0. Matt Strassler wrote a dumbed down popularization (“Why short range forces short range?”) that needs further deconstruction to be comprehensible.
2. Strassler has a tendency to overcomplicate what he tries to simplify for his lay readers by trying to coin cute words like "wavicle" in order to avoid mathematics or rather to protect his lay readers from the proprietary language physicists call “mathematics”.
In scholastic fields such as academic physics one of the highest rewards a professional physicist can hope to have is to coin a word that all his colleagues accept and use. Of course, the top reward is to have a physical unit named after you but for this you need to be a dead white male. After all, there are only a limited number of units that can be named but anyone can invent a new word such as “wavicle” and try to make it accepted into the physics jargon. You may obtain more professional points by establishing a new name then having published 100 papers in high prestige scholarly journals.
It looks like so far Strassler is the only one using the cute word “wavicle” because this is not really a new physical quantity but a new name for an old concept, namely, wave-particle duality. Strassler is just playing naming games.
3. The problem for me is that in physics fundamental words like field, wave and particle are equivocations. These words have at least two meanings, one valid in the "classical" realm and one valid in the "quantum" realm.
4. Just as Aristotelians divided the world into the terrestrial and celestial realms, each governed by distinct rules, modern physicists have partitioned the universe into two separate domains governed by different physical laws (three, if we include General Relativity). It is no surprise, then, that physicists have spent over a century attempting to "unify" these conceptual silos they have created—so far without success.
5. In the case of waves, the word “wave” refers to two fundamentally different entities both called waves. One of the waves can be "scaled up and down" arbitrarily and the other has a limit on how much it can be scaled down. These are two different entities.
6. The unit of study in physics for millennia has been the "particle" or the "atom".
7. Particles were defined as the indivisible units that made up the world. Physicists called these units "matter". Newton formalized this atomic materialist worldview and added his supernatural universal cause of all motion acting between particles and setting them in motion. Newton called this universal occult cause "force" and by propaganda he had the world accept his supernatural cause as a physical cause. Huygens, Leibniz and in our time Einstein all recognized that Newton’s “force” was a supernatural cause and criticized Newton for introducing occult causes to physics. But Newtonism won because Newton had successfully established his own school based on his supernatural cause he called “force”. Newton replaced Aristotle as the master of European scholasticism and his disciples filled in the gaps in Newton’s Principia and created the consistent system of units we know today as “Newtonian mechanics.” Newtonism also won over Einstein’s attempts to replace Newton’s occult force with his own gravitational theories that did not include supernatural causes, that is, his General Theory of Relativity.
8. But experiments done in the early 20th century confused physicists and they decided that the unit of study of physics must be fields not particles.
10. But physicists never dumped the word particle.
11. They started to call some properties of fields such as excitations "particles" and thus entered the realm of scholastic sophistry and proved that an atomic materialist worldview is the unquestionable dogma of physics. All experiments, regardless of what they say, must be interpreted to support the dogma of atomic materialism. Even if this can only be done by the sophistry of calling waves “particles”.
12. I think physicists' real problem is a professional problem not physics problem. They've been doing business as "particle physicists" for such a long time that they are unwilling to change their professional title to "field physicists" or "excitations of the field physicists" instead they keep changing the meaning of the word particle to save their professional title.
Your comment is helpful, thanks. I also discussed this with chatgpt and he said similar things: “Strassler’s term "indivisible waves" seems to be his unique phrasing to make these ideas more intuitive for a lay audience. Physicists usually use more formal language, such as ‘quantized excitations of a field’ or ‘wave-particle duality.’
But my problem is different.
Below I use the word “particle” to mean “a three dimensional indivisible unit,” and nothing else. A particle is not a mathematical point as Strassler suggests when he describes a particle as a “dot.” And a particle is not a wave. If Strassler decides to call waves “particles”, waves do not magically become particles. Ever since the scientific revolution we have not explained natural phenomena by magic.
I read Strassler quote again:
In a quantum world such as ours, the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves, which for historical reasons we call “particles.” Despite their name, these objects aren’t little dots...
My interpretation of this quote is like this:
> In a quantum world such as ours the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves...
This means that the world is made of quantum fields and fields are waves and not particles [particle are indivisible units, Strassler calls them “little dots”].
This is a clear statement. Strassler is saying that our world is quantum and it is made of fields. Fields are not particles. The unit of study of physics is now fields, not particles. There are no particles in this world because the field is made of waves. These waves are not particles. But they differ from the classical waves because they can only be scaled down to a certain length.
> ...which for historical reasons we call “particles”. Despite their name these objects aren’t little dots [they are not indivisible units with extension].
Strassler’s quote makes it clear that the building blocks of the world are waves, not particles. In this world of ours there are no particles in the sense of indivisible units. It is only that Strassler chooses to call these waves “particles.” This is just a naming convention.
If someone decides to call “monkey” the animal we know and love as a “donkey”, obviously the long eared cute animal will not become a monkey just because someone decided to call it “monkey”. This play on words can only create confusion. If we are calling an animal with the name of another animal we are only exposing ourself as a sophist.
This is exactly what Strassler is doing. He is intentionally trying to corrupt the meanings of well established words by loading them with new meanings. He is playing naming games. Calling a wave particle does not make the wave a particle. Then why call a wave particle? No sane person would call a wave “particle” unless he has something to hide and wants to deceive us or even deceive himself.
To me, if true, the fact that the building blocks of the world are waves is a big and fundamental discovery because it proves that the world is not atomic and matterful as Newton assumed. There are no forces acting between particles because particles do not exist.
This is where the problem lies for physicists. Atomic materialism is their professional dogma and they need to save it despite the experiments contradicting it. But this dogma cannot be saved by using sophistry and calling waves particles.
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