12.124.18.126
In Reply to: RE: To paraphrase Feynman... posted by geoffkait on May 22, 2015 at 16:10:18
| Do you see why that is strange?Yes it's strange, but only if you think of particles as being first. The wavefunctions are.
The duality is that in observational physical 3-d space the effects look like 3-d particles sometimes and 3-d waves sometime.
The truth is that neither is precisely right.
The laws of quantum mechanics are written as evolution operators on wave*functions* which are the true fundamental "things" {elements of state} in the theory. Of course these are much less intuitive for human brains to understand, and even less intuitive is that they are elements in a functional Hilbert space which is not physical space. And that's where all the weirdness comes from.
Particle/no-particle is a sometime thing as one can see by creation/annihilation operators on the underlying fields (which are quantum mechanical wavefunctions of functions (the field)). Just depends on your basis. You don't even need to have a definite number of particles at any time, i.e. the wavefunction needn't be in an eigenstate of the particle number operator. If you took expectation you'd have a probability distribution of particle counts.
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