The Notion Of Wave Packet Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [2]

Gribbin (1988: 104-5):

In the everyday world, a wave is a spread out thing.  The ripples on a pond stretch out over a long distance, and it is hard to be sure exactly where the string of ripples — the wave train — begins and ends.  But a particle is a very well defined thing, which occupies a definite place at a definite time.  How can these two conflicting images be reconciled, as they must be if an electron is to be regarded as both wave and particle at the same time?  The appropriate image is of a little package of waves, a short wave train which only extends over a small distance, a distance roughly corresponding to the size of the equivalent particle.  There is no difficulty in constructing such wave packets, as they are known, in the real world.  The mathematics describing such phenomena are very well known.

Blogger Comments:

The ripples on a pond constitute the propagation of a disturbance through a medium.  Electrons, on the other hand, propagate even in the absence of a medium; i.e. through a vacuum.  So electrons are not waves in this sense.  

The mathematics describing wave packets is known as a Fourier analysis.  From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, because quantum waves are quantifications of potential in terms of probability, a Fourier analysis is a technique that manipulates the probabilities of quantum potential. The resultant wave packet is thus a compromise of potential probabilities (wave) and instance frequencies (particle) that arises from not making a clear distinction between potential and instance.