Comment Comment+Clarification (Score 3) 50
Indeed some clarification is in need:
First, Zewail apparently has been pushing these ideas for some time, and Nature just gave him the opportunity to get it publicized a little. This is theory, people aren't going to go simultaneously calculate position and velocity of fundamental particles this afternoon, but he theorizes that with these two conditions met, such a characterization could be possible. As far as I understand, that is all he is claiming.
Second, when I said "he proposes in a recent issue of Nature...that one can solve, USING CLASSICAL PHYSICS (ie: f=ma)..." the (f=ma) is an EXAMPLE of what classical Newtonian physics is. I am not sure how that got misunderstood, but I apologize for my ambiguity. Perhaps it would have been better to simply quote Zewail as I will do now: "But if these waves are added up coherently with well-defined phases, the probability distribution becomes localized in space. The resultant wave packet and its associated de Broglie wavelength has the essential character of a classical particle: a trajectory in space and time with a well-defined (group) velocity and position - a moving classical marble but at atomic scale!" (Nature 2001, 412, p.279).
Even if my explanation was convoluted, I simply hope to get across Zewail's main idea: that quantum uncertainty is no longer an obstacle, and therefore openening the theoretical possibility for the resolution of HUP.
First, Zewail apparently has been pushing these ideas for some time, and Nature just gave him the opportunity to get it publicized a little. This is theory, people aren't going to go simultaneously calculate position and velocity of fundamental particles this afternoon, but he theorizes that with these two conditions met, such a characterization could be possible. As far as I understand, that is all he is claiming.
Second, when I said "he proposes in a recent issue of Nature...that one can solve, USING CLASSICAL PHYSICS (ie: f=ma)..." the (f=ma) is an EXAMPLE of what classical Newtonian physics is. I am not sure how that got misunderstood, but I apologize for my ambiguity. Perhaps it would have been better to simply quote Zewail as I will do now: "But if these waves are added up coherently with well-defined phases, the probability distribution becomes localized in space. The resultant wave packet and its associated de Broglie wavelength has the essential character of a classical particle: a trajectory in space and time with a well-defined (group) velocity and position - a moving classical marble but at atomic scale!" (Nature 2001, 412, p.279).
Even if my explanation was convoluted, I simply hope to get across Zewail's main idea: that quantum uncertainty is no longer an obstacle, and therefore openening the theoretical possibility for the resolution of HUP.
