Re:Breakthrough in the quantum transfer of information betwe...
by paulddraper on Saturday November 12, 2016 @01:00AM
(#12936819)
Very much this. This should be prologue to any introduction QM book/class/whatever.
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Building on this idea, "an electron can be both states at the same time" isn't necessarily the right way to think about it.
I mean, it's sort of right, but relies on an intuitive understand of what the heck that even means. And QM reality is grounded not in our human intuition, but in the math of wave functions. If we associate "state up" with a wave function concentrated one way and "state down" concentrated the other way and "both states" as a mixture, then okay. We give foreign concepts familiar descriptions all the time. (Like, maybe, telling someone that a byte is a letter...it's kind of true, for some concept of letter.)
But the true fundamentals of QM are not particles or waves or discrete states, but wave functions and Hilbert space.
---
Building on this idea, "an electron can be both states at the same time" isn't necessarily the right way to think about it.
I mean, it's sort of right, but relies on an intuitive understand of what the heck that even means. And QM reality is grounded not in our human intuition, but in the math of wave functions. If we associate "state up" with a wave function concentrated one way and "state down" concentrated the other way and "both states" as a mixture, then okay. We give foreign concepts familiar descriptions all the time. (Like, maybe, telling someone that a byte is a letter...it's kind of true, for some concept of letter.)
But the true fundamentals of QM are not particles or waves or discrete states, but wave functions and Hilbert space.