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Clearly particles individually pass through slits, be it a single or a double slit experiment. The fact that wave interference is evident in their trajectory may be due to their interaction upon entering the slits. If water particles, or sand particles can together form waves, one can assume they will act in such way that their individual trajectories will reflect the wave they form, and once that wave, if it were to pass through a couple of slits will alter their individual trajectories to satisfy the interference pattern we see on the plate in the double split experiment.

In other words, the interference pattern in the double slit experiment (based perhaps on the my sorely naive point of view), are the result of particles, that together form a wave, and upon the entrance to their respective slits, their altered trajectories through the slits reflect their wave relationship.

I need to know if any of this is absurd.

S.G
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Gilles Lamoureux
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One way to test your idea is to send electrons through the double-slit one at a time. You could send a single electron through once every month, or once every decade. However long we wait between sending each electron, the interference pattern still appears after many electrons pass through the double-slit. This tells us a single electron may interfere with itself, and exhibits wavelike properties as an individual! Evidently electrons are not particles nor waves. Rather they exhibit properties of both.

Aiden
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Yes they can and do. Sound waves are caused by the collective actions of atoms. Individual atoms vibrate back and forth and don't really go anywhere. But each is well approximated by having a definite position. The atoms bounce into each other all the time because of thermal energy. Some do bounce back and forth in one or the other of the slits. None bounce simultaneously in both.

Sound is a pressure wave. A moving wall can push forward into a bunch of atoms, pushing them forward. This crowds the atoms. The crowd pushes into more atoms, slowing themselves and pushing the new atoms forward. The wall moves back, leaving atoms less crowded. Pulses of crowding move through the collection of atoms.

A pulse is a big thing, involving many atoms spread out over large distances. The pulse can go through both slits and can interfere with itself.

Next consider what happens when you do the experiment at lower and lower gas pressure. You have fewer and fewer atoms present. The spacing between atoms increases. It takes a larger distance for the atoms pushed by a moving wall to crowd into enough atoms to stop themselves and start new atoms moving.

If you reduce the pressure so low that you have just a single atom at a time, you don't have a wave any longer. You would expect single atoms to get pushed forward and go through one or the other slit. You would expect individual atoms in the screen to get hit. You would have to add up lots of hits to see the pattern. You would expect to lose the interference pattern. You would expect to see hits show the shape of the slits.

You can try this with light. At high intensity you see an interference pattern directly. Your thought that this could be a collective effect of many photons is not ruled out.

If you turn down the intensity of light so far that you have a single photon in flight at a time, you see individual atoms on the screen hit. You have to wait for a lot of hits to see the pattern. If you do that, you see that the hits add up to an interference pattern.

So individual photons have both particle like and wave like properties. They are wave like in that a photon does go through both slits and interferes with itself on the other side. They are particle like in that a photon hits a single atom and misses all the others. It is often said that a photon is like both a classical particle and a classical wave. There is enough truth in this to be misleading. A photon really is not like anything classical.

mmesser314
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