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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.
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