Wednesday 30 August 2017

Wave-Particle Duality Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [2]

Gribbin (1989: 215):
It turned out that the behaviour of light could sometimes be explained only in terms of particlesphotons — while the wave explanation, or model, remained the only valid one in other circumstances.  A little later, physicists realised that if waves that sometimes behave as particles were not enough to worry about, particles could sometimes behave like waves. …
[Quantum theory] tells us that there are no pure particles or waves, but only, at the fundamental level, things best described as a mixture of wave and particle, occasionally referred to as "wavicles". 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the wave model is a model of quantum system potential, whereas the particle model is a model of instances of that potential.  The notion of "wavicles" confuses potential with instance.

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