Penrose (2004: 508):
What has happened to our ordinary picture of a particle, as something (at least approximately) localised at a single point? Well, we might say that a momentum state is only an idealisation. We can still get away with having a very well-defined (if not perfectly precisely defined) momentum if we pass to somewhat similar states referred to as ‘wave packets’. These are given by wavefunctions that peak sharply in magnitude at some position and are ‘almost’ eigenfunctions of momentum, in an appropriate sense. In one dimension such wave packets can be presented explicitly, …. This is the well-known ‘bell-shaped’ curve of statistics…
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According to Max Born, the wavefunction is a measure of probability. According to Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, probability is an assessment of potential. On this basis, the peak in magnitude of a wavefunction marks the most probable instantiation of potential.
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