I also understand what your saying about it all being physics but I'm trying to distinguish classical from quantum because both are being observed either independantly or simultaneously.
Put it this way then: why only classical or quantum? Why not quantum field theory? or String theory? Or quantum information theory? Or any number of other possibilities besides getting hung up over whether something is "classical" or "quantum"?
Further your quote said, they are both happening at the same time which is precicely what I'm saying.
They are not "both happening at the same time", but we measure both types of behaviors at the same time (i.e., particle and wave
behaviors, not particles and waves). If something is behaving like a particle and a wave at the same time, it is fundamentally, completely, utterly, and in all other ways
non-classical. The most important thing to understand is the difference between showing that some system can
behave like it is composed of particles or
behave like it is waves, but if it can behave like both at the same time, then it is neither.
This is where Schrödinger's cat comes in:
"At the same time, it was also recognized early that the predictions of quantum theory imply that, by coupling a microscopic system to a macroscopic system, these quantum features should be transferable to the classical appearing objects around us, in obvious contradiction to our experience. Of course, no other example has illustrated this problem of the quantum-to-classical transition more poignantly and drastically than Schr¨odingers infamous cat, which appears, by the verdict of quantum theory, to be doomed into a netherworldy superposition of being alive and dead.
In this paradox, Schrödinger imagined a cat confined to a box. Inside the box, the decay of an unstable atom serves as a trigger for the hammer to break a vial containing poison. The release of the poison will then kill the cat. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, the atom is at all times described by a superposition of decayed and not decayed. The feature of quantum entanglement (see below) then implies that this superposition spreads to the total system containing the cat, hammer, and poison, which must then be described by a superposition of two states which seem mutually exclusive according to our experience. One state corresponds to the atom not yet decayed, the hammer untriggered, the vial unharmed, and thus the cat alive. The other state represents a situation in which the atom has decayed, the hammer has broken the vial, and the poison thus released has killed the cat.
The second part of the paradox is established by the appearance of an external observer. When the observer opens the box, standard quantum theory predicts that she will collapse the superposition onto one of its two component states. Thus it is ensured that the observer will perceive only either one of these states, in agreement with our experience. The observer would therefore seem to suddenly decide the fate of the cat by simply looking at the unfortunate animal. The paradox, then, consists of the simple question: What was the state of the cat before the observer opened the box? Alive or dead, both alive and dead, or neither? Has this question any meaning at all?" pp. 2-3 of Schlosshauer's
Decoherence and the Quantum-to-Classical Transition (
The Frontiers Collection).
The idea that something is both a particle and a wave is akin to saying that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, and further that it only takes one form or the other if we look.
When you send one particle through two slits it ends up showing an interference pattern. Why? My guess would be because the one wave that is the one particle became two waves because of the two slits just like the water example. A particle can only do this if it is being interfered with almost identically to the way two water waves interfere with each other.
A particle cannot do this. Period. That's it. A particle is a particle, and when it hits something, it reacts like a particle. A wave is a wave, and when it interacts with another wave in a local region, the two interfere with one another
You can shoot molecules of water at slits your whole life, and you never find them doing creating interference patterns.
When sending one particle at a time the interference patter emerges at random intervals but essentially shows that they are a wave and spread out in order to give the same type of data a water wave would.
A water wave would not. Nor would a sound wave. It takes two waves to interfere with one another.
If the particle does not interfere with itself it will not show an interference pattern.
A particle
cannot show an interference pattern. Interference is the product of interaction between waves.
What is classical mechanics? When did it appear? After Newton? If so, then what are we to say of the fundamentally changed versions aft the work of people like Laplace, Hamilton, Maxwell, Rutherford, Young, etc.? The physics of Newton was very different than the physics of the 19th century. Yet we call it Newtonian physics, or classical physics. The reason is that even though much work was done before and after Newton, and even thought things like fields and waves and equations of motion were constantly being added, changed, updated, etc., nobody thought "wait a minute, there is no phlogiston! Classical physics is wrong!" Likewise, nobody said "well, we have to figure out what's going on here, because classical physics says the atom is like plum pudding, but it seems like it has a center with electrons orbiting it. So which atoms are "classical" and which are "nuclear""?
It was just physics, and even though it changed, none of these changes really altered the way physics understood reality. They just thought they now understood it better.
Quantum physics was an entirely different ball game. It completely altered physics in such a fundamental way that the founders, Einstein included, detested it. Einstein spent hears trying to show that Quantum theory was fundamentally flawed. He failed. So did everyone else (Rosen, Bell, Schrödinger and his infamous cat, etc.). Einstein and others seemed to have little difficulty with the idea that space and time were fundamentally related, because the idea of a reference frame wasn't new, and thus as radical as the STR and GTR were, they only changed how we experienced reality in ways that matter for science fiction, or perhaps SETI. Spacetime and spacetime curvature may not be the way we experience reality, but the fact that a someone on a space shuttle comes back having experienced a couple of microseconds less than I did doesn't alter things for practical purposes.
Quantum physics is a theory about all of matter. The reason Schrödinger's cat is a "paradox" is not just the duality, but the realization (which has only increased as we have observed quantum processes at play at the molecular level and above), that this utterly foreign idea of matter being fundamentally nonlocal is not only counter to everything we experience, but makes up everything we are.
Thus, if all it took was saying "the particle is behaving like two wave. Problem solved." Einstein, Podesky, Rosen, Bohr, Bohm, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and others would not have spent their entire lives trying to figure out what was going on.
Further there would not be empty spaces with no particles if the particle was just everywhere going through walls.
There is no such thing as empty space precisely because quantum states involve being in multiple states (and "places") at the same time. The question is what we can perceive.
Why can we detect interference after shooting single "particles" down 2, or 3, or more slits
only if we let the "particles" go unobserved? Because observation fundamentally changes their state, nature, and behavior. What are we doing when we put up a screen to detect where the particles hit? Observing.
The experiment shows that the particles are interfered with at random but not so random that any path is possible.
They don't show that at all. And subsequent experiments have throughly disproved this, quite apart from the fact that saying "particles" can show an interference pattern is like saying that time can act like a particle.
