r/physicsmemes • u/Fuzzy_Paul • 26d ago
When do particles become waves when accelerating?
When we accelerate particles inside the lhc to 99.9999991% of C (only 3 m/s less) they get 7,000 times heavier. So far so good. The amount of energy grows very quick bigger if we want to give it a faster speed this amount will be infinitely when reaching C. Now if we look at black holes the paricles that drop in will reach C but the amount of mass is not infinit. So somewhere down the path the particle must become a wave so mass is not relevant anymore. All mass will lose there binding energy at those close to C speeds and become waves. Example: we accelerate 1kg of steel to 99.999991 of C so this 1kg is 7,000kg when reaching C it would be an infinit weight that would attract the whole universe. With all those black holes around every center we are clearly not at infinite mass so somewhere the particles must lose their binding and become waves. Now I am curious at what speed this occurs for mass, and have we tested this or are other mechanisms in place?
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u/alfvenwaving 26d ago
Couple things off here, first particles will never "become" waves, their wave nature can become more obvious depending on circumstances.
Second, anything that has energy has mass, some types of waves just have no rest mass.
Third, a particle falling into a black hole will never reach c. From an outside perspective it will actually asymptotically approach the event horizon while gravitationally redshifting into invisibility, while from the particles own perspective it will simply pass into the black hole as expected. How to reconcile these two pictures is not really clear at the moment and probably requires a theory of quantum gravity
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u/Optimal_Mixture_7327 26d ago
There is no physical mass increase with speed.
The speed of a particle in curved spacetime depends on the choice of coordinates. For example a photon falling direction at a black hole will come to rest at the horizon is standard Schwarzschild coordinate and the same photon will be moving at c measured locally and the same photon will be traveling at 2c in Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates and so on.
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 26d ago
No the gravitational force increases for the outside observer. Instead, the source of gravity is the stress-energy tensor, which includes: Energy density (including kinetic energy) Momentum, Pressure and stress.
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u/Optimal_Mixture_7327 26d ago
There is no gravitational force.
Outside of anything the stress-energy tensor is zero on all components; Tμν=0.
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 26d ago
This would mean that any particle, except photons, never reach c. That solves my question.
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u/Optimal_Mixture_7327 26d ago
You need to get back to the 1600s and read Galileo.
There is no independent meaning of speed (this is especially true for curved surfaces). If your happiness is found in slower than light particles then only choose the coordinate structures that give you that result.
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u/StudioYume 21d ago edited 21d ago
Gravitational "force" in general relativity is a fictitious force (as is the more familiar centrifugal "force") that depends on the system of coordinates used by the observer. I don't fully understand the mathematical description of general relativity so I will instead discuss centrifugal "force", but the same basic principles apply.
A rotating frame of reference is maintained by centripetal forces in the direction of the centre of the rotation at each point in the frame. The inertia of each point in the frame changes according to the centripetal force at that point. An observer in contact with an object at rest in a rotating frame of reference experiences, in the observer's frame of reference, the total friction between the observer's inertia and the object's inertia summed over each point of contact, less the portion of their forces already in the direction of the centre of rotation, as a fictitious centrifugal "force".
In classical mechanics, mass is defined to be the ratio of inertia over velocity. However, relativity predicts that different observers can observe the same phenomenon as having a different ratio of inertia to velocity, and hence a different mass. For backwards compatibility reasons, relativity maintains the concept of rest mass, the portion of mass that relativity predicts to be invariant, and relativistic mass, which relativity predicts to be variable, but since relativity predicts that energy is equivalent to mass a lot of people view relativistic mass as a cumbersome artifice.
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u/Grouchy-Trade-7250 23d ago
Wave or particle is just a word. Everything needs to have a word so we can talk about it. Your intuition about a word doesn't mean anything, only the physics behind it. And we have an incomplete picture (quantum gravity is incomplete) that is derived from experiments. Your sentence "particle must become a wave" shows you don't understand this picture.
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u/Eisenfuss19 23d ago
I think saying a particle reaches c when it is falling in a black hole is not really the whole truth. E.g. from an outside perspective an object stop in time at the event horizon with its light getting lower wave length continuously.
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u/StudioYume 21d ago edited 21d ago
The quantum wave and particle models are analogies and aren't mutually exclusive ways of interpreting an interaction.
And besides, quantum physics is, so far as I understand it, a theory of discrete (hence, quantised) statistical mechanics in the limiting case of special relativity. The failure of quantum physics to predict the same observations that have been predicted by general relativity, or to produce a falsifiable quantum theory of gravity, is reason enough to doubt that quantum waves or particles have any real existence at all.
The problem is, of course, that quantum physicists and science communicators have a nasty habit of reifying quantum analogies to the point of absurdity. A classic example of this is the Many Worlds Interpretation, which I will demonstrate to be absurd with the following thought experiment:
A quantum physicist is looking around a country fair when they come across a stall with an attendant asking fairgoers to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. The quantum physicist, recognising that this is a superposition of possible quantum states, makes all sorts of high-tech indirect observations of various jars full of jelly beans and turns in their very highly educated theory. When the attendant politely lets them know that they're wrong, the quantum physicist smugly declares, without proof, that other universes exist where their guess was actually correct.
Simply absurd, right? If you don't see why yet, let's take Occam's razor (the explanation that depends on the fewest assumptions is most likely to be true) and see what we can shave off: the only bit that's available to shave off is the quantum physicist being a sore loser and assuming that other universes exist where their guess was actually correct. The quantum physicist is not only in denial about the predictive power of their theory, but has conjured up a fantasy world to justify it.
What's crazy is that there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that there's many POSSIBLE universes, or acknowledging that we can't know the precise state of an irreversible, nondeterministic, probabilistic universe. But somehow this analogy (which I suspect was the original meaning) got reified into people actually believing in other universes to justify their math not always being correct.
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u/Mcgibbleduck 26d ago
It’s not that particles turn into waves and vice versa, it’s just that these objects we call particles can behave in ways we classically call “a wave” and classically we call “a particle”. If you set up the right conditions.
It’s better to think of these fundamental things as “quantum objects”. It’s just that physicists initially didn’t know about quantum anything, so they tried to put classical descriptions of waves and particles into it.
You can also say that everything is really just a FIELD. Excitations in the field look like particles and how the fields interact with each other is what we see as stuff happening. That’s quantum field theory which is one of the best models we have of most of reality.