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Wave-Particle Theory

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A tuning fork vibrates. As it does so, the air within which it exists, transmits the vibration in all directions, weakening as it travels. The vibration reaches another tuning fork, which then vibrates sympathetically.

Consider the original tuning fork as a particle, a single entity. That particle is producing a wave, that induces the same vibration to a lesser amplitude in another particle, which must then maintain its vibration for an interval of time after the original wave has passed - thus it will induce its own set of waves at the same, but softer, pitch.

What is the "sound" that is produced? Is that sound represented by every vibrating particle as the three-dimensional wave travels through various media? Or is that sound the wave, and not the particles?

It is only light that I have heard of as being inseparably both wave and particle. But is sound, when one considers it as both vibrating molecules and the waves of sympathetic transmission, any different than sound in anything other than order and magnitude?

Magnetism, gravity both are self-evidently dependent on a mass, i.e. the substance that is magnetic or dense; and yet that attraction is somehow transmittable, having an impact across both matter and lack-of-matter. Does the fabric of space, distinct from both its constituent parts and the emptiness between them, have a wave-transmission-like behavior, one that transmits gravity and/or magnetism?

It is said that space is not empty at all, but filled with "cosmic rays", so that if "vacuum" becomes "devoid of anything", then the existence of such a thing as a vacuum is nothing more than a postulate. If that is true, then is it the non-emptiness component of space that provides a medium for the transmission of waves, providing both particulateness and interstices within which there is room for vibration?

When wave and particle are observed at low speeds, we can easily separate one from the other. We don't identify the tuning fork as a wave, nor the tuning fork's tone as a particle; yet neither exist without the other. The presence of a wave (pitch) affects a tuning fork tuned to that pitch; and the tuning fork when excited produces that pitch (wave).

Move sufficiently away from the tuning fork, both in the 3-dimensional universe and in a time contraction (such as is produced by stop-motion animation) and the tuning fork can be perceived as a particle (in a sense, as a molecule), and its vibration as an integral expression of its existence when it is stimulated in a certain way.

Rather than looking on light as unique in its wave-particle behavior, we might gain more insight on the nature to the universe if we look for the wave-particle behavior in other entities.

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(c) Michael J. Carroll [March, 2018]