- #36
meopemuk
- 1,769
- 69
zenith8 said:Let us first assume the wave function is a real field (a 'real wave' if you like). Of course you can say that it isn't and that QM is just a way of cataloguing observations from an unknown underlying 'mechanism' which one should refuse to speculate about - but (a) that doesn't get you anywhere and is a bit boring, (b) you then have no way of explaining how you get a perfectly standard interference pattern in e.g. a two-slit experiment. What exactly is interfering with what, if it isn't a real wave passing through the slits? To say that 'nothing passes through the slits' as is often done is simply silly - clearly something does and to say otherwise is merely to play with words (imperfectly quoting Deutsch).
Well said. Though I disagree with it. I prefer the (boring) idea that wave function is just an abstract quantity, which is a record of our ignorance about the physical system. Wave function is not a "real" or "physical" field. I am not interested in understanding of "what interferes with what" when electron passes through the slits. The detailed mechanism of what happens in the region of slits is not observable in principle (yes, you can observe what's going on there, but then you would need to change the experimental setup, and the answers you'd get will not have any relevance to the original double-slit setup), so this mechanism should not concern physicists. It is entirely sufficient to have an abstract mathematical model of what's going on, and this model is well-known: the Hilbert space, the Hamiltonian, the wave function, the Schroedinger equation for the wave function, and the wave function collapse at the point of measurement.