eftychia: Photo of clouds shaped like an eye and arched eyebrow (sky-eye)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 02:26pm on 2006-03-15 under ,

So I was thinking about particle/wave duality and wondering how far it extends. I know that every particle is a wave, but is every wave also a particle?[1] And that got me thinking about sound particles.

Soon I was imagining something like a Bose-Einstein condensate of trapped phonemes.[2] I mean, you couldn't just hold 'em in a glass jar, after all. But what would I do with a stored (or trapped) collection of sound particles once I had it?

Oooh, and once you had sound particles, you could try to bounce photons off of 'em: then even folks without synaesthesia could know what various sounds look like!

Soapy thoughts -- what'cha gonna do but post 'em to LJ and bug everyone else with 'em, eh?

[1] I'll look it up later. I oughta' already know. High school was a long time ago and I never formally studied QM, but yeah, I ought to already know this anyhow. Seems kind of basic.

[2] Yes, I'm aware that phonemes aren't atomic acoustically (even if you think of them as linguistic atoms[3]), but this isn't a rigorous theory or even a serious exploration of a hypothesis; it's just shower-musing. Go with it for the moment. Besides, non-atomic particles (and yeah, I'll always continue to be amused by the fact that atoms aren't atomic) act as waves too, right?[4]

[3] Though that brings up another notion: is information-propogation wavelike? If so, memes would be particles, right? Okay, enough of that for now.

[4] And for anyone wondering, yes I still do want to perform the two-slit experiment with a mass driver and a bunch of Volkswagons and a baseline several AU long. It'd be fun. Okay, maybe with bicycles or toasters if cars would require too long a baseline to get dramatic results.

Mood:: 'quixotic' quixotic
There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] whc.livejournal.com at 07:50pm on 2006-03-15
I think the wave/particle duality only applies to electromagnetic waves, no wave motions in a medium, but I might be wrong.
siderea: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] siderea at 10:39pm on 2006-03-15
Seconded.
 
posted by [identity profile] jmax315.livejournal.com at 12:37am on 2006-03-16
"I know that every particle is a wave, but is every wave also a particle?"

Yes.

"Soon I was imagining something like a Bose-Einstein condensate of trapped phonemes."

The accepted term for a quantum of acoustic energy is phonon. Not sure if you could do a Bose-Einstein condensate of them or not; it depends on their spin characteristics, which I don't know offhand, and am not up to calculating without 4-5 hours of re-learning intermediate QM.

"Though that brings up another notion: is information-propogation wavelike?"

Um. Dunno as anyone's formalized information transfer far enough to answer this one. Information theory kinda sidesteps the notion of _how_ it's transferred, and concentrates on the statistics of the transferred information. On the other hand, the correspondence between information and entropy suggests there might be some meat here...

"If so, memes would be particles, right?"

Well, bits, anyhow. Memes tend to be a little more complex than single bits...

"And for anyone wondering, yes I still do want to perform the two-slit experiment with a mass driver and a bunch of Volkswagons and a baseline several AU long. It'd be fun."

Yeah, it would. If you can get together the rest of the equipment, I'll donate my Volkswagen.
 
posted by [identity profile] jmax315.livejournal.com at 12:44am on 2006-03-16
The best current theory of superconductivity (which is certainly not the last word, as it doesn't adequately account for high-temperature superconductors) essentially explains it as a coupling effect between electrons and phonons; grossly oversimplified, the conduction-band electrons can't scatter off atoms (which, microscopically, is how resistance happens) 'cause there aren't any open states of the right energy in the phonon bands (bouncing an electron off an atom causes mechanical vibrations... that is, creates a phonon).
 
posted by [identity profile] eviltomble.livejournal.com at 01:50am on 2006-03-16
Sounds a bit like solitons to me, although not exactly (they're a *subset* of waves; I remember trying to look up how to make them back at university, and getting nowhere fast, but I did at least find some nice animations of them...).
 
posted by [identity profile] maugorn.livejournal.com at 04:03pm on 2006-03-16
Didn't the plumber and the kid in _The 10,00 Fingers Of Dr T_ build a "Noise Fix" that accomplished the task you describe?

Even tho it was Very Atomic, since it was done with early 60's technology, there's probably some significant upgrades you could do to it now.

It might be worth a call to Dr Seuss's estate. If anyone could build a device that lets you watch music in a Quantum sense, it would be him.
Heck, they might even lend you the prototype.
 
posted by [identity profile] anniemal.livejournal.com at 03:44am on 2006-03-17
Dearlove,
You should maybe just shower. Enjoy the spray. Be here now. Just an antecedent.
jducoeur: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jducoeur at 05:42pm on 2006-03-19
I gather that the relationship is pretty close. There was an interesting article in Scientific American a few months back, discussing how you could perhaps model black holes using sound waves in fluids, and the analogy might teach us some useful things about black holes that we would have trouble figuring out otherwise...

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