Friday 2 August 2019

The Collapse Of The Wave Function Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [3]

Edelman (1992: 215):
If one attempts to determine that position in an experimental setting, however, one loses forever the possibility of determining the momentum to the same precision. This so-called Heisenberg uncertainty is fundamental; there is a conjugate relation between the position and the momentum (the mass times the velocity) of a particle, and this relation sets the precision of the product of these variables to a value no less than Planck's constant. This is not just because to measure a particle's position precisely one must use particles or waves of much smaller wavelength and thus of higher energy, inevitably "kicking up" the particle's momentum. It is a fundamental property of the theory. In considering this relationship operationally, one begins to get a feeling for the strange flavour of quantum theory. If one (the physicist observer) chooses to measure the position of a particle to a certain precision, the act of setting up and carrying out the measurement precludes forever and irreversibly the measurement of the momentum to a similar precision. 
According to the theory, however, no bias exists before the measurement: The wave function ψ is a linear combination of functions describing all possible outcomes of the measurement, and when a measurement is made the wave function "collapses" or "projects onto" one of the possible outcomes.

Blogger Comments:

As previously explained, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the collapse of the wave function ψ onto one of the possible outcomes, when a measurement is made, is the process of construing experience as an instance of material-relational meaning potential.

The wave function ψ is a model of (probabilistic) quantum system potential, the meanings that can be construed of experience by consciousness.  The 'outcomes of the measurement' are (statistical) instances of that potential.

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