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The macroscopic scale is the length scale on which objects or phenomena are large enough to be visible with the naked eye, without magnifying optical instruments. [1] [2] It is the opposite of microscopic.
When applied to physical phenomena and bodies, the macroscopic scale describes things as a person can directly perceive them, without the aid of magnifying devices. This is in contrast to observations (microscopy) or theories (microphysics, statistical physics) of objects of geometric lengths smaller than perhaps some hundreds of micrometers.
A macroscopic view of a ball is just that: a ball. A microscopic view could reveal a thick round skin seemingly composed entirely of puckered cracks and fissures (as viewed through a microscope) or, further down in scale, a collection of molecules in a roughly spherical shape (as viewed through an electron microscope). An example of a physical theory that takes a deliberately macroscopic viewpoint is thermodynamics. An example of a topic that extends from macroscopic to microscopic viewpoints is histology.
Not quite by the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic, classical and quantum mechanics are theories that are distinguished in a subtly different way. [3] At first glance one might think of them as differing simply in the size of objects that they describe, classical objects being considered far larger as to mass and geometrical size than quantal objects, for example a football versus a fine particle of dust. More refined consideration distinguishes classical and quantum mechanics on the basis that classical mechanics fails to recognize that matter and energy cannot be divided into infinitesimally small parcels, so that ultimately fine division reveals irreducibly granular features. The criterion of fineness is whether or not the interactions are described in terms of Planck's constant. Roughly speaking, classical mechanics considers particles in mathematically idealized terms even as fine as geometrical points with no magnitude, still having their finite masses. Classical mechanics also considers mathematically idealized extended materials as geometrically continuously substantial. Such idealizations are useful for most everyday calculations, but may fail entirely for molecules, atoms, photons, and other elementary particles. In many ways, classical mechanics can be considered a mainly macroscopic theory. On the much smaller scale of atoms and molecules, classical mechanics may fail, and the interactions of particles are then described by quantum mechanics. Near the absolute minimum of temperature, the Bose–Einstein condensate exhibits effects on macroscopic scale that demand description by quantum mechanics.
In the Quantum Measurement Problem the issue of what constitutes macroscopic and what constitutes the quantum world is unresolved and possibly unsolvable. The related Correspondence Principle can be articulated thus: every macroscopic phenomena can be formulated as a problem in quantum theory. A violation of the Correspondence Principle would thus ensure an empirical distinction between the macroscopic and the quantum.
In pathology, macroscopic diagnostics generally involves gross pathology, in contrast to microscopic histopathology.
The term "megascopic" is a synonym. "Macroscopic" may also refer to a "larger view", namely a view available only from a large perspective (a hypothetical "macroscope"). A macroscopic position could be considered the "big picture".
Particle physics, dealing with the smallest physical systems, is also known as high energy physics. Physics of larger length scales, including the macroscopic scale, is also known as low energy physics. Intuitively, it might seem incorrect to associate "high energy" with the physics of very small, low mass–energy systems, like subatomic particles. By comparison, one gram of hydrogen, a macroscopic system, has ~ 6×1023 times [4] the mass–energy of a single proton, a central object of study in high energy physics. Even an entire beam of protons circulated in the Large Hadron Collider, a high energy physics experiment, contains ~ 3.23×1014 protons, [5] each with 6.5×1012 eV of energy, for a total beam energy of ~ 2.1×1027 eV or ~ 336.4 MJ, which is still ~ 2.7×105 times lower than the mass–energy of a single gram of hydrogen. Yet, the macroscopic realm is "low energy physics", while that of quantum particles is "high energy physics".
The reason for this is that the "high energy" refers to energy at the quantum particle level. While macroscopic systems indeed have a larger total energy content than any of their constituent quantum particles, there can be no experiment or other observation of this total energy without extracting the respective amount of energy from each of the quantum particles – which is exactly the domain of high energy physics. Daily experiences of matter and the Universe are characterized by very low energy. For example, the photon energy of visible light is about 1.8 to 3.2 eV. Similarly, the bond-dissociation energy of a carbon-carbon bond is about 3.6 eV. This is the energy scale manifesting at the macroscopic level, such as in chemical reactions. Even photons with far higher energy, gamma rays of the kind produced in radioactive decay, have photon energy that is almost always between 105 eV and 107 eV – still two orders of magnitude lower than the mass–energy of a single proton. Radioactive decay gamma rays are considered as part of nuclear physics, rather than high energy physics.
Finally, when reaching the quantum particle level, the high energy domain is revealed. The proton has a mass–energy of ~ 9.4×108 eV; some other massive quantum particles, both elementary and hadronic, have yet higher mass–energies. Quantum particles with lower mass–energies are also part of high energy physics; they also have a mass–energy that is far higher than that at the macroscopic scale (such as electrons), or are equally involved in reactions at the particle level (such as neutrinos). Relativistic effects, as in particle accelerators and cosmic rays, can further increase the accelerated particles' energy by many orders of magnitude, as well as the total energy of the particles emanating from their collision and annihilation.
In physics, the fundamental interactions or fundamental forces are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist:
The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string theoretic interpretation by Leonard Susskind, who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn. Leonard Susskind said, “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface." As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way. The prime example of holography is the AdS/CFT correspondence.
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
In physics, the correspondence principle states that the behavior of systems described by the theory of quantum mechanics reproduces classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers. In other words, it says that for large orbits and for large energies, quantum calculations must agree with classical calculations.
Classical physics is a group of physics theories that predate modern, more complete, or more widely applicable theories. If a currently accepted theory is considered to be modern, and its introduction represented a major paradigm shift, then the previous theories, or new theories based on the older paradigm, will often be referred to as belonging to the area of "classical physics".
In physics, a subatomic particle is a particle smaller than an atom. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, a subatomic particle can be either a composite particle, which is composed of other particles, or an elementary particle, which is not composed of other particles. Particle physics and nuclear physics study these particles and how they interact. Most force carrying particles like photons or gluons are called bosons and, although they have discrete quanta of energy, do not have rest mass or discrete diameters and are unlike the former particles that have rest mass and cannot overlap or combine which are called fermions.
The microscopic scale is the scale of objects and events smaller than those that can easily be seen by the naked eye, requiring a lens or microscope to see them clearly. In physics, the microscopic scale is sometimes regarded as the scale between the macroscopic scale and the quantum scale. Microscopic units and measurements are used to classify and describe very small objects. One common microscopic length scale unit is the micrometre, which is one millionth of a metre.
In physics, quantum tunnelling, barrier penetration, or simply tunnelling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier that, according to classical mechanics, the object does not have sufficient energy to enter or surmount.
In condensed matter physics, a quasiparticle is a concept used to describe a collective behavior of a group of particles that can be treated as if they were a single particle. Formally, quasiparticles and collective excitations are closely related phenomena that arise when a microscopically complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it contained different weakly interacting particles in vacuum.
A point particle, ideal particle or point-like particle is an idealization of particles heavily used in physics. Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension; being dimensionless, it does not take up space. A point particle is an appropriate representation of any object whenever its size, shape, and structure are irrelevant in a given context. For example, from far enough away, any finite-size object will look and behave as a point-like object. Point masses and point charges, discussed below, are two common cases. When a point particle has an additive property, such as mass or charge, it is often represented mathematically by a Dirac delta function.
In statistical mechanics, the thermodynamic limit or macroscopic limit, of a system is the limit for a large number N of particles where the volume V is taken to grow in proportion with the number of particles. The thermodynamic limit is defined as the limit of a system with a large volume, with the particle density held fixed.
Classical Newtonian physics has, formally, been replaced by quantum mechanics on the small scale and relativity on the large scale. Because most humans continue to think in terms of the kind of events we perceive in the human scale of daily life, it became necessary to provide a new philosophical interpretation of classical physics. Classical mechanics worked extremely well within its domain of observation but made inaccurate predictions at very small scale – atomic scale systems – and when objects moved very fast or were very massive. Viewed through the lens of quantum mechanics or relativity, we can now see that classical physics, imported from the world of our everyday experience, includes notions for which there is no actual evidence. For example, one commonly held idea is that there exists one absolute time shared by all observers. Another is the idea that electrons are discrete entities like miniature planets that circle the nucleus in definite orbits.
Quantum mechanics is the study of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles. By contrast, classical physics explains matter and energy only on a scale familiar to human experience, including the behavior of astronomical bodies such as the moon. Classical physics is still used in much of modern science and technology. However, towards the end of the 19th century, scientists discovered phenomena in both the large (macro) and the small (micro) worlds that classical physics could not explain. The desire to resolve inconsistencies between observed phenomena and classical theory led to a revolution in physics, a shift in the original scientific paradigm: the development of quantum mechanics.
A macroscopic quantum state is a state of matter in which macroscopic properties, such as mechanical motion, thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity and viscosity, can be described only by quantum mechanics rather than merely classical mechanics. This occurs primarily at low temperatures where little thermal motion is present to mask the quantum nature of a substance.
A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a nearly constant volume independent of pressure. It is one of the four fundamental states of matter, and is the only state with a definite volume but no fixed shape.
Classical mechanics is a physical theory describing the motion of macroscopic objects, from projectiles to parts of machinery and astronomical objects, such as spacecraft, planets, stars, and galaxies. For objects governed by classical mechanics, if the present state is known, it is possible to predict how it will move in the future (determinism), and how it has moved in the past (reversibility).
Temperature is a physical quantity that quantitatively expresses the attribute of hotness or coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. It reflects the kinetic energy of the vibrating and colliding atoms making up a substance.
In the physical sciences, a particle is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from subatomic particles like the electron, to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like powders and other granular materials. Particles can also be used to create scientific models of even larger objects depending on their density, such as humans moving in a crowd or celestial bodies in motion.
This glossary of physics is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to physics, its sub-disciplines, and related fields, including mechanics, materials science, nuclear physics, particle physics, and thermodynamics. For more inclusive glossaries concerning related fields of science and technology, see Glossary of chemistry terms, Glossary of astronomy, Glossary of areas of mathematics, and Glossary of engineering.
In 1923, American physicist William Duane presented a discrete momentum-exchange model of the reflection of X-ray photons by a crystal lattice. Duane showed that such a model gives the same scattering angles as the ones calculated via a wave diffraction model, see Bragg's Law.
we shall call a system "macroscopic" (i.e., "large scale") when it is large enough to be visible in the ordinary sense (say greater than 1 micron, so that it can at least be observed with a microscope using ordinary light).
