The Thoughts Of Born Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1990: 118-9):

Born found a new way of interpreting Schrödinger's waves. The important thing in Schrödinger's equation that corresponds to physical ripples on the pond in the everyday world is a wave function, which is usually denoted by the Greek letter psi (ψ). … [Born] tried to find a way of associating a wave function with the existence of particles. The idea he picked up on was one that had been aired before in the debate about the nature of light, but which he now took over and refined. The particles were real, said Born, but in some sense they were guided by the wave, and the strength of the wave (more precisely, the value of ψ²) at any point in space was a measure of the probability of finding the particle at that particular point. We can never know for sure where a particle like an electron is, but the wave function enables us to work out the probability that, when we carry out an experiment designed to locate an electron, we find it in a certain place.

Blogger Comment:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the complementarity of wave and particle is the complementarity of potential and instance.*  The wave model is concerned with the probability of construing experience as a particle across a range of locations, whereas the particle model is concerned with each instance of construing experience as a particle across a range of locations, with the frequency of instances reflecting the probability of potential.

This is not a trivial observation.  Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics mistakes potential for instance, and leads to the notion of a multiverse, where potential universes are misconstrued as actual universes.

* This suggests that, when system probabilities are eventually included in the SFL model, each system of features will be represented as a wave of probability.