Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> For example, there's no known mathematical model to indicate where a 
> specific electron is, and indeed if I understand correctly, experiments 
> show there cannot be one.

  That's a bit like being in the middle of the ocean and saying "there's
no mathematical model which says where the water is", speaking as if the
"water" was a point in space and you'd had to locate it at some specific
coordinates.

  Your statement is like that. You are starting from the assumption that
an electron is an extremely small particle with well-defined boundaries,
approximately equal to a mathematical point, and then you ask for a
mathematical model to say where that point is in space. As with the
water example, that's kind of silly.

  What the mathematical model *can* do is to give a distribution function
which tells how the electron is distributed in space (a bit like a
function which tells how the water is distributed, except that with
the electron the "density" of the "water" is not constant).

  These probability functions may not be infinitely accurate (because they
depend, among other things, on finite measurements which are accurate only
to so many decimals), but they can be used for practical calculations.

  It's not like you could shoot an electron to some direction, and then
the electron suddenly hits the other side of the Earth (or the solar
system). It hits a quite accurately calculable place.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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