new posting style - Page 6

keikiwai · #51 10-05-2007, 02:23 AM

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im done posting serious, lengthy replies. im gonna start dropping a bunch of one-liners

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Firstly, Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle which tells us that we (the observer) can never exactly know both the position and momentum of a particle. As every observation requires an energy exchange (photon) to create the observed 'data', some energy (wave) state of the observed object has to be altered. Thus the observation has a discrete effect on what we measure, limiting how precisely we can determine both the position and momentum of the particle.
Max Born (1928) was the first to discover (by chance and with no theoretical foundation) that the square of the quantum wave equations (which is actually the wave-density) could be used to predict the probability of where the particle would be found. Since it was impossible for both the waves and the particles to be real entities, it became customary to regard the waves as unreal 'probability waves' and to maintain the belief in the 'real' particle.
Unfortunately this maintained the belief in the particle/wave duality, in a new form where the 'quantum' scalar waves had become 'probability waves' for the 'real' particle. Albert Einstein agreed with this probability wave interpretation, as he believed in continuous force fields (not in waves or particles) thus to him it was sensible that the waves were not real, and were mere descriptions of probabilities.