Tuesday 6 December 2022

Collapse of the wave function an intuitive explanation of the “Measurement”

This is a basic description of the wave-function collapse to explain an intuitive explanation of what is happening.

In quantum mechanics, we use the wave-function to measure probabilistic predictions.

An important aspect of what we call a “measurement” in quantum mechanics doesn’t actually have to be done by a measurement device. 

   In quantum mechanics, a “measurement” can happen just by the interaction between lots of particles. Like say, photons interacting with grains of dust.

Therefore, the wave-function is everywhere collapsing and reforming continuously.

The way to have an intuitive logical explanation of what is happening is to think of the collapse of the wave-function as a new moment in time that has the geometry of space-time.

   When we make a measurement there is a somewhat random and unpredictable collapse into one of the possible measurement states and this depends on what the wave function looked like just before we made the measurement.

  It collapses into one state, rather than continuously flowing from one state to another, and then at that new moment in time, just after the measurement, once again the wave-function starts following forming probability based on our new measurement state.

This is totally logical if we think of the mathematics of quantum mechanics as representing the physics of time.

The electromagnetic fields are not quantized, it is just of the energy transfer processes between field and matter, between photons and electrons that are quantized.

We have electromagnetic waves, flowing out forming the carrier for potential quantized photon energy.

The energy contained in a wave, spread out forming probability within the characteristics of three-dimensional space.

 This energy is converted back to another form of energy in a very local and quantized event by light photon ∆E=hf energy continuously transforming potential energy into the kinetic E=½mv² energy of matter, in the form of electrons. Kinetic energy is the energy of what is actually happening. 

This geometrical process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light photon energy is continuously forming a probabilistic uncertain ∆×∆pᵪ≥h/4π future.

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