Quotes About Wavefunction

The wavefunction tells us where we might potentially find an electron when we look; but what we do find in any given experiment is random, and we can't meaningfully say why we find it here rather than there.

We know that measurements of a quantum system seem to collapse the wavefunction. We most certainly don't know how, or why, or indeed if that actually happens.

Wavefunction collapse is a generator of knowledge: it is not so much a process that gives us the answers, but is the process by which answers are created. The outcome of that process can't, in general, be predicted with certainty, but quantum mechanics gives us a method for calculating the probabilities of particular outcomes. That's all we can ask for.

T]he wavefunction of the electron in [a] box can penetrate into the walls. If the walls aren't too thick, the wavefunction can actually extend right through them, so that it still has a non-zero value on the outside. What this tells you is that there is a small chance – equal to the amplitude of the wavefunction squared in that part of space – that if you make a measurement of where the electron is, you might find it within the wall, or even outside the wall.

It is important to bear in mind that this is a property of single photons. Each individual photon must be considered to feel out both routes that are open to it, but it remains one photon; it does not split into two photons in the intermediate stage, but its location undergoes the strange kind of complex-number weighted co-existence of alternatives that is characteristic of quantum theory.

Determinism in relativistic quantum mechanics is called unitarity. Determinism in all forms of physics is concerned with time evolution.

In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron.

if you know the quantum wavefunction right now for every particle in the universe, Schrödinger's equation tells you how the wavefunction was or will be at any other moment you specify. This

Remember from Chapter 7 that in the Many Worlds framework, every potential outcome embodied in a quantum wavefunction—a particle's spinning this way or that, another particle's being here or there—is realized in its own separate, parallel universe. The universe we're aware of at any given moment is but one of an infinite number in which every possible evolution allowed by quantum physics is separately realized.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

Kuantum mekani?inde, bir ba?ka cisimle çarp??mad??? sürece hiçbir cismin belirli bir konumu yoktur.

According to Bohr and Heisenberg, the universe exists as an infinite number of overlapping possibilities.

W]hereas we might have been content enough to believe that electrons in a bright beam are wave-like and can be diffracted by the double slits, it is hard to understand how one-by-one passage of what seem to be particles (judging from the discrete bright spots that appear on the screen) can produce wave-like interference. We're forced to conclude that 'wave-like' electrons can interfere with themselves.

It seems that no matter how hard we try, or how unreasonable the resulting definition of reality, we just cannot avoid having to invoke the collapse of the wavefunction.