Re: naive particle position and momentum

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Mon, 10 May 1999, Michael Moloney wrote:

> If we wanted to be able to say the particle was in a region delta-x and
> could magically reduce its wavefunction to zero outside delta-x, we
> would be sacrificing some knowledge of its momentum...

But the example of double-slit diffraction of single electrons illustrates
that it's NOT just our own lack of knowledge that has bearing.  The
electron itself is somehow "spread out" so that it passes through both
slits.  And after passing through one slit, the electron is "spread out"
into a single-slit diffraction pattern.  While it is flying through space,
the electron itself doesn't know where it is, and so it takes more than
one path as it flys from the emitter, through the two slits, and to the
detector screen.  Doesn't this mean that, in a fairly "real" sense, the
electron IS the wavefunction?

"Wave function" once implied statistics of large numbers of particles.
But since the wave function seems to remain in existence even for single
particles, it certainly isn't a matter of statistics of large populations.
There might be just one particle in a particular box, but until that
particle interacts with a detector, the particle is spread out all across
the wave function, and the single particle has an infinite number of
unique positions simultaneously.

Weird thought:  If perfectly monochromatic light is passed through a
high-speed chopper, the resulting light spectrum will contain sidebands
above and below the original line-spectrum.  Single-frequency photons went
in, and multiple-frequency photons came out.  This must mean that the
chopper cut some photons to pieces!   :)


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