Natural Science Forum / Physics / Particle Physics / January 2008

Hello All,

I hope I frame the question/proposition in a suitable manner to
warrant thoughtful feedback by thoughtful groupies.

I warn you upfront that I am, quite unfortunately, not capable of
setting forth mathematical or theoretical arguments/substantiations so
I must "hand wave" based on (hopefully not very flawed) basic physics
and logic.

The question is put first, and the motivation in the postscript.

Assume first that instead of using probing means that are on the same
energy scale as the electron, for example, we could harness deep
subatomic particles like the those that shoot out of smashed atoms
(e.g., quarks, sub quark particles, etc) into otherwise conventional
microscope/sensory apparatus. (Does physics theory prevent this?)

So, the question is, in principle, and for the sake of argument, if
instead of Heisenberg's gamma-ray microscope for locating an electron
we had a quark "ray" based microscope (assuming we discovered a way to
harness, focus and detect them), then could the incoming "quark ray"
that is scattered by the electron up into the microscope's aperture
resolve the electron's position and velocity (because a quark
presumablely would not alter the velocity as a gamma ray would) with
an uncertainty that is so small as to be negligle?

If this is too naïve or flawed a question, then please just let me
know, but if it has a shred of plausibility then I would like to hear
the basic concepts for/against the notion.

Thanks in advance for your feedback either way.
Ariel Bentolila

P.S.-
Movtivation:
Three important principles of quantum mech. theory are the quantum
wave function (describing the probability to localize a particle in
space-time), the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that all sub
atomic particles of a given class are indistinguishable from one
another apart from a few state parameters.

It seems to me, though, that these principles might just be an
artifact of the scale of the probing means wrt the particle, which may
give rise to at least some of the crazy observation/behavior of the
sub atomic world.  That is, if we could somehow dramatically scale
down our sensor's energy/mass (several orders less than the
electron's) and scale up the sampling rate (several orders faster than
the electron's speed) then maybe the above principles would go away
and more normal behavior/history of electrons, for example, would be
observed in high resolution.

My thinking goes like this (ignoring higher dimensionality and
connected-whole issues),  to sample accurately any observable your
detection means must run at much higher frequency (i.e., smaller time
constant) than the target you are trying to measure; e.g. some kind of
Nyquist frequency concept.  The smaller time constant requirement
implies your probe must have a much smaller mass/energy than the
target.  Given that our best means of detection are generally
electromagnetic waves (e.g., photons, gamma-rays, etc) or particles
(electron beams, etc), which all have mass/energies that significantly
interact with electrons we can say that they are on the same mass/
energy scale as the electron.  It seems very intuitive that if your
probe is on the same or lower mass/time/energy scale as what is being
measured that your measurement will alter and only statistically
represent the target's state.