Wave-Particle Duality Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [5]

Gribbin (1989: 243-4):

For many purposes, and especially for teaching undergraduate physics, physicists do indeed treat electrons as "real" particles, and the waves associated with them as "probability waves," which can interfere with one another, be diffracted through small holes, and do all the other tricks waves can do.  "It is the probability which has the wave-like behaviour," Davies [1984] tells his students in that book, "while the particles themselves remain as little lumps, albeit elusively secreted in the wave which guides their progress … which facet of this wave-particle duality is manifested depends on the sort of question being asked."  This is bad teaching.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the "interference" of probability waves is the ensemble of interdependent potentials of the quantum system.  Waves do not pass through the slits, particles do.  Particles are the instances of the quantum system potential, and the scatter of particle frequencies "instantiates" the probabilities that quantify the potential.