Perspective And Knowledge

 “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge”- doubtlessly that is a very powerful thought. In physics, we’re here to describe how the nature(or the universe, in a large scale) works, in the language of mathematics. And to do so we’ve to think, imagine to decode the aspects into mathematics or as a combination of simple fundamental properties.  These thoughts consist – “why”, “how” and “what will” happen. But how knowledge empowers or changes our thoughts?

When our ancestors thought Earth to be the centre of the universe all the thoughts were thought with an angle of this fact. Like day and night, motion of other planets etc. But when the idea of solar centricity(a result of deep thinking of course) came, scientists( or philosophers, then) started thinking every astrophysical phenomenon with that point of view i.e. the angle of thoughts changed!

An Example!

And now, I am sharing the evolution of my personal point of view about the nature of light.

"Wavy Strings":

My father told me that light is an “electromagnetic wave”. Well I didn’t understand anything at that time, just remembered the term “electromagnetic”. Still I was familiar with “wave”. Although it was difficult and confusing to think light as a wave, after a while I was able to think light as tiny “wavy strings”. This idea lasted for a very long time.

"Bouncy Balls":

Then I came to know about the particle nature. Bang! I started saying everyone that newton was right and there’s nothing wavy about light. They are just like "bouncy balls"! Well, it didn’t last long.

The Poster Boy - "Dual Nature":

It was the most confusing part. Haha, as I’ve said, “dual nature” was the most used term. Me and my friends always tried to fit that term in anywhere we could. I knew that  “light sometimes behaves like wave and sometimes like particle” – and that’s where the trouble begun. Why and how? Why would light behave like both and how it knows when to behave like what? Is light conscious? A big confusion.

And I tried to solve it. For me it was neither wave nor particle, but something other. Alas! I didn’t give it a name. The idea was like this – “in some cases we can only detect one of its natures, so the other seems to be hidden and we found light to behave like either wave or particle”. Just like from one angle a cylinder seems to be a circle and from another as a square(of course a close one), but actually it’s neither.

A New Perspective:

A new point of view came with my 2nd semester optics books. That nothing exists as “a pure wave”. From the ripples of water to the wave of a rope – everything is the wiggling  of atoms. So as the light. For it here is photon instead. But what about the dual nature then? It depends on the factor that causes light to do anything. When it is comparable to a single photon, in large scale the total effect just add up, showing the particle nature. Which means, what happens to each photon just gets bigger(talking about the effect). And for larger scales(comparable to its wavelenght) the “single photonic effect” get modulated as a whole and represent the wave naure.

I guess quantum mechanics awaits to change this  mode of thought too!

Like Feynman has said – everything should be learnt to be corrected, not permanently. The gained knowledge changes the thought and the changed thought gathers new knowledge – that is the ultimate relationship between thoughts(or the angle or thoughts) and knowledge.