Saturday, 19 April 2008

Single particle interference on a large scale

"It is important to note that the interference pattern is built up from single, separate particles. There is no interference between two or more particles during their evolution in the apparatus. Single particle interference is evidenced in our case by two independent arguments...The chance of having two subsequent molecules in exactly the same state of all internal modes is vanishingly small. Therefore, interference in our experiments really is a single particle phenomenon!"

'Quantum interference experiments with large molecules'. American Association of Physics Teachers. Volume 71, No.4, April 2003, by Olaf Nairz, Marcus Arndt and Anton Zeilinger.

This, and other multi-slit experiments with much smaller entities, demonstrate that particles also display wave-like qualities, i.e. they are neither exclusively particles or waves but both, depending also on how they are measured. Thus, particles are non-local, and since matter on a larger scale is composed of countless entities which behave as both particles and waves, then we can assume that perceptible matter is also non-local and both particulate and wavy.