DAY TWO OF THE LACKADAISICAL MELISSA CHALLENGE
Get Out of My Waves, Dewed!
Don’t call me a particle, man!
The verdict is in — kind of.
We are all waves. You’re waves, I’m waves, Uncle Lester is waves, and the microwave is a wave in more ways than one.
Don’t call it a particle!
I think LL Cool J. said that.
Well, it’s not that simple really — nothing ever is. We are both particles and waves, or a duality of the two, of sorts. You see, biological macromolecules can behave as both particles and waves.
Don’t shoot the messenger, man!
Especially when the messenger doesn’t know what that means.
We can kind of blame Big Al Einstein for this crap. Back in 1905, at 26 years old, Al proposed the idea that light could be both particle and wave. Now I don’t know about you, but when I was 26 I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about chicks and trying to surf “real” waves in SoCal. – Neither was going splendidly.
So what we have established here is Al Einstein was thinking about weird shit at a very young age, which further solidified his nerdy reputation. All the other kids laughed and pointed at parties as Al would carry on about the tiny bits and waves he believed we are made of.
See, Al was 26 in 1905. People weren’t dropping acid back then. If Al would have brought that shit up in 1967, he would have been the leader of a cult.
Back to waves and particles.
So Einstein did know this one dude, Louis de Broglie, that was kind of into Einstein’s weird shit. After lecturing Al on the importance of keeping his weird theories on the down-low, so that maybe a girl would nibble at his worm. – That’s a fishing metaphor.
Get your mind out of Einstein’s pants.
Louie came up with an equation that changed the way the cool kids looked at Al from that point on.
wavelength λ to m and v — and thus to momentum p = mv — according to the relation λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant.
Louie, being a bit of a fat head, called this equation the “de Broglie wavelength.”
I might have called it “Al’s Chicker-Picker-Upper Equation” because after that the ladies went wild for Al. They could never stop running their hands through his hair resulting in this look:
So to sum all this up, yes, we are both particle and wave even though they would seem mutually exclusive and quite counterintuitive.
I imagine our whole world, and beyond, is a bunch of waves swirling around each other. Some people’s waves feel real nice to swirl with and others I would ask, “Please, get the hell out of my waves.”
The word was “Waves.”