The Wave Interpretation Of Light Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1988: 96):

One of the most striking features of waves is the way they can interact with each other, interfering to produce distinctive patterns of peaks and troughs.  This is true for ripples on the surface of a pond, and it is also true for two beams of light, carefully prepared to be in step with one another by letting light from a single source — a lamp — pass through two pinholes in a sheet of cardboard.  Light spreading out from each of the pinholes overlaps and interferes to produce a characteristic pattern of bright stripes and dark shadows — a diffraction pattern — on a second card held up on the other side of the pinholes from the lamp.  This, and similar, effects can only be explained in terms of wave motion, and such experiments had been the basis of the wave interpretation of light in the nineteenth century.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, it is not true that the diffraction pattern is produced by wave motion, and this is borne out by the fact that the diffraction pattern gradually appears even if one photon is emitted at a time, thereby making interference impossible. This is also borne out by the fact that a wave is a propagation of a disturbance through a medium, and light propagates even in the absence of a medium through which to propagate.

Instead, the observed pattern of peaks and troughs "instantiates" the constructive and destructive interference between the superposed waves of probability that quantify the system as potential.