P72: A Physical Resolution of Wave-Particle Duality

Every quantum object exhibits wave-like behaviour, such as interference and diffraction, under some experimental conditions, and particle-like behaviour, such as localised, discrete detection events, under others, a phenomenon confirmed across electrons, atoms, and molecules of increasing size and complexity. Standard quantum mechanics predicts precisely which behaviour will appear in any given experimental arrangement, through the mathematics of the wave function and the de Broglie relation connecting wavelength to momentum, but the two descriptions, wave and particle, are not derived from one shared underlying physical picture; they are complementary but ontologically distinct concepts, applied according to the measurement context, with no accepted account of what a single physical entity is such that it displays both behaviours. This paper proposes a physical resolution of wave-particle duality from the dual character of a condensation in a universal physical substrate, following the framework developed in earlier work. Under this proposal, a quantum object is, at all times and under all experimental conditions, one and the same physical entity: an extended, propagating substrate disturbance with an internal condensation structure. Its wave-like behaviour is the physically real spatial extension and interference capability of this disturbance, established in related work; its particle-like behaviour is the localisation of this same disturbance at the moment of irreversible detection, established in further related work. We show that the de Broglie wavelength, conventionally introduced as an independent postulate connecting a particle’s momentum to an associated wavelength, follows directly from the same condensation-geometry framework used to derive the reduced Planck constant, expressing the wavelength as the ratio of the condensation momentum scale to the particle’s actual momentum, reproducing the standard de Broglie relation to within 0.14 percent for a representative low-energy electron using no adjustable parameter. We discuss the relationship of this proposal to the standard complementarity principle, address the objection that this account merely relabels wave and particle behaviour without resolving their apparent incompatibility, and specify falsifiable predictions distinguishing a single-entity account of wave-particle duality from a genuinely dual ontology.