be in its early stages and the Planck dynamics were a portention that many other unexpected discoveries were due, as the science of observing and measuring microcosmic reality progressed - the evolutions of which were alternately championed and challenged, by Planck, Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, Shroedinger and many others - that space does not allot for in the format of this dissertation...