måndag 18 mars 2024

måndag 29 maj 2023

Wave-Particle Duality: Trilogy on Bitchute

I have now completed a "trilogy" on the topic of wave-particle duality and the future of quantum mechanics, summing up and developing some of the ideas presented in this blog:

Episode I

Episode II

Episode III


tisdag 4 april 2023

torsdag 22 juli 2021

The g-factor - a way to obfuscate reality?

In previous blog posts I have put into question the notion that the electron can only have spin of magnitude plus/minus one half of the reduced Planck's constant. It seems more natural to assume that the electron can have instead any integral value of the reduced Planck's constant. Leaving side for the moment the question of the possibility of higher order spins and focusing entirely on the magnitude of the smallest possible spin, a highly legitimate question arises: Have not physicists been able to measure this magnitude accurately?

Indeed, I asked myself this question and looked up an article on the Bohr magneton which says:

In atomic physics, the Bohr magneton (symbol μB) is a physical constant and the natural unit for expressing the magnetic moment of an electron caused by either its orbital or spin angular momentum.



This ought to be clear enough, hence, if we only measure how the electron spin interacts with a magnetic field in the same way be measure other types of angular momenta then we ought to settle this matter. So I was wrong then? Well, there is a catch, further down in the article we read:

The spin angular momentum of an electron is 1/2ħ, but the intrinsic electron magnetic moment caused by its spin is also approximately one Bohr magneton since the electron spin g-factor, a factor relating spin angular momentum to corresponding magnetic moment of a particle, is approximately two

So the g-factor is approximately two, what a coincidence! Or was it rather put to two?

tisdag 24 november 2020

Understanding "photons" from electron spin and dimensional analysis

Historically, the way quantum mechanics evolved seems to be something of the following:

1. Discovery of blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect leads to the corpuscular theory of light, that is, light consists of particles called ”photons”.

2. Bohr derives the hydrogen spectra assuming quantization of angular momentum.

3. The electron double slit experiment leads De Broglie to assume wave-like properties of matter, which in turn leads to the Schrödinger equation.

4. Oh yes, and then we have the discovery that electrons have spin which also happens to be quantized.

No shade should fall upon the pioneers of quantum mechanics that these discoveries might not have come in the correct epistemological order. But now we have the opportunity to take some steps back and revise what we have discovered. Previously, I have advocated the idea of taking the quantized angular momentum of the electron as the starting point of the analysis. If so, would it then be wisest to assume that all other quantized phenomena in nature exist independently of this first assumption or would it be wiser to try to derive other quantization phenomena based on the first assumption?

Here we will try to understand the quantized energy packets o flight, also called ”photons”, based on the quantized electronic spin. First off, what is the dimension of angular momentum?

[angular momentum] = [energy] x [time]

You could imagine the electron saying to the light:

- I can only accept or give away angular momentum in integral packets of h_bar. If it does not have this size I have to give it back to you.

Now, from a dimensional point of view there are various ways this could be accomplished, a greater amount of energy could be provided on a smaller time scale or a smaller amount of energy could be provided on a larger time scale.

Now think for a moment, does light have a natural energy scale or a natural time scale? I would say it has a natural time scale. What is that time scale? Well, the period of one oscillation T. Recall that the frequency f is given by

f = 1/T

Now we get immediately

[quantized energy] = [quantized angular momentum]/T

or with properly scaled quantities

E = h/T = hf

söndag 22 november 2020

Experimental evidence of higher order electron spin?

In a previous post I made the conjecture that electrons can have spins that are any multiple of the reduced Planck's constant, and not just the two discrete values of +/- 1/2 h_bar which we have been taught. Is there any experimental evidence to back this up? I think there might be, have a look at the following image that was taken from an article in Nature:


The experiment performed is the well known double slit experiment with electrons. I have proposed that this experiment can be explained by the Stern-Gerlach phenomenon, that is, the more you widen the other slit the more you increase the inhomogeneity in the magnetic field produced by the moving electron and the electron trajectories are then split according to their spin. As you would expect, lower spins are more probable than higher order spins, although in the image I think I can spot spin up to the order of at least 9. It would not be surprising if the probability follows a binomial distribution.