What is Consciousness?

[Yerda]

I'm just curious... If this is the case and photons don't exist, then what are they actually "colliding" with the Large Hadron Collider?

Hadrons. I think the same quantum weirdness applies though.

 

[Runewolf1973]

Hadrons. I think the same quantum weirdness applies though.

But a proton is a hadron, is it not?

 

[Yerda]

But a proton is a hadron, is it not?

I think so, yes.

 

[Runewolf1973]

I think so, yes.

Lol. I just realized I got my photons mixed up with my protons. Haha. Now it makes sense.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I'm just curious... If this is the case and photons don't exist, then what are they actually "colliding" with the Large Hadron Collider?

The problem is one of language, and one I blame on the developers of modern physics from Planck, Einstein, Lorentz, Born, Bohr, von Neumann, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, etc., to Dirac, Pauli, Gell-Mann, Bohm, Fermi, Wigner, etc. Essentially, the language from classical physics continued to be used, only it was used to refer to fundamentally different phenomena (or even non-phenomena). Photons were the original quanta, singular "quantum". Einstein won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that positing light comes in discrete "packets" explained why, when light was shined on metals, upping the intensity only resulted in a "stepwise" increase in the number of electrons that were "knocked out" by the light. Put differently, if light were a wave, then it would be some spread-out, nonlocal "thing" which, if you changed its wavelength or frequency, should change continuously and its effect on e.g., electrons should too. It turns out that when you change the intensity (I'm using this term informally) of light, it won't necessarily mean more or less electrons get knocked out, which for a wave is not just weird, but wrong. However, if you imagine a wave of light as composed of enormous numbers of discrete "packets" or quanta, as Einstein did, you can explain this effect (the photoelectric effect) by assuming Planck's "hail mary" constant as a constant with which the frequency of light must be multiplied in order to give the "energy". Put differently and simplistically, the "energy" of a light beam doesn't change like a wave but makes discrete "jumps", and thus changing intensity is really changing the number of "packets" sufficient to knock electrons out of orbit.

Not a great explanation, but the main point is that Einstein showed light seemed to behave as if it were a particle, and when we think of photons we tend to think of particles. However, a century or so of research before Einstein (and some after) continued to confirm he was wrong: it behaves like a wave. Turns out, both answers are wrong because neither waves nor particles exist: everything is wave-like but behaves approximately "point"-like or "localized" given sufficiently large scales. Another issue, and an even worse one, is that things at the level of photons, electrons, etc., seem to exhibit, on a very fundamental level, the dynamics of a system governed by (non-classical) probabilities. Indeed, because of this and because they seem to be somehow probabilistic, quantum mechanical systems and therefore those of quantum field theory (and therefore the standard model of particle physics and therefore scientists at CERN) do not generally distinguish between mathematical representations that have no physical analogue and those that do. This is partly because quantum mechanics, which particle physics is an extension of, prevents us from actually making statements about the nature of what is measured apart from measurement (i.e., we can determine whether we will measure light as a wave or a particle even after an experiment is finished). It is partly because extensions of quantum physics involve deriving "particles" and other phenomena mathematically in waves that can't really be empirically determined (all experiments can tell us is given a particular state of affairs, a specific type of measurement will yield another particular state of affairs with a given probability). That is to say that in order to e.g., make QM compatible with special relativity, we have to change the nature of quantum systems themselves, but mathematically.

Thus in quantum physics and particle physics, photons, protons, quarks, leptons, etc., are not only primarily mathematical entities, but are of a fundamentally different nature depending upon whether we are dealing with quantum mechanics or particle physics.

So modern physics retained terms like "system", invented "observables" to refer to things that are mathematical functions rather than things which can be observed, introduced the idea of "wave-particle" duality which is like "dead-alive" duality, and otherwise confused things except for practicing physicists and those with similarly sufficient experience (and sometimes not even then!).