Personal Essays and Short Stories #2

The Reflecting Pool 

The vast, isolated, body of water sits in silence like it's own universe. A microcosm of all this is or ever was. The water stretches like a static black void, but look closely and you will find the surface waivers ever so slightly. Faint waves in the water, always there however imperceptible, are the lingering traces of events past. 

A stone plops in, and ripples emanate radially outward. Eventually they fade into nothingness (which is the ever-present vibration to small to see);patterns of standing waves that stretch the length of the reservoir. The faint vibrations are like the Cosmic Microwave Background, remnants of old events. Smaller events like a stone skimming the surface are like particles. Imagine a stone the size of an electron thrown across the surface at nearly the speed of light and it will skim the surface and create little ripples as it's energy dissipates as waves on the surface. 

As the stone glides in the air above the water it has a superposition of many states, and exists theoretically in a probability of locations from the perspective of the water. The position is only known once energy is deposited as a wave on the surface. In this sense it is both a wave and a particle. It is a wave above the surface because it's position is unknown and has a probability of being in several locations. When it hits the surface it suddenly becomes a particle because it collides with the surface. The ripples that emanate outward can indicate things like mass of the particle. For example and enormous stone would have quite a large wave, and small particles would have really small little ripples. So in this sense something of a particle nature, can impart a wave in a medium that can indicate information about the particle. In someways this shows a system of a simultaneous wave-particle nature. Just a thought a experiment here.