Quantum Waves and Probabilities
Most recent answer: 04/28/2015
- monesh (age 45)
Myrtle Beach, SC, USA
Muddled or not, that's an important deep question.
We actually don't really know how the quantum wave, which follows a definite non-random equation, turns into events which only have a probabalistic relation to the wave. That's called the "measurement problem" or more generally the problem of quantum interpretation. (see , )
As for the waves with different wavelengths behaving differently, that's not mysterious. Think of a water wave bouncing off a pattern of rocks. The way the wave bounces will depend on the wavelength. Quantum waves are the same. What's quantum about them is that if their energy is absorbed (in a typical case, at least) it's absorbed in little packets with energy hf, where f is the frequency and h is Planck's constant. The size of those packets determines what sort of chemical changes the light can trigger. The timing of those absorptions is somewhat random. That brings us back to the question of how those random events arise from a deterministic wave equation.
Mike W
(published on 04/28/2015)