what is the physical manifestation of a wavefunction im just

>>8528138
The wave function [math] \psi [/math] they teached me that it is only a way to graph any physical wave from an object like an electron, it's just the way it looks

well, yeah, a wavefunction describes probability, not a physically structured wave

The modulus square of the wavefunction in a position basis (by this I mean your wavefunction is a function of the spatial/temporal coordinates) is the probability distribution function dictating the probability of measuring whatever it is your wavefunction corresponds to at the given position/time.

Various other quantities are then calculated similar to expectation values in statistics as sums/integrals weighted by your probability distribution function (mod square of your wavefunction).

>>8528138
>what is the physical manifestation of a wavefunction

It is not physical, it just contains information about a physical system.

>>8528138
Theres no physical manifestation of the wave function because the wave function itself has no physical meaning, at least in the current standard interpretation of qm.

>>8528272
This

It's essentially an approximation of a wave's path given a set of conditions

Nobody know. But what is a fact, complex numbers doesn't represent anything physical

>>8528138
The wavefunction is just a model, it describes reality rather than representing it

The map is not the territory

I only just realised the subtlety of the wavefunction studying some QM the other day.

You have a particle is some potential and the wavefunction is what describes everything about the particle, so what is the wavefunction for a given situation?

All we really know is that the wavefunction must be a solution to the Schrodinger equation, but you can think up infinitely many solutions to it all different by some scalar multiple so how do you know which solution is for your particular state. The wavefunction doesnt have a physical manifestation, when you try and measure it instead you measure some other property of the particle like its position or energy. You can repeat this measurement many many times and you'll get different answer each time depending on the probability for each to occur which is described by the wavefunction. After many repeats you can know only through experiment what the probability for each is and then you can work backwards to get the wavefunction. If you just had one particle and you cannot repeat the measurement you just cannont know its wavefunction because you cannot measure the wavefunction

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>>8528138
This is an example of a physical manifestation.

>>8528466
Also SPM works by detecting electrons tunneling through a surface, and tunneling is a direct result of quantum physics. Because the electron can be described by a wave function, the probability of it's location is continous and does not become zero once it reaches a barrier, but decreases exponentially. SPM is a physical manifestation of quantum physics describing matter through wave functions.

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>>8528138
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfmgyXs7z8&list=PLsPUh22kYmNCGaVGuGfKfJl-6RdHiCjo1

consider yourself educated.

>>8528138
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kxuU8jYkA1k

what do you think of that?

so what im getting from this (haven't read all the posts yet or watched all the vids but I will) is that there really is no physical equivalent of the wavefunction like the particle nature of the electron?

that's pretty unclear so basically: light has wave/particle duality, and the wavey part is a physical thing (em waves) and the particle part is a physical thing (photon).

However, an electron has wave particle duality, but the wavey part (wave function) has no physical manifestation but the particle part (the thing you can measure if you isolate the electron and the wave function collapses) does have a physical manifestation

if this is the case, why do people treat quantum particles like electrons as having a wave-particle duality, implying that this duality is like the dual nature of light?

am i missing something?

>>8528138 (OP)
idk did you ever see a porn where the guy slaps his dick on the chick's pussy a few times before he sticks it in? It's kinda like that.

>>8528885
A wavefunction is just a way of mathematically encoding information about a quantum system. It does not a priori have anything to do with actual physical waves.

>>8528885
im just here to lurk i have no idea but i like your explanation thus far, i dont have any equipment or facilitation to check it out

>>8528894
Ya it does. The waves are propagation of the particle through space-time.

>>8528898
i dont think that's true though (op here). electrons dont move in organized waves around an atom, they zip around, and the wavefunction just gives the probability of finding the electron in a certain place

whereas em waves are literal waves that propagate through spacetime due to the oscillation E and B fields

>>8528900
>yfw EM waves are photons and you need the wave equation to understand more fundamentally

It doesn't matter if it gives a probability. That's just a percentage of likelihood you use to evolve the particle over time. It's still telling you how the particle is moving. Just because it gives it to you in units of probability instead of units of permitivity doesn't mean much when they both are describing a wave changing in physical space.

>>8528900
>electrons dont move in organized waves around an atom, t
>they zip around, and the wavefunction just gives the probability of finding the electron in a certain place

How do you think the probability of the electron moves over time? Like a wave. The probability wave is a movement of probability.

>>8528890
I'm dying

>>8528885
The wavey part of an electron is not the wavefunction, the wavefunction can be very particle like, when you measure the position of an electron the wavefunction does collapse, but it collapses into a different wavefunction that now describes the position of the electron with near 100% certainty.

You cant really say "the wavey part" of an electron like you can say the real part of a complex number, you can't really talk about just that aspect of it and ignore the particle-like aspect as if it were an independent component to the complete electron

>>8528138
>"it's the thing you take the absolute value squared to obtain some probabilities about the system"
That's kinda it, in a way.

The wavefunction contains all the dynamic information about a particle as a normalized vector. When you want to know some dynamic quantity (say position or velocity), then you in a sense construct a basis that corresponds to the quantity, expand the wavefunction in that basis, and read off the coordinates squared as the probability of the system found in each particular state when a measurement is made. Each coordinate has an associated value that represents the state (for instance, position measurements measure the location of a particle, different states corresponding to different positions, the associated value being position in meters). The weighted average of all these associated values given any particular wavefunction tells you what the expectation value of any dynamic quantity you want to know is.

Does this make sense?

That's a more difficult question to answer than you think.
When it comes down to it, the question "what is the physical interpretation of X?" really is the same as asking "how does X affect a measurement of the system?"

For example, remember the concept of a "potential" that you learned in your first physics class? That's actually unphysical in the sense that there isn't really anything that can be measured directly, like the position of something. We just invented the concept to explain the measurable quantities of the system, like acceleration.
In most cases, there's only one solution for the potential that matches the outcome of an experiment. For example, the familiar form of the gravitational potential mgh is the only one that will yield the correct results of a kinematics experiment. However in electrodynamics, you find that there are actually multiple potentials that will give the correct electric and magnetic fields because of gauge transformations.

The reason why I mention all this is because when you ask what the "physical manifestation of a wavefunction" is, the answer is that it is the factor that correctly produces the observable quantities, such as the energy of the system.
That's Schrodinger's equation. It says that the wavefunction is the vector v (not in real space, but in "Hilbert space", where the dimensions may not necessarily be spacial, but could be other parameters like spin, flux, etc) that satisfies the eigenvalue equation

Hv = Ev.

E is a number that is the total energy of the system, which again is an observable.

In other words, the wave function is no more physical than potential; it just produces the right values for measurable quantities. It wasn't until later that people noticed that the square of the wave function could be interpreted as the probability density function of the parameters in the Hilbert space.


Tl;dr it's actually nonphysical, it's just required in order to produce the correct results of a measurement.