- #71
jeeves
- 33
- 4
Yes, I would like to write things in terms of a wave function with coefficients ##A(t)## and ##B(t)##. In particular, I would like to know whether what I wrote in post #59 is correct (regarding both the coefficients themselves and the reasoning used to reach them).PeterDonis said:You can, of course, write things in terms of a QM wave function with coefficients ##A(t)## and ##B(t)## in front of the "non-decayed" and "decayed" terms, where ##B(t)## is determined by the radioactive decay law and ##A(t)## is determined by normalization (the squared norm of the wave function as a whole must be 1). But this doesn't tell you anything new as far as probabilities go that the radioactive decay law doesn't already tell you. And if you're not picking any particular QM interpretation, you have no reason to even bother writing down the wave function in the first place since you're not assigning it any physical meaning and it doesn't add any ability to predict probabilities that you don't already have.
I disagree that if I am not picking a particular interpretation, there is no reason to do this. The reason is to see if my understanding of the QM formalism is correct. This knowledge will be useful for when I consider more complicated situations, where I do not have prior knowledge of the probabilities or a suitable classical approximation.