## The Myth of Wave / Particle Duality

This posting describes some of the History, which many people may be bypassing, in their appreciation of Quantum Mechanics.

About until the 1920s, ‘light’ was largely thought to consist of waves. But a problem with that was, how to explain, why light can travel through apparently empty space. After all, the light that reaches us from distant stars is not fundamentally different, from light that originates on Planet Earth. And until the 1920s, it was believed that there exists a mysterious “Aether“, which transmitted light through space.

A basic premise of wave-propagation, such as in the case of sound-waves, is that there must first be some sort of medium, to conduct the waves, which in the case of sound may be air. But the need for the existence of a medium, also explains why there is no sound in space.

But during the 1920s, the existence of an aether was disproved. Decisively. And so another explanation was needed, of what constitutes light. And the thought seemed more logical, that particles can easily travel through empty space – hence, photons. Even though this was not actually the first form in which photons were theorized.

But then obviously, this raises questions, about how these particles are supposed to relate to waves, where waves were at first easier to observe.

I think that the way many people today are presented, what Quantum-Mechanics consists of, is just, “Wave / Particle Duality”. But then what many students believe – and what I once believed myself – is, that Quantum Mechanics holds some sort of secret key, as to how Matter and Energy might simultaneously consist of particles and waves. And in reality, QM holds no such decisive, secret answers. The only real secret which QM may hold, is a detail that could be embarrassing to the present way in which QM works.

## Self-Educating about Perpendicular Matrices with Complex Elements

One of the key reasons for which my class was taught Linear Algebra, including how to compute Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors of Matrices, was so that we could Diagonalize Symmetrical Matrices, in Real Numbers. What this did was to compute the ‘Perpendicular Matrix’ of a given matrix, in which each column was one of its Eigenvectors, and which was an example of an Orthogonal Matrix.  (It might be the case that what was once referred to as a Perpendicular Matrix, may now be referred to as the Orthogonal Basis of the given matrix,?)

Having computed the perpendicular matrix P of M, it was known that the matrix product

PT M P = D,

which gives a Diagonal Matrix ‘D’. But, a key problem my Elementary Linear class was not taught to solve, was what to do if ‘M’ had complex Eigenvalues. In order to be taught that, we would need to have been taught in general, how to combine Linear Algebra with Complex Numbers. After that, the Eigenvectors could have been computed as easily as before, using Gauss-Jordan Elimination.

I have brushed up on this in my old Linear Algebra textbook, where the last chapter writes about Complex Numbers. Key facts which need to be understood about Complex Vector Spaces, is

• The Inner Product needs to be computed differently from before, in a way that borrows from the fact that complex numbers naturally have conjugates. It is now the sum, of each element of one vector, multiplied by the conjugate, of the corresponding element of the other vector.
• Orthogonal and Symmetrical Matrices are relatively unimportant with Complex Elements.
• A special operation is defined for matrices, called the Conjugate Transpose, A* .
• A Unitary Matrix now replaces the Orthogonal Matrix, such that A-1 = A* .
• A Hermitian Matrix now replaces the Symmetrical Matrix, such that A = A* , and the elements along the main diagonal are Real. Hermitian Matrices are also easy to recognize by inspection.
• Not only Hermitian Matrices can be diagonalized. They have a superset, known as Normal Matrices, such that A A* = A* A . Normal Matrices can be diagonalized.

This could all become important in Quantum Mechanics, considering the general issue known to exist, by which the bases that define how particles can interact, somehow need to be multiplied by complex numbers, to describe accurately, how particles do interact.