POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Trivial trigonometry : Re: Trivial trigonometry Server Time
5 Sep 2024 03:21:55 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Trivial trigonometry  
From: Kevin Wampler
Date: 8 Dec 2009 01:06:04
Message: <4b1deccc$1@news.povray.org>
Warp wrote:
>   If it looks like a wave, feels like a wave, smells like a wave, what is it?
> Not a wave, it seems. It just fakes being one quite well.

In general I agree with Neeum that it's not meaningful to discuss 
weather it's a "wave" without defining what you even mean by a wave, but 
I still thought I'd point out one way in which the "waves" in QM behave 
differently from classical waves.

This was mentioned by Feynman in the short video linked by Darren, and 
it's that in multiple particle systems the wave function doesn't just 
describe the probability of finding a single particle at a given 
position, but rather the probability of finding the entire system of 
particles in a given configuration.  This is distinct from the way that 
classical waves behave, and is the source of effects of "non locality" 
in quantum systems which would not arise from a system with classical waves.

If you want to still call this a wave (perhaps a wave in the 
configuration space of the system?) then that's clearly fine, but it's 
worth keeping in mind that it's a different sort of wave than one 
generally means in classical systems.


Post a reply to this message

Copyright 2003-2023 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.