Wavelike Particles And Particulate Waves Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 500-1):

The upshot is that a particle of momentum p seems to be a periodic thing, like a wave, where there is a universal relationship between the wavelength λ and the magnitude p of its momentum … 

The wavelength λ, associated with a particle of momentum p, is called its de Broglie wavelength, after the highly insightful French aristocrat and physicist Prince Louis de Broglie, who first suggested, in 1923, that all material particles have a wavelike nature with a wavelength given by the above formula. Moreover, in accordance with the requirements of relativity, the particle should also have a frequency ν … 

These kinds of consideration led to the conclusion that an ordinary particle displays wavelike behaviour, this having a universal relationship to the particle’s rest-mass as determined by the Planck and de Broglie formulae.  

But, in the previous two decades, a converse to this had already been established, demonstrating that entities previously thought of as purely wavelike — basically Maxwell’s oscillating electric and magnetic fields as the constituents of light — had also to be viewed as having a particulate nature, again consistent with the Planck and de Broglie formulae.

 

Blogger Comments:

If wave-particle complementarity is viewed from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, then a wave constitutes quantum potential and a particle constitutes an actual instance of that potential. The crest of a wave measures the most probable location of a particle, the frequency measures the number of probability peaks per time interval, and the wavelength measures the time interval between probability peaks. It is in this sense that wavelength is 'associated' with the momentum (mass x velocity) of a particle.