It seems that my last communications on this thread, have left others with the perception of 'wrongness' on my part. This would be a misinterpretation of where I have been coming from throughout this thread, so I'm happy to return to it, to clarify. I personally, would never be sure that a pure
perspective, deliberately adopted as a way of visualising a path towards unification, could ever be viewed as ‘wrong’, myself. Perspective adjustment is a perfectly legitimate method which often leads to major steps forward … particularly when the individual components of the discussion
are not in dispute. It is a quite legitimate technique.
I’m also very happy to admit that the issues raised, (in history), by the UV Catastrophe .. have caused me to think deeply and research widely, and if I were to take the easy path, I’d surely be following in the footsteps of many others, (and also in the wake of many great scientists), who possess, (and possessed), far greater brain-power, insights and scientific skills than myself. If I were to do this, I fully recognise that I might then be fortunate enough to catch what I’m sure will be, extraordinarily clear glimpses of others’ profound insights. That being said, I will nonetheless attempt to stand behind a perhaps massively feeble, (by comparison), and probably already, well-trodden path, only as an attempt at perhaps, glimpsing at a possible pathway towards potential unification of the presently, but apparently separate and overlapping, QM and classical ‘worlds’.
So here goes ..
I have stated throughout this thread, many times in fact, that classical could be viewed as having holes, discontinuities and inaccuracies (in the past), which were in need of further development during the same era as the emergence of QM thinking. I think it is probably fair to say that QM 'filled in' those holes, by revising the basic elements of classical, and in this particular case, through the development of the packetised view of particles, given the name ‘photons’.
From the historical perspective, as I understand it, all this emerged from Planck's thinking on the Equipartition Theorem .. ie: derived from classical statistical mechanics.
So, QM could perhaps, also be viewed as having unified thermodynamics (described in statistical mechanics), with particle and wave mechanics. Personally, from the perspective I’ve chosen to adopt in this thread, I can also see that it might be the
unification of these domains, which eventually sorted out the UV catastrophe problem. Ie: not so much the particle we call a ‘photon’, but more importantly, the unifying aspects of the concepts behind it.
In this sense, and as it seems that there might not be anything specifically ‘non-classical’ about these three areas of physics, there also appears to be nothing particularly ‘non-classical’ about using these to describe a photon, (which seems to be the way a photon is usually described, anyway). Admittedly QM recombined these three areas of classical, in a very unexpected way, but at the end of the day, the fundamental principles still have classical descriptions at their core.
Photons might be recognised as a ‘quantum concept’, but so are particles of all types. The concepts of photon oscillation, or the energy emitted being in discrete packets proportional to the frequency, all seem to be very classical descriptions of behaviours at the core of the blackbody spectrum.
The description of the photon itself, also seems to involve fairly classical particle terms such as mass and charge. The QM interpretation of ‘spin’ may be unique to QM (fair enough), but it also comes from the concept of angular momentum. It is clear that spin
is where QM does start to show unique aspects, so this may the fundamental aspect which answers my initial question. Whether spin manifests itself in some macroscopically observable behaviours, I’m unclear about and as such, I’m happy to concede that it probably exists. (Perhaps the Pauli exclusion principle leads to other examples ?).
Spin is the kind of thing I’m looking for .. as opposed to the usually cited, ‘quantum weirdness’.
So, if there
is a way of describing fundamental photon properties directly resulting in the phenomenon apparent in a blackbody spectrum, and these can be described in classical terms, are these photon behaviours really an example of a distinguishing QM concept ? If they can be described in classical terms, is the UV Catastrophe really then evidence of the ‘failure’ of classical particle physics, or does it represent the successful unification of fundamental classical principles which then went on to achieve the precision needed, to accurately predict the spectrum ?
Folks, I’ll be perfectly candid by saying that I really don’t know the answers to these questions. This being said, I invite more knowledgeable others, to participate in commentary to help me continue this line of enquiry, (... or otherwise - which is also a perfectly legitimate outcome).
I’m happy to leave this thread with an understanding which goes in either direction.
Cheers and best regards.
