01 January 1970 11 5K Report

Collective effects are evident in billions and billions of particles or entities in physics, such as In lasers, electromagnetism [1], superconductivity, critical mass in nuclear physics, physics of fluids, thixotropic and other non-newtonian effects, fusion and fission, binding energy, gravity, and quantum mechanics.

There are applications also in maths. We discussed its application in social movements, where statistics is not used, nor psychology, but a causal model is introduced, based on physics of fluids and collective effects.

The problem is that a system made of billions of billions of particles or entities, as usual in physics of natural systems, is much harder to study, for example, in quantum behaviour or even classical.

In network theory, comes the example of 6 degrees of separation. Now, in physics [2,3], comes the example of 10 photons. Studying quantum behaviour of particles is much easier with fewer particles, so the fact that phase transitions occur in these small systems means we can better study quantum properties such as coherence.

Could we start to see behaviour of collective effects with 10 electrons or less? Can we use them to better study coherence also in non-quantum behaviour? What is the lower limit?

[1] Carver Mead, Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism,

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics

[2] https://phys.org/news/2018-09-photons-billions.html

[3] Driven-dissipative non-equilibrium Bose–Einstein condensation of less than ten photons, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0270-1

More Ed Gerck's questions See All
Similar questions and discussions